2023-06-29 13:53:10
At this hour of the morning in Spain, so early here and so late in Ukraine, Hector Abad Faciolince, Colombian writer who at nightfall of this last Tuesday was about to be assassinated in Kramatorsk, Ukraine, send a photograph by wasap and this short caption: “Crossing the border on foot. All good”.
In the photograph you can see a quiet line of people who seem to be waiting to enter through a door that, at that moment, with the background that is already known, could turn out to be the same door to paradise.
Although what the camera reflects at that moment is the mute set of a fleeing crowd, surrounded by walls that look like civil barbed wire, the echo of the news can be heard in the distance, ruthless, forced by itself to be part of the Time.news of stupor
Héctor Abad is there, with his partner Sergio Jaramillohis countryman, returning to a land without bombs, about to cross the border that will take him to territory without war, because until a while ago, or even right now, they have been crossing, they, his friend Catalina Gomez AngelUkrainian journalist, writer Victoria Amelinawho is very serious, the greatest danger of their lives, the instant that sounds when even the air carries the news of death.
It is a specific group of people, apart from those we have mentioned, those who are in that shapeless line of walkers in search of the border. They are nameless people: they flee. Like those who fled from the Spanish Civil War, or those who went to the concentration camps, crestfallen, those who knew that the rifles, the muskets, were not there just because they were, but to kill them, those who leave the Ukraine, like Héctor, like their friends, they have already heard the roar of death and smoke, and of death, and they are here, photographed with the first light of day, and they are now part of this wasap which is friendly news for those who have asked them at dawn Spanish: “Hector, how are you?”
In response, “Crossing the border on foot. All good”, there are centuries of history of others, who have traversed similar places, barbed wire, looking for the place where the word refuge is a specific place where at least immediate memory, fear, noise is alleviated. that followed the sharp, cruel blow, which a few hours ago explained the exact size of the stupor. Speaking of something else, life itself, this writer who now offers this two-line dispatch, in his book about the heart of a Colombian priest friend of his, says something similar from the title: “Except my heart, everything is fine.” The future acts, said Fernando Arrabal, in coups. And there is the past covering this image of the future with danger and blood, the people fleeing from the war in the image that has just crossed the air to settle in a distant house where news of Héctor and his friends were expected. They are at the border, leaving, “all good”.
In the photographs of the day before yesterday appeared Héctor and his friend Sergio stained by the scourge of war, its consequences. In the case of the latter, a former commissioner for peace, Colombian like him, accustomed like Hector to the word war and the cruel news of shrapnel, he was seen hanging from a leg that had been hit by shrapnel that fell, it was a shell, over the restaurant in which they had just sat down. In this case, in Sergio’s, his face lowered towards pain, which was strong as a battle injury. Héctor appeared full length, looking at the camera, his ‘Hold Ukraine’ rosette attached to his jacket, and all his clothes stitched with black dots, like blood. But it was not blood, but the trace of all the splinters that joined the disaster that his eyes revealed. I never saw Héctor Abad Faciolince showing that stupor on his face, as if he were seeing the darkest past of his life again..
That’s how they stayed @hectorabadf and Sergio Jaramillo after surviving a bombing in the Ukraine. Shocking. pic.twitter.com/LkdddjHJWF
—Jose Manuel Acevedo (@JoseMAcevedo) June 27, 2023
He and Victoria Amelina, and Sergio, had been laughing about the anecdotes that usually happen at the end of the afternoon, there’s no real beer, you have to drink without alcohol, we’re finally sitting down, they laugh, and at the peak of that laugh exploded the bomb and also exploded the evidence of the future that seems crossed out, part of one of those stains that combine with the face of Héctor Abad Faciolince. If you stop looking at your clothes, so stained, or your partner’s sore foot, and look at his eyes, the eyes of the writer who is looking at the camera, you could see there, in its exact dimension, incredulous, the exact size of stupor.
It is impossible, at the end of that look that is like a verse written by someone fleeing death, not to suddenly imagine what happened in the life of this man, who was a boy at the time, when he saw his own father, Dr. Héctor Gómez, bloody, dead, on the street. It was in Medellín, Colombia, in the midst of that huge collection of as many stupors as murders, on August 27, 1987. He, a skinny boy as he appears in the film, ‘El olvido que seremos’, by Fernando Trueba, in his own such a poetic book, of the same title, is now a living part of the stupor of another war to which he has gone with others to proclaim ‘Hold Ukraine’.
weeks ago, in the Madrid Book Fairhe wrote down circumstances of the life of others and laughed at the occurrences that had happened in the bookstore booth without platform where he had been signing. Already dressed as if for lunch, that boy from August 1987 was this man from 2023 who was counting the hours or days that were left to move to Ukraine in search of what he always was, before that noise that broke his adolescence, his human passion. of writer: tell life, repudiate death.
He took notes, he always takes notes, of whatever he heard; with his pen with small letters, with his glasses for very close vision, with his heart repaired a while ago, perhaps with the same guayabera with which he traveled to Ukraine, he was going to move to the epicenter of the disaster and found himself, that’s what he said now on the radio in Colombia, on the radio in Spain, speaking with Carles Francino in la Ser, everywhere they called him from.
Chance and death, together, doing their meticulous work against people’s lives, the horrible viciousness of the Russian army plummeting against the peaceful laughter of those in the Ukraine to proclaim life against death. “We sat down, there was no beer, we laughed, the bomb is designed to hurt.”
Everything happened in slow motion, and suddenly, after the noise, he noticed Victoria, her friend, straight, in her chair, clean, who did not respond… Very serious news would be heard from her laterand what remained in his memory, in Héctor’s memory, in that face that is seen in the photographs, is, as he said, “horror and horror.”
This morning, in the long line for the getaway, as if he were once again naming that book about the hearts of others, and about his own, he wrote this telegram to a Spanish friend that he attached to that line of hope and drama of those who they manage to leave: “Crossing the border on foot. All good”. The syntax of stupor, the finger that falls on the keyboard to alleviate the restlessness of those who, being so far from that line of fleeing, are walking beyond fear and death.
#HECTOR #ABAD #FACIOLINCE #UKRAINE #size #stupor