News of a Kidnapping by Gabriel García Márquez, Edith Grossman Page B

announcing either political or religious meetings, or broadcasting deafening concerts. On several occasions they heard campaign slogans for the Constituent Assembly that was to convene soon. More often they heard the whine of small planes takingoff and landing just a short distance away, which led them to suppose they were somewhere near Guaymaral, a landing field for small aircraft about twenty kilometers to the north of Bogotá. Maruja, who had known savanna weather from the time she was a girl, felt that the cold in their room was not the chill of the countryside but of the city. And their captors’ excessive precautions made sense onlyif they were in an urban center.
    Most surprising of all was the occasional roar of a helicopter so close it seemed to be on the roof. Marina Montoya said it meant the arrival of an army officer who was responsible for the abductions. As the days passed, they would become accustomed to the sound, for during their captivity the helicopter landed at least once a month, and the hostages were sureit had something to do with them.
    It was impossible to distinguish the line between truth and Marina’s contagious fantasies. She said that Pacho Santos and Diana Turbay were in other rooms of the house, so that the officer in the helicopter could take care of all three cases during each visit. Once they heard alarming noises in the courtyard. The majordomo, the man who managed the house, wasinsulting his wife as he gave hurried orders to move it that way, bring it over here, a little higher, as if they were trying to force a corpse into a place that was too small. Marina, in her gloomy delirium, thought that perhaps they had cut up Francisco Santos and were burying the pieces under the tiles in the kitchen. “When the killings begin, they don’tstop,” she kept saying. “We’re next.”It was a terrifying night until they learned by chance that they had been moving an old wash tub that was too heavy for four men to carry.
    At night the silence was total, interrupted only by a demented rooster with no sense of time who crowed whenever he felt like it. Barking dogs could be heard in the distance, and one very close by sounded to them like a trained guard dog. Maruja got off toa bad start. She curled up on the mattress, closed her eyes, and for several days did not open them again except when she had to, trying to think with more clarity. She was not sleeping for eight hours at a time but would doze off for half an hour and wake to find the same agony always lying in wait for her. She felt permanent dread: the constant physical sensation in her stomach of a hard knot aboutto explode into panic. Maruja ran the complete film of her life in an effort to hold on to good memories, but disagreeable ones always intervened. On one of three trips she had made to Colombia from Jakarta, Luis Carlos Galán had asked her, during a private lunch, to help him in his next presidential campaign. She had been his media adviser during an earlier campaign, traveling all over the countrywith her sister Gloria, celebrating victories, suffering defeats, averting mishaps, and so the offer was logical. Maruja felt appreciated and flattered. But when lunch was over, she noticed a vague look in Galán, a supernatural light: the instantaneous and certain vision that he would be killed. The revelation was so strong that she persuaded her husband to return to Colombia even though GeneralMaza Márquez had warned him, with no further explanation, that they were risking death. A week before they left Jakarta, they heard the news that Galán had been murdered.
    The experience left her with a depressive propensity that intensified during her captivity. She could find nothing to hold on to, no way to escape the thought that she too was pursued by mortal danger. She refused to speak oreat. She was irritated by Beatriz’s indolence and the masked guards’ brutishness, and she couldnot endure Marina’s submissiveness or the way she