I Can Take Two With My Bare Hands

It was around two in the afternoon. The sun in El Guamo at that hour is not the sun anywhere else — it’s a physical presence, something that presses down and doesn’t negotiate. I heard the motorcycles before I saw them.

Four men. Four motorcycles. Old police caps that had been worn down to something that no longer resembled their original form — colorless, frayed, the kind of thing that communicates not authority but its deliberate inversion, the costume of men who’ve decided the joke of the cap is funnier than anything it was designed to represent. Behind one of the men, on the back of his motorcycle, a boy. Eleven years old, maybe. He had a machete, like the others. He looked exactly as aggressive as the four men he’d arrived with.

I had seen dangerous people before. I grew up with the most dangerous person I’ve ever known, and I’ve spent enough years in enough difficult places to have a working calibration for threat. These four men registered immediately, completely, before any of them had said a word.

I walked to the gate and asked if I could help.

The Theater

They said they needed to cross the farm to reach a place behind it. They needed to ride their motorcycles through.

I want to describe why this was impossible, because the impossibility was part of the message. The farm had mountains above and deep jungle below. There was no path for motorcycles. There had never been a path for motorcycles. The geography made the request physically absurd — not inconvenient, not difficult, but the kind of impossible that everyone present understood immediately, including the men asking.

So we both knew what was happening. We both knew the other knew. And we both stayed in character anyway, because that’s what this kind of theater requires.

I told them there was no path. That even if there were, I had fighting bulls loose up there, large and dangerous animals in territory they knew as their own.

The main man — the only one who spoke, which is its own kind of communication — said he knew the farm better than I did. Said there was a path. Said the bulls weren’t a problem because he was a bullfighter.

They all laughed and looked at each other.

I said I wanted no problems. Said the inner road had been abandoned, that the vegetation was dense, that there were bothrops vipers in the leaf cover, that what they were proposing was a reliable way to get someone killed. And I told them they should go to the next farm on the right — a farm I knew belonged to people nobody in that region would try to cross — where the road was maintained and the passage was actually possible.

They heard what I was actually saying. I knew they heard it. We were still in character.

What Was Running Underneath

Here is what I was thinking, in the part of my mind that was running parallel to the conversation:

I don’t have my machete. I can probably take two of them with my bare hands. I cannot take four men with machetes on motorcycles. And if I try and fail — or if I succeed and what comes next is the forty who follow these four — what happens to my wife? Her mother? Hundreds of animals on a farm in the middle of a region with seven hundred active paramilitaries fifteen years before I arrived, and however many of whatever remained?

This is not a dramatic thought. It’s not heroism or fear or rage. It’s an inventory, taken fast, of what’s available and what isn’t — the kind of calculation that, as I’ve written elsewhere, doesn’t wait for permission from any slower part of the brain. It just runs, in the background, while the conversation continues in the foreground, and the two tracks operate simultaneously, and nothing in my face or my voice reflects the second track at all.

I knew what they were there for. They knew I knew. We were still, all of us, in character.

Then one of them looked at the animals and started talking to the others, in the specific tone of a man conducting an appraisal in front of the person being appraised:

This one is worth a thousand. That one five hundred. That one twelve hundred. A pause. He’s even got potbellied pigs.

I played fool. Said this wasn’t a business, that it was a sanctuary, that I didn’t think about the animals in those terms, that they all stayed until they died of old age. Said it pleasantly. Said it while knowing they understood exactly what I was actually saying, which was: I know what you’re pricing, and the answer is no, and I’m not moving from this gate.

Then: Where are the pitbulls?

They knew about the pitbulls. They knew about the pitbulls specifically, which meant they knew about us — not the general knowledge a region has about newcomers but the specific knowledge of people who’d been paying attention. I said the pitbulls were around, somewhere in the back. I knew they were secured and couldn’t help me. I said it anyway, because the information that they existed was worth something, even if they weren’t coming.

They left.

What Came After

I called the police. This was, by then, a gesture I performed out of the obligation to have performed it, not out of any expectation. The police in that region were what the police in that region were. I knew before I dialed what the call would produce, and it produced exactly that.

So I prepared Molotov cocktails. Not many — enough. I positioned them in places I’d thought about, spots that made sense given the layout of the property and the most likely approaches. I did this carefully, methodically, the way you do things when the doing is the only available option regardless of what it accomplishes.

And I thought: if they come, and they come in numbers, this ends badly and I know it. The cocktails won’t change the outcome. But they will make it cost something. Whoever comes to harm us will find out, at minimum, that this wasn’t easy — that the man at the gate who played theater with them and didn’t move was also the man who made them pay for whatever came next, even if paying was the last thing he did.

That’s not bravery. I want to be precise about that. It’s closer to: the cockroach who is also a scorpion doesn’t stop just because the odds have shifted. You give them true hell, whoever comes, because the alternative — deciding that what’s behind you isn’t worth making them pay to take — is the one thing that was never actually available.

The War That Followed

Things did go south after the gate. Not directly — directly would have been cleaner, in a way, more legible. What happened instead was the specific cruelty of an asymmetric situation: signs, afterward. Damage found, not witnessed. Animals killed, found afterwards. Evidence that they’d been somewhere on the massive farm without my seeing them, and then the evidence that they’d been there, afterward, when they were already gone.

One man. Against how many I couldn’t fully know. In a region with a history that predated my arrival by a decade and a half and that I’d driven into, with hundreds of animals and two women and no exit that didn’t require the animals to also exit, looking for enough pasture to keep them alive through a drought.

I didn’t leave. We didn’t leave until we could leave on our own terms, with whoever we’d managed to keep alive, which was most of them — which, given everything, was a kind of miracle I’ve stopped trying to fully explain.

The gate, the theater, the internal inventory running underneath it — I think about it sometimes. Not with pride, and not with regret. With the specific attention you give to a moment that revealed something true about what you actually are when the performance has to be completely real, when the theater is the only thing standing between what’s behind you and what’s outside the gate.

Two I could take with my bare hands.

The other two I couldn’t.

So the theater continued, and I didn’t move, and eventually they left.

That was enough. For that afternoon, that was enough.

This is the ground-level reality of the life described in No Net and Leave No One Behind — not the philosophy, but what the philosophy is managing, on an afternoon in El Guamo, at a gate, with the sun pressing down and four men who knew exactly what they were there for.