The Night Will Be Long, page 1
ALSO BY
SANTIAGO GAMBOA
Return to the Dark Valley
Night Prayers
Necropolis
Europa Editions
1 Penn Plaza, Suite 6282
New York, N.Y. 10019
info@europaeditions.com
www.europaeditions.com
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2019 by Santiago Gamboa
c/o Schavelzon Graham Agencia Literaria
www.schavelzongraham.com
First publication 2021 by Europa Editions
Translation by Andrea Rosenberg
Original Title: Será larga la noche
Translation copyright © 2021 by Europa Editions
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
Cover Art by Emanuele Ragnisco
www.mekkanografici.com
Cover illlustration by Ginevra Rapisardi
ISBN 9781609457129
Santiago Gamboa
THE NIGHT
WILL BE LONG
Translated from the Spanish
by Andrea Rosenberg
THE NIGHT
WILL BE LONG
Provoni raged and roamed the outskirts of the galaxy, searching, in his wrath, for something vague, something even metaphysical.
An answer, to so speak. A response. Thors Provoni yelled into the emptiness, dinning out his noise in hope of a response.
—PHILIP K. DICK, Our Friends from Frolix
Close the door tight, brother;
the night will be long.
—JOSÉ ÁNGEL VALENTE, Punto cero
PART I
THE BEGINNING
According to the boy’s account, at around six in the evening three SUVs came around the curve and into the hollow to cross the Ullucos River. The bodyguards were riding in the first and third vehicles, two Land Rover Discoverys, both silvery gray, or at least that’s what it looked like with the last rays of sunlight smacking him right in the eyes. The one in the middle, the biggest one, was an unmistakable black Hummer with level-six armor—a fact that would be established later—and windows tinted so dark that it seemed impossible for anyone inside to actually see out. The attackers were waiting in three different spots, arranged in a triangle. They’d planned to dynamite the little bridge, but something changed and they decided against it. Instead, they blocked the convoy’s path by laying the desiccated trunk of an old eucalyptus across the road, which proved effective, since when the SUVs found themselves in the middle of the hail of bullets, they were unable to retreat.
The drivers had good military training. When the first shots rang out and they realized they weren’t going to be able to escape around the next curve, they spread out in a V shape, protecting the Hummer and illuminating the area with their headlights, which worked for a while, since the tracer bullets just hit the chassis, shattered the lights, and pierced the tires. Even hemmed in, the men organized to repel the attack. Their first move was to get out of the vehicles and figure out where the enemy was located, but they soon realized they were surrounded. The heaviest fire seemed to be coming from the road itself, as if a nest of machine gunners were lurking a few meters ahead.
And the worst was still to come.
The boy watched two attackers pass close by the tree (a mango) he was perched in and felt a mix of fear and vertigo. They climbed up from the stream bank and positioned themselves on the rise, less than a hundred meters from the armored Hummer. They had a bazooka. They lay down in the grass, gesticulated, and moved their arms, as if they were using complicated calculations to work out the shot, but without making a sound. At last they decided. One of them got on his knees and rested the barrel on his shoulder. The other one, behind him, calculated the trajectory, paused a few seconds that the boy thought would never end, and fired. The Hummer flew backward, wiping out one of the men. It crashed back to earth and burst into flames. The artillerymen had time to calmly reload the bazooka and retake their position. The second shot blew up the righthand Landrover, proving its armor to be inferior. A second bodyguard was crushed, and flames took over part of his body.
The gunfire intensified.
From where the boy was hiding, the air was a fabric woven of sparks and flashes.
One bullet sailed through the night and entered the base of the skull of another of the men, possibly the youngest and most aggressive, who had grabbed a fire extinguisher. It was later learned that his name was Enciso Yepes. He was of average height with a powerful build, and he had close-cropped hair with a longer patch on top like a soccer player. On the left side of his chest was a tattoo that said, “God is my buddy, my homie, my key,” and on his right arm was one that said, “Estéphanny is Love and she is God and IHer.” The bullet pierced his brain and, from within, shattered the frontal bone at the level of his right eye. After killing him, it reemerged into the open air, which was saturated with smoke and gunfire, grazed a mudflap, and, changing trajectory, plunged into the trunk of a cedar tree fifty meters from the road.
