Out of Captivity : Surviving 1,967 Days in the Colombian Jungle

252 OUT OF CAPTIVITYcomrades were all watching, and if I didn’t do it, I would be ashamed. Ihad to do it in the spirit of the revolution or they would kill me.”We liked Mono and we liked what he could do for us, but the coldindifference of that story revealed, if not his true nature, then what hehad been transformed into by the FARC. We didn’t say a lot to Mono.We hadn’t thought of him as a killer, but he was. I added to my librarya sobering reality—new, unbearably grim images of ways I could possiblydie.To combat those fears, I sat and watched the Plumber whittling apiece of wood while guarding us. He used his knife to transform thestick into a cylinder and then into a spinning top. I’d taken a varietyof shop classes and thought I was pretty decent at working with myhands. I asked him if he could get me a piece of wood; whittling andcarving seemed like good ways to keep my mind occupied. The nextday he brought me a piece of wood and his knife. He asked me towhittle it into a cylinder. He supervised the operation and was pleasedwith my work and I was happy to have something to do.I didn’t think that my skills were good enough yet to work on adetailed scale, so I asked the Plumber for a short log—about a foot inlength. We’d asked for a chess game and never gotten one, so I decidedto carve a pawn. I needed something simple that I could carve and apawn wasn’t that much different from the cylinder I’d made for thePlumber. I spent the day whittling and carving. After I returned theknife at the end of the day, I showed it to Tom and Keith. They lookedat me. They looked at my project. Keith just shook his head, and whenI looked objectively at what I’d done, I could see that my pawn lookedmore like a primitive fertility idol than a chess piece.Using my rusty drafting skills, I drew out my vision of a pawn. Mydrawing was to scale, but I wasn’t completely satisfied. In one of themagazines Mono had stolen for us, there was an article about a brilliantyoung Russian woman. She was supersmart but also a beautiful