by Howard Fast
“Yes, I know who they are — which makes it even more senseless. The youngest one of the lot is a chap called Alex Hellman, American, as was Pete Roberts. Roberts is a bit older, in his forties, if I recall correctly. I’ll have to verify for my story. The third one was quite a decent chap, Carmen Luis. He was chief of the land reform agency. You know, the notion of splitting up the vast estates and dividing the land among the landless peasants — a sort of impossible dream project with this government in power, but very good political feed for the liberals in your Congress. This will be a bad mouthful for them, but the liberals seem quite capable of swallowing anything.”
“And the Americans? Who are they?”
“That’s the odd part of it. Both of them worked for the big labor combine in your country, the AFL-CIO. Specifically, a part of the labor union called the Institute for Free Labor Development. I’ve never really understood the workings of the labor movement in your country, but it appears that the AFL-CIO is a big supporter of all your wars. They were hot as hounds on the scent in Vietnam, and down here they’ve been staunch allies of what is euphemistically called the government. And that chap, the fat fellow with the brush hair, his name is Fritz Oberman, and he’s cheek-by-jowl with the death squads and the government as well. All odd bedfellows. Pete Roberts made a nuisance of himself, going around as a sort of point man for the Reagan bunch, telling us all how good the local government was and how vicious and rotten the peasants in the resistance were; and the other one, Hellman, even defended lunatics like Fritz Oberman, and here Fritz Oberman leads in an assassination squad that blows the three of them into kingdom come. It’s one of those unanswerable conundrums that haunt this place.”
“Then why were they killed?” Barbara asked hopelessly.
“Ha, dear lady. Why indeed? I haven’t spoken to either chap for some time. I don’t take to these so-called trade union lads. For my money, they’re as corrupt a lot as you’ll find, but maybe these two saw the light. Maybe they were going to blow the whistle, as you Yankees say, and tell the world what a pen of pigs run this country. Such judgment is all right coming from chaps like me, but coming from the Reagan camp, it bespeaks trouble. Who knows? I’m just guessing. I’ll name you in the dispatch. Barbara Lavette standing beside me as it happens. That ought to reassure Carson.”
“I’d like to file my own story.”
“Don’t know. I do have a clear eyewitness beat — no other member of the press there as it happened. But let me brood over it.”
The streets were quiet, deserted, lit by cold, impartial moonlight as they drove back to the hotel. Barbara had not been able to phone a story in, not because the wire service preempted her, but because, after Abrahams filed his story, there was no way to get through, either because the crush of demand had simply wiped out any free access or because the circuits had been deliberately blocked. By one o’clock in the morning, they gave up, and Abrahams took Barbara back to the hotel. Except for two bellboys and the desk clerk, the lobby was empty, although there was activity in the dining room. The glass doors were closed, but Barbara could make out the figures of several women, scrubbing the floor where the killing had taken place.
“Terrible, Señor Abrahams,” the desk clerk said. “Such things should not take place in a fine hotel like this. If they must go about such business, one would think that they could find the proper place.”
Abrahams voiced his agreement and introduced Barbara. The night clerk pushed a registration card toward her, shaking his head regretfully. “Please do not think that such things go on every day or every month. You will enjoy your stay with us.”
“I am sure,” Barbara said in Spanish.
Up finally in the two-room suite that Abrahams had promised, he asked Barbara why she had done that. He was plainly irritated.
“What?”
“Oh, you know damn well. Spanish.”
Barbara dropped onto the bed, arms flung out, sighing with relief. “It’s been a long day, Cliff. I’ve been thinking about what you said about language. My feminine wiles, considering I ever had any, have gone with time, and it’s too late for me to learn how to punch. Language is the only weapon I have, and I’m pretty well lost without it. I know that you know what’s best down here, but there’s no way I can come out of this with anything worthwhile unless I use my language.”
Abrahams thought about that for a while, and then he nodded. “Do it your own way, then, but for heaven’s sake, be careful.”
“Always.”
“Tomorrow morning, I have to do a follow-up on tonight — if I can drag myself out of bed. It’s two A.M., and I’m going to dash off in a moment. But about tomorrow — suppose I pick you up here for a late lunch, say about two o’clock. The whole schedule of meals runs late down here.”
