In the early hours in Spain, it was both too soon and too late in Ukraine. Hector Abad Faciolince, the Colombian writer who narrowly escaped assassination last Tuesday evening in Kramatorsk, sent a photo via WhatsApp with the caption: “Crossing the border on foot. All good.”
The image shows a quiet line of people waiting to pass through a doorway, the background already familiar to those who know the moment well.
What the camera captures is a tense stillness among a fleeing crowd, surrounded by walls topped with civilian barbed wire. The distant echo of the news, relentless and inescapable, presses on with a weight that seems to belong to a larger, unearthed history.
Abad is there with his partner, Sergio Jaramillo. A citizen of long-standing commitments, he is returning to a country free of bombs, ready to cross into a zone where war feels like a thing of the past. They are joined by friends who were once comrades, and by Catalina Gomez Angel, a journalist who has stood by them in difficult times, with Victoria Amelina close by as well. The air carries the news of danger as the moment of greatest peril nears its edge.
Among those waiting are nameless faces, a sequence of strangers in a single line toward a frontier. They are runners, seekers, the displaced. Some carry the weight of memory from other dark chapters, from Civil War ages or concentration camps, knowing that rifles linger on the other side. Those who left Ukraine, including Abad and his companions, have heard the roar of danger and smoke, and now, at first light, their names blur into the shared story of escape. A question travels through the air to the Spaniards: “Hector, how are you?”
From that quiet reply—“Crossing the border on foot. All is well”—emerges a long, layered history. It speaks to generations who moved through similar barriers, through barbed wire, in search of a shelter where memory can soften fear, where a place can be found to quiet the noise of a sudden catastrophe. The moment intersects with a harsh news cycle that had shown the full scale of the shock a few hours earlier. In broader terms, the author, recounting life through a two-line post, echoes a line in a work about the heart of a friend of a Colombian priest: “Everything is fine except my heart.” Fernando Arrabal’s words about the future moving with blows linger here, linking past and present as the image of people fleeing war becomes a symbol of impending danger and bloodshed. They wait at the border, seeking a calmer haven as the world observes the scene in a distant frame, and the line remains: everything is fine.
Earlier, photographs from the day before showed Hector and his companion Sergio marked by the scars and consequences of conflict. In the case of a former Colombian peace negotiator, the experience of conflict has become almost a second skin; he once watched as shrapnel ripped through a scene, cutting into the life they had built. Sergio’s expression bore the weight of a battle wound, while Hector’s gaze, fixed on the camera, carried a darker tally—the stains and splinters of a disaster that had unfolded. The image bore the badge “Hold Ukraine” on Hector’s jacket, clothing speckled like dark blood, and yet his eyes seemed to condemn not blood but the memory of the destruction that followed in its wake. The moment captured a shock of recognition—the deepest, most intimate memory of a life marked by violence.
That day, the two friends had shared jokes and stories, the ordinary warmth of a late-afternoon chat, a non-alcoholic toast at the end of a day’s work. Then a bomb shattered the routine, blending laughter with catastrophe in a way that would imprint itself on the memory of the photographer and those who viewed the photo. If one looks closely at Hector’s face in that frame, the heavy stains on his clothes, the ache in his companion’s feet, reveal a broader truth. In his eyes, a stark, almost overwhelming numbness sits there, a stark reminder of the darkest moments of his life returning in a flash.
For many, it is difficult not to drift into a dream as that gaze lingers. The sequence reads like a poem written by someone fleeing death. What happened in Hector’s life, tracing back to his childhood, is etched into the present by his own father’s fate—the brutal violence that claimed lives in Medellin in 1987, a city that endured a flood of shootings and murders. The book that bears that same title remains alive in the collective memory of a war that returns with new faces, a new generation proclaiming an old cry: hold Ukraine.
Weeks earlier, at a literature fair in Madrid, discussions turned to the living conditions of others and the events surrounding a bookstore booth. It was a time when the signature moment—an author at a signing—was tempered by the reality of a world in which danger haunts every corner. The younger version of the man who stood in that August 1987 moment is now part of the 2023 narrative, counting down the hours to crossing borders in search of a place where a voice can once again belong to life and not to fear. The mission remains simple: tell stories of life, resist death, and bear witness to human resilience.
He kept notes, recorded everything he heard with a pen and a careful, near-sighted gaze; perhaps his heart was steadier now, even as he faced the epicenter of disaster. He spoke on the radio, in Colombia and Spain, and with Carles Francino as they traced the threads of memory that connect past and present. The scene of coincidence and tragedy coexisted, as the hammer of war pressed down on lives, while those who spoke of life in the face of death tried to hold on to hope. The brutal force of the Russian assault, juxtaposed with the quiet humor that keeps people moving forward, created a stark contrast: a moment when a joke about beer sits next to a bomb designed to do harm.
Everything unfolded in slow motion, and the moment of realization arrived with the noise that followed. Victoria stood upright, serene in her chair, and then news of something very grave arrived. In Hector’s memory, what remained of that face in photographs—what he called the horror—lingered, a stark testament to what violence can leave behind.
That morning, in the long line of escape, a telegram was written to a Spanish friend, a line of hope attached to that shared moment and to the broader narrative of those who found a way out. The telegram spoke of crossing the border on foot, of the enduring impulse toward safety. Stupor’s syntax, a pen’s tiny tremor, tried to ease the restlessness of those who were so far from that line of escape, walking beyond fear and toward a fragile, uncertain dawn.