'In the midst of the silence, the boy started laughing. He wiped his axe on his jacket. And he laughed. That was when I knew that he was scared too. An invisible axe rested at all times against the back of his own neck.

'A loud howling and moaning rose up from the horrified people who were my friends, my neighbours, my relatives. I saw my mother press her hands to her eyes, and I hated myself for being so little, for being so scared, and for not being able to help her. The bandits themselves were now growing uneasy, screaming and striking out at everyone around them. They scooped up whatever food they could find, but for some reason they didn't see the basket of corn that I was hiding behind. And then they started taking away some of the younger women. To my horror I saw that they had also begun tugging at my mother; she was still young and they wanted to take her too. She screamed and called my father's name. They struck her, but she kept on resisting.

'That's when I could no longer stay hidden behind the basket of corn. I was still not wearing any trousers. But I saw how they were trying to take my mother away from me, and that was something I could not let happen. I stood up, dashed naked across the sandy space where Alfredo's head was already covered by a swarm of green flies, and took a firm grip on my mother's capulana. The leader of the bandits, who seemed to take a special interest in my mother, looked at me in surprise. He saw that I was her son. Everyone used to say that we looked so much alike. He grabbed my little sister from my mother's back where she had been tied on in the same way I had once been. He went over to a big mortar that the women used to pound corn and stuffed my sister inside. Then he lifted up the heavy pole and handed it to my mother.

'"Tm hungry," he said. "Crush the corn and what's in the mortar so we can have some food."

'My mother tried to move towards the mortar. She screamed and fought, but he held her off. Finally he hit her and she fell to the ground, and then he grabbed me by one arm.

'"You have to choose," he shouted at my mother. When he yelled, his voice had a strange hissing sound, almost like an animal, because he didn't have any teeth in his mouth.

'"I'm going to chop off this chicken's head," he said. "I'm going to chop off his head if I don't get some food."

'My mother lay on the ground screaming. She tried to crawl over to the mortar that my sister was stuffed into. I could feel myself peeing from fear; the evil that was holding on to me was so big and so incomprehensible that I wanted to die. I wanted to die, I wanted my mother to die, and I wanted my sister to live. Someone would lift her up and tie her to their back. One of my aunts, who was also mother to my sister, would lead her back to life. No one should have to die crushed by a pole in a corn mortar. Such a sacrifice could not be worthy of death.

'Suddenly the man with no teeth seemed to give up. He shouted a few brusque orders to his waiting men. They began herding together the goats and the women and the half-grown boys, who carried on their heads the food the bandits had found in the village. They also dragged along me and my mother, who at the last moment tried to tear herself away to get my sister, who had started to cry down in the mortar.

'The leader must have heard her, the faint cries from inside the mortar. Because all of a sudden he picked up the pole that was lying on the ground beside Alfredo's head. He looked at the pole, as if he didn't at first understand why he was holding it.

'Then he lifted it up – the man with no teeth, who had come with his men like beasts of prey in the night to kill us in the name of liberation – and he slammed it into the mortar until my sister stopped screaming.

'My mother heard the screams stop. She turned round and saw what had happened, how the man with no teeth pounded the pole one last time, and then everything was very still.

'At that moment it felt as if the world died. Even though many of us were still alive, we were actually dead. Even the spirits, which were fluttering restlessly all around, fell to the ground like a rain of tiny, cold dead stones.

'I remember very little of what happened after that. My mother, who had fainted, was carried and dragged along by the bandits. I was still naked and my body was slashed by the thorny bushes we passed on our way towards a destination which none of us knew. I thought that we were walking like ghosts through a landscape that was no longer alive, a group of people all dead, bandits who were dead, breathing an air that was dead too. There was no more life; it had all come to an end when my sister stopped screaming. The river, which we glimpsed now and then through the brush, was dead, the water was dead, the sun burning in the sky was dead, our weary footsteps were dead. We were a caravan of dead people who had left our lives behind us. We were on our way towards eternal nothingness. We walked when it was dark, and we walked in the early dawn. Out in front moved the scouts whom the man with no teeth had sent ahead. Whenever they saw people, we would take a long detour. In the daytime we waited for darkness in the shelter of groves of densely intertwined trees.

'By then the bandits had already begun to divide the women up among themselves. But they didn't want anything to do with my mother. She cried the whole time and wouldn't stop even when they kicked and hit her. I tried to stay near her at all times. I still had no trousers, but one of the other women had torn off a scrap from her capulana, which I had wrapped around my waist. The bandits forced the women to make the food, which they then ate, not sharing any with us. After they had eaten they would drag the women into the bushes. When the women came back, their clothes would be torn and in disarray, and I could see that they were ashamed. The bandits were constantly drinking from their cans filled with tontonto. Sometimes they would fight. But most often they would go to sleep if the man with no teeth didn't send them to scout or keep watch.

'We trudged through a landscape that seemed to have been abandoned by everything alive. There weren't even any birds. Judging by the sun, I could tell that we first headed north; then one day we turned to the east. Still none of us knew where we were going. We weren't allowed to talk to each other, we were only permitted to answer the questions that some of the bandits asked us. I looked at the boys who were only a few years older than me. Although they were young, not even full grown, they behaved as if they were old men. I would often sit and sneak a glance at the boy who had chopped off Alfredo's head with his axe. I thought about the way he had laughed because of the terror that filled him. I wondered how his spirit would some day be received by the dead, by his ancestors. I thought they would probably punish him. I couldn't imagine that the spirits would fail to punish each other for the crimes they had committed when they were alive.

'Late one evening we reached a high plateau. For several days the path we had been following grew steeper and steeper. When we came to the top, other bandits were already there, along with several poorly built huts, flickering fires and lots of guns. We had arrived at one of the bases which the bandits concealed in inaccessible places and which the young revolutionaries seldom managed to find. I remember nothing from our first night there except that we were exhausted. My mother had stopped crying by then, but she had also stopped talking, and I thought that her heart was paralysed with sorrow for all those who were left behind in the burned village. The bandits herded us into one of the huts. I lay for a long time on the hard earthen floor in the dark, listening to the bandits getting drunk on palm wine, now and then quarrelling or singing obscene songs or cursing the young revolutionaries. I had a hard time falling asleep because I was so hungry. It felt as though fierce animals were biting me in the stomach, making tiny holes through which all my strength was seeping out, like the last drops of water in an almost dry river bed. But I must have fallen asleep at last.