If he had survived, Enciso Yepes would have been an invalid and unable to talk. He was thirty-five years old and had three young children with two different women. His bank account contained 1,087,000 pesos, but he had debts totaling 7,923,460. Life had not been stingy with him, but it was tremendously lopsided, since at the same moment that his soul was heading toward (we assume) purgatory, his beloved second wife, Estéphanny Gómez, thirty-one years old, born in the village of Dosquebradas, Risaralda, was sprawled naked on a heart-shaped bed at the Panorama Motel in Pereira, in the position known as doggy-style, with her hips hoisted up in a pyramid and her face buried in a flowery pillowcase, suffocating in rapturous grunts of pleasure. It would soon be discovered that Estéphanny was the shouty type, and among the things the people in the room next door heard that afternoon, the most memorable were phrases of the sort “Pound me, honey, whip me good!” or “Harder, Papi, give it to me!” or “It’s so good to fuck stoned, baby.” All of this in the company of a man who, to the best of my knowledge, was her brother-in-law, Anselmo Yepes.
Far from there, by the Ullucos River, the fighting grew even fiercer, and the men, sweaty and firelit, no longer looked like heroes. But they were holding out. From that keep of fuel and twisted metal, an intrepid group was still defending, and it appeared they had a lot of ammunition. They were well trained. They barely needed to look at each other to implement a strategy. The Hummer was on its side, but as the flames abated it was clear that the chassis remained intact. It was impossible to imagine that the occupants were alive, given the impact and the heat.
But alive they were.
A helicopter’s sudden arrival caught everyone off guard. It was a Hurricane 9.2, but that was learned afterward. From the air, via radar, the aircraft identified the origin points of the attack and destroyed them with its .52 caliber machine guns. The attackers, who’d been on the verge of victory, were stunned, unable to process what was happening. Then all hell broke loose. The guys with the bazooka raced toward the slope, heading down to the riverbank, but then realized that they could attack the helicopter and maybe bring it down. Those seconds of indecision were fatal. The one carrying the bazooka hoisted it to his shoulder and kneeled down, but as the helicopter’s spotlight swept toward him, he leaped to one side and almost ended up shooting in the opposite direction. Then the machine guns took the men down from above. First one, then two. The crisscrossing bullets, like in the third secret of Fátima, came out of the darkest night. One man dove into the water and hit his head on a rock. The machine guns must have found all the nests of attackers, because the gunfire suddenly ceased. Any survivors managed to flee; everything happened really fast.
Then the helicopter alighted next to the SUVs. The doors of the battered Hummer opened and the boy, from the tree, saw a man dressed all in black climb out along with two young women, one of them wearing just a swimsuit and inadequately covered with a towel. The three boarded the helicopter, which immediately lifted back into the air and disappeared into the night.
Then the bodyguards loaded the bodies into the ruined vehicles, collected the weapons, and headed toward San Andrés de Pisimbalá. A little while later a second group arrived in two huge utility trucks. They cleared away the eucalyptus trunk and meticulously gathered up the remnants of the battle until there was no sign remaining on the hillsides or roadway.
The boy waited another hour. He climbed down from the tree and walked along the shoulder, searching the ground, but they’d taken everything, from the ruined SUV chassis to every last shotgun cartridge. He didn’t find a single spent casing.
THE PROTAGONISTS
The person who told me this story is an old friend. Her name is Julieta Lezama, a seasoned freelance reporter who sells her stories to press outlets in Spain, the United States, and Latin America. She’s young—on the brink of forty—and has two sons plus a divorce from another journalist whose beat is politics and finance, topics far removed from the things that make Julieta’s soul thrum. What interests her is harsh reality, public order, crime, and the blood that flows out of bodies and gives a tragic hue to the contours of this beautiful country, whether it’s splashed on asphalt or grass or plush pillows in affluent homes.
What Julieta is passionate about is the violent death that certain human beings, one fine day, de
Julieta has a small office in the same building where she lives with her two teenage boys, in the Chapinero Alto district of eastern Bogotá. The only luxury she enjoys (and only for the last eleven months, as her work with the Sunday magazine of the Mexican newspaper El Sol has stabilized) is a full-time secretary and all-around collaborator named Johana Triviño, who organizes her files and keeps her deadline calendar up to date. In addition—and this is her favorite part—Johana’s in charge of arranging meetings with people involved in the cases, and sometimes goes with her, especially when Julieta wants a witness around. Johana has a virtue that’s rarely found in female communication studies graduates: she knows how to use (and identify) all kinds of weapons, from handguns to less conventional arms, since she spent twelve years as a member of the FARC’s Western Bloc. At first it was a bit of a lark for Julieta: working with someone who came from a world so different from her own, from the shadowy Colombia that, incredibly, had existed apart from the rest of the country for more than fifty years and now, with the arrival of peace and then the ultraright’s rise to power, was in a very delicate position, on a tightrope.
Johana, protagonist number two in this story (though not necessarily in hierarchical order), is a Cali native, from a family that moved in the eighties from Cajibío, in Cauca Department, to the Aguablanca district. It’s the toughest area of Cali, that stunning city known as heaven’s branch office. There she grew up among migrants from Tumaco, Cauca, and Buenaventura. Among gangs of criminals, members of the FARC and ELN, paramilitaries, and drug dealers. Her father was a jeep driver, informal taxi driver, and finally the personal chauffeur to a wealthy family, the Arzalluzes, who lived in a fancy house in the Santa Mónica neighborhood.
The Arzalluzes, as it happened, had a little girl, Costanza, who’d been born on November 9, 1990, the exact same day and year as Johana. The family (the Arzalluzes) took this to heart, and on the shared birthday, they would give Johana suitcases of barely used clothing, shoes, books, and toys that their daughter no longer wanted. The ritual played out every year: bright and early that day, Johana’s father would take her to Connie’s (as Costanza was called) house to visit and accept the gifts. They would share a slice of cake with the servants, have a glass of soda, and that was it. After that Connie would start getting ready for her other birthday party with her cousins, friends from the club, and schoolmates, and Johana would be sent back to Aguablanca. That’s how things always went until the year they turned fifteen.
Naturally, the Arzalluz daughter was having a huge bash at Club Colombia that year, and she was so busy getting ready that she couldn’t take part in the traditional celebration with Johana. Starting early that morning, Johana’s father the chauffeur had to make a million trips between the club and Santa Mónica. The caterers’ van wasn’t big enough, and since the food had to stay chilled, he was stuck ferrying the trays of appetizers, spring rolls, finger sandwiches, octopus carpaccio, and, most especially, the six pyramids of king shrimp that were to preside over the central tables. Added to that was an endless stream of baskets of dishware, three sizes of wineglasses, water glasses, and cutlery. He had to transport the decorations that the mother wanted brought from home to the club ballroom to enhance the elegant atmosphere, which changed with the hour according to her whims and anxiety levels: a two-seater Chesterfield for the birthday girl’s grandparents to sit on; several bronze sculptures of Mercury and young Bacchus, his hair made of clusters of grapes; a Louis XV–style gilt-framed mirror; and an old painting from the English romantic period, a hunting scene that, the family claimed, could be from the Turner school. He helped supervise the lights and sound checks for the band, which started setting up its equipment at four in the afternoon, and to top it all off, he had to make three trips to the airport to pick up relatives flying in from Bogotá and Medellín. He got off of work at eleven that night, dead tired, and was finally able to go home for his daughter’s fifteenth birthday party.
In Aguablanca, Johana and her family were celebrating in the church’s community hall, with speakers and a good sound system. Her father loved old-school salsa and they were playing compilations of Héctor Lavoe, La Fania, Ismael Rivera, Richie Ray and Bobby Cruz, La Pesada de Cali, musicians who dominated the scene in this city that loved rhythm, the sound of trumpet, bass, and percussion.
Carlos Duván, her older brother, helped hang banners and decorate the room with posters and balloons. Her friends wrote phrases about life, enthusiastic ideas, and “aspirations” for the future. Her father bought twelve boxes of Blanco del Valle aguardiente, Viejo de Caldas rum, and a few bottles of Something Special whisky for the family’s nearest and dearest.
And the food!
Balls of unripe plantain stuffed with pork rind, plantain fritters stuffed with cheese, slices of fried plantain with tomato onion salsa and guacamole, three massive pots of sancocho stew, white rice, and several kinds of meat. When the father arrived, people were dancing already, but out of respect for him they played the waltz again so he could take his daughter out on the dance floor, to the applause of friends and family.
The call came after midnight. It was Mrs. Arzalluz; she was so embarrassed to do this, but Connie needed to ask him a favor. What was it? In all the commotion, the girl had left her makeup bag in the car the chauffeur had used to pick up the grandparents from the airport and then driven home. When she’d gone to touch up her makeup for the first dances, she discovered—a tragedy!—that the bag was still in the car the chauffeur had headed home in. Connie had left it there and then forgotten to ask him to take it out with everything else. She wanted to know if it would be too much of an imposition to ask him to bring it to her; her party was going to go on all night and the bag had the makeup a cousin had bought for her in Miami that matched her dress perfectly.
The driver explained that he was at his daughter’s party and had already had a few drinks, so it wasn’t a good idea for him to drive, but then Connie came on and begged him to bring it to her. What was she going to do without her makeup? She’d need to touch it up during the party! The father had no choice but to agree. He put on his jacket and told Johana he had to go back to Club Colombia, just for a minute. Seeing everybody’s disappointment, he added: what can you do, it’s work.
Our guess, or really what the police told us, is that as he was pulling up to the club he didn’t spot a cyclist coming until he was right on top of the guy, and swerved so violently he skidded over the median and overturned the car into the river. He died of a skull fracture. The Arzalluzes came to the wake, but not the funeral. They gave us big hugs and I realized something: poor people are important only when we die, that’s it. Connie didn’t come to either the wake or the funeral, since she was hungover from her party. The cunt who killed my father for a fucking bag of makeup, my little rich friend, didn’t even come to offer her condolences.
From that day on, I was filled with hate.
I said to myself: We can’t leave Colombia in those bastards’ hands. This country is perverse, diseased, and it has to change, even if it’s by dubious methods. I refuse to just sit down and cry.
The neighborhood had these urban militias roaming around, and paramilitary groups too, and from time to time you’d hear gunfire. I liked the FARC guys; they had a certain mystique and were tough as nails. No soft talk—they knew what was needed. A cousin of mine, Toby, was with them. I talked to him and he gave me pamphlets about the guerrilla groups and their cause. Even a well-thumbed book. How the Steel Was Tempered, by Nikolai Ostrovsky. It had been so thoroughly and sweatily manhandled that I thought I might get mange from turning its pages. I didn’t understand a thing, but I liked it. It convinced me that a person needs to study and understand History, with a capital H. That’s what I did, on my own, all throughout my time in the guerrilla. Fight and study. Often the two activities were one and the same. By the time I turned sixteen, Carlos Duván and I had traveled to Toribío. We managed to make contact with the FARC and asked to join. They accepted us. We completed the politics and training courses, and then our military training. After a few months, hearing my comrades’ stories, my anger began to dissipate. What had happened to my brother and me was nothing compared to the horrors other people had experienced.
