The Colombian writer Héctor Abad Faciolince (Medellín, 1958) –author of works such as El olvido que seremos or the recent Except my heart, everything is fine– was one of the people who was having dinner on Tuesday in a Kramatorsk pizzeria when a missile fell on their heads. Yesterday afternoon, from Kyiv, he answered the call of this newspaper.
How are you?
The further away you go, the less insecure you feel. It was a tremendous thing. Every kilometer is a step away from the gifts of terror that Putin offers us every day. I am already in Kyiv, but the journalist Catalina Gómez Ángel is a true angel, she stayed in the hospital accompanying the writer Victoria Amelina, our dear friend, she left holding her hand in the Doctors Without Borders ambulance.
What happened?
It was half past seven in the evening. In Kramatorsk there is a curfew at nine at night but before that you have to leave to get home, so we didn’t have much time to eat. In the region there is a dry law, they cannot sell alcohol and that is the joke we were making, Amelina said that the closest thing is a non-alcoholic beer, she asked for it, I only had water and I raised my glass to toast with it. To his left was Catalina, to the right the ex-peace commissioner Sergio Jaramillo, next to me our Ukrainian translator and driver, and at that moment, as if from the center of the earth, a noise that I had never felt in my life came from below. although I later found out it was coming from above, it was a precision missile that hit exactly in the middle of the roof of the pizzeria, knocking me to the ground as if I had been struck by lightning. There I was, lying, between glass, pieces of tin, sticks, splashed all over my body with a black substance, which I didn’t know if it was coming from my body or was coming from outside, I said to myself ‘I’m hurt but nothing hurts, like those who get shot’.
And what he did?
I started to get up, Catalina asked me ‘sorry, sorry, for having brought you here’, with that absurd and Catholic complex that we have of feeling 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 was supposedly perfect, sitting upright, leaning against the chair, she wasn’t limp, just with her head slightly tilted back, but she was pale as paper and her eyes closed. Catalina and Sergio began to yell at her and she didn’t react, completely still, she had no blood, it was as if her death had come from inside her, without touching her. I looked wounded and some Ukrainians took me outside to lie down.
What happened to Amelina?
She was wounded at the base of the skull from the back, due to a splinter from the missile. We were dining on the terrace, not inside. A piece of the pergola fell on Sergio’s thigh and injured him. I have nothing, just a buzz inside. The dead were inside, those who were dining in the center of the restaurant had the roof collapse on top of them, plus the explosion. It was an absolute precision missile to fall on the most famous restaurant in the city. People screamed in fear. Our car was destroyed by the explosive wave and a neighbor took us to the hospital, where we saw wounded and injured enter, blood on the floor and in the corridor.
You have written a lot about the violence in Colombia, from the death of your father to other events. It seems?
It is only similar to the desperate violence of Pablo Escobar, when they were surrounding him and he began to throw bombs in the bullrings, buildings, stations, and killed many civilians. But this is a formal war, cities are razed to the ground completely. When this gentleman who commands Russia, like Pablo Escobar, feels that he is not winning the war, he more than devotes himself to punishing the civilian population.
What were you doing in Ukraine?
As part of a delegation from Hold on, Ukraine!, we had come to present to the Ukrainians the solidarity of Latin America, and the encouragement for them to continue holding on, for them and for all of us. We were invited by an incredible book fair that could be held in Kyiv, very crowded, with the Ukrainian Nobel Peace Prize winner Oleksandra Matviichuk, with the president of the PEN Club… People were moved to tears, there were musicians… The illusion was so great that Victoria Amelina, who was not going to come with us, was so enthusiastic that that night she said ‘I’ll go with you and take you to certain places where you can see the horrors of Russian oppression.’ Amelina, author of A Home for Dom, is writing a long essay documenting Russian war crimes, and she wanted to show us about it herself. The pizzeria was the restaurant that she liked the most and we wanted to give her that dinner. At the moment of greatest joy, death arrives and she rolls a dice. Why she got a splinter in the head and not us is a terrible question that we will continue to ask ourselves for the rest of our lives.
are they coming back?
Yes, we will take the train, we will cross the border with Poland and I hope to be back in Madrid soon.
