They asked Umberto for his final words, but didn’t wait for him to say them. If he’d been given a moment, Umberto would have observed the disparity between this maneuver and the treatment he’d received during the previous months. He might even have remarked on it.
For 15 months before his execution, Umberto Carlito Urulla had been kept alternately in solitary confinement and the torture cell known as El nicho. The niche was a small corner, a nook really, in the colonial era castillito being used as a prison for political dissenters. It was an awkward trapezoid of a space separated from a hallway by only two iron gates erected at an angle across its walls. It was dark and isolated. It lacked privacy and ventilation. Despite its open side, the air from the hall and tall ceiling gathered in the niche and grew stagnant like water in a wide eddy. The sweat, blood, saliva, and tears of its occupants took long to dissipate and disperse. Umberto’s first stay in the niche had been mercifully brief, as though the warden wanted to introduce the man and the room to one another.
Umberto was caught on a Thursday evening. He was dining hurriedly on boiled grubs and jungle fruit when he heard the approaching gunfire and agonized screams of his gente. He was preparing for a long meeting of negotiations with the newest government representatives assigned to end the so-called revolution when, unexpectedly, his jungle cavern was swarmed with troops.
———
Umberto’s father was the principal of a public high school in the capital. The school was literally at the opposite end of town from the Urulla home, so he drove there in his car. Umberto’s mother was a teacher. She met her husband while they were both teachers. But being a woman, she had not advanced to any level of administration. Even so, she too had a car. She taught at a different public high school from her husband; this one in the center of the city.
Umberto grew up in what in his country was considered a middle class family; a two-income, two-car, and a house family. When he finished grammar school, he demanded to be enrolled in a private high school. He abhorred the idea of being a student at either school where his parents worked. He pretended to high academic aspirations. His parents were gullible. He did well at the school. He earned scholarships to university. He excelled in political science and planned a career in politics. Then he deviated into economics.
Umberto also deviated from his rigid route to and from school, home, friends’ homes, and social engagements. He learned about poverty from a dedicated professor who had more than a passing acquaintanceship with the poor. He learned about the hopelessness of poverty and the lack of ambition and of aspiration that often accompanied it. As he studied, he explored the slums of his city, then of his province, and then of the entire small country of his birth. Little by little, he began to envision a city and then a nation without poverty. Everyone employed or provided for by the government; for exactly that had those politicians been elected, after all.
Umberto began to hatch plans and to talk to people. He joined university organizations and encouraged its members to not just talk about a better future but make it happen. He organized events and petitions. Soon, he appeared on the news leading a march through the center of the city. His father called it youthful zeal that would soon wear off. But Umberto’s mother and his professor friend worried about his activities and the attention he was garnering. And they feared for him.
When Umberto disappeared, his parents believed he was the victim of a simple kidnapping. These had become commonplace among people of a certain economic level. The Urulla’s were even a little proud to be considered so well off as to merit a kidnapping. They waited for a ransom note or call to come. They worried about how to gather enough funds to pay it. They pleaded on television for his release and safe return, promising to do whatever was asked in exchange for their son’s freedom. They received no ransom note, or contact, or indication of Umberto’s whereabouts.
After two weeks, the police began to treat the matter as a missing person case. Perhaps the boy had gone off to sow wild oats. Three months, the police lost interest altogether.