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.