The Colombian writer Héctor Abad Faciolince (Medellín, 1958) – author of works such as El olvido que seremos or the recent Salvo mi corazón, todo está bien – was one of the people who were having dinner in a pizzeria in Kramatorsk on Tuesday when a missile it fell on their heads. Yesterday, from Kyiv, he answered the call of this newspaper.
How are you?
The further one gets away, the less insecure one feels. It was a tremendous thing. I am in Kyiv, but the journalist Catalina Gómez Ángel, who is a real angel, stayed in the hospital accompanying the writer Victòria Amelina, our dear friend, she went out with her holding hands in the ambulance.
What happened?
It was a quarter past eight in the evening. In Kramatorsk there is a curfew at nine o’clock at night, but since before that you have to leave to get home, so we didn’t have much time to eat anything. In the region there is dry law, they can’t sell alcohol and it’s the joke we were making, Amelina said the nearest was a non-alcoholic beer, which she ordered, I only had water and raised my glass to toast with her On his left was Catalina, on his right the ex-peace commissioner Sergio Jaramillo, next to me our Ukrainian translator and driver, and at that moment there was an uproar that I had never heard in my life, as since from below, although I later learned it came from above, was a precision missile that hit exactly halfway up the roof of the pizzeria, knocking me to the ground as if I had been struck by lightning. There I was, among glass, pieces of tin, sticks, splashed everywhere with a black substance, which I didn’t know if it left my body or came from outside, I said to myself ‘I’m hurt but nothing hurts me, like the that they start a shot’.
And what did he do?
I started to get up, Catalina was asking me ‘forgive me, sorry, for bringing you here,’ with that Catholic and absurd complex that we have to feel guilty. She, a war correspondent halfway around the world, had never experienced a terrorist attack right where she was. I looked at Victoria and she looked perfect, sitting, straight, leaning back in the armchair, she wasn’t unkempt, just her head slightly tilted back but pale as paper and her eyes closed. Catalina and Sergio started shouting at her and she didn’t react, completely still, bloodless, as if death had come from within, without touching her.
what happened to him
She was wounded at the base of the skull by the back, due to a shrapnel from the missile. We were having dinner on the terrace, not inside. A piece of pergola fell on Sergio’s thigh and injured him. I have nothing, just a hum that I hear. The dead were inside, the roof collapsed on top of them, that plus the explosion. It was a perfectly accurate missile to land on the most famous restaurant in town.
What were you doing in Ukraine?
As part of a delegation from Aguanta, Ukraine!, we had come to present the solidarity of Latin America. We were invited by an incredible book fair that could be held in Kyiv, very popular, with the Ukrainian Nobel Peace Prize winner Oleksandra Matviychuk, with the president of PEN… The excitement was so great that Victoria Amelina, that he wasn’t supposed to come with us, he got excited and said ‘I’m coming and I’m taking you to places where you can see the horrors of Russian oppression’. Amelina is writing an essay documenting war crimes. The pizzeria was his favorite restaurant and we wanted to give him that dinner. In the moment of greatest joy, death comes and rolls a die. Why she got a crack in the head and we don’t is a scary question that we will continue to ask ourselves for the rest of our lives.