“Cliff, you’ve been lovely, but I can’t monopolize your days.”
“Barbara, you’ve been a godsend. I’ll have none of that, and I can’t think of anything more pleasant. In the morning, if you can’t sleep, you might wander around the streets and get the smell of the place. Now, sleep well.”
Abrahams left, and Barbara double-latched her door, managed somehow to crawl out of her clothes and got into bed. She was asleep almost instantly.
Eleven
The days passed, and Barbara realized that one could come to accept even San Salvador, the sweet, horrible stink of a dead body lying in a sewer culvert, the miasma of suspicion and fear, the submachine gun suddenly swung in your path, and children running and playing and laughing where other children had been murdered only days before. Abrahams seemed to appreciate her company, silencing her protests about taking up too much of his time. He made a point of rewards issuing from the company of an intelligent and sensitive woman. “I’ve been here too long,” he told her. “Now I’m seeing things newly with your eyes.” And indeed Barbaran had a feeling that the streets were new to him because they were so new to her.
Underneath the fear and sometimes subtle and sometimes naked horror of the place, there was a thing that gripped her and, in a certain sense, fascinated her, scents other than the scent of death, a perfume of charcoal burning, food cooking, a night odor of jasmine. There was hunger among the men marooned there for women, even for a woman like herself. She made friends quickly. She spoke French and Spanish fluently, and the very fact of her age gave her entry into circles where a younger woman might well have been either excluded or received only in terms of her sex.
To some, she was a mother figure. She didn’t resent that. A young captain in the American advisory force spoke to her as he never would have spoken to a male correspondent. “Why?” he pleaded, “why are we always on the side of the shitheads? Forgive me, I get carried away; but just once couldn’t we team up with something different, something more human than these murderous bastards? I don’t like to turn my back to them; believe me, Miss Lavette, I sure as hell don’t.”
The American senator, there on a junket, said, “He’s right. But we can’t choose our bedfellows.”
“Suppose your wife said that to you?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, suppose your wife told you that she couldn’t afford to choose her bedfellows.”
“I find that remark rather strange.”
“It’s not a personal remark. I watch these killers and reflect that the guns they use to murder nuns and priests are bought by my tax dollars. It’s not a nice thought.”
There were no nice thoughts in this place. The gardener who took care of the plantings around the hotel would say good morning to her, and her reply, not a simple good morning, but a more gracious “Good morning and how are you today?” delivered with flawless pronunciation, induced further conversation and trust. One day, Barbara asked him about his past.
“I can tell you and trust you?”
“Yes. Absolutely.”
“I believe you, señora. I’ll tell you then, and if you want to write it for your newspaper, you will never mention my name.”
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“Never.”
There was a small bench, the garden embracing it protectively. She sat on the bench, and he squatted alongside, his pruning clippers in his hand, not talking to her but speaking softly toward the shrubs in front of him. “I had a wife, a mother, four children. Three girls — one was eleven, one nine, one six. My boy is thirteen years old. We lived in a little village in Cabañas — oh, maybe sixty, seventy kilometers from here. The population of our village was about three hundred. A band of the guerrillas come through the village. We are not of the guerrillas, but we honor them and respect them. All the villagers do. They stayed for only an hour. We gave them food and water. Then they went on. The next morning, someone shouted that soldiers were coming. There is a narrow road up to our village, so we could see the soldiers when they were a kilometer away. In the floor of my house, I had dug a hole, for we knew that sooner or later the soldiers would come. I had not yet made a cave big enough for all of us, but under a wooden box in my house, there was a hole big enough for my son and myself. I knew they would kill my son and myself, and we didn’t have time to run away. You know, señora, when they come into a village after the guerrillas pass through, they kill all the men and boys. Even if a little boy is only two years old, the government soldiers kill him, because they say someday he will grow up and go into the hills and join the guerrillas. But I felt that my wife and my mother and my little girls would be safe. I mean, what else could I do?
“So I hid in the hole with my son in my arms through all the terrible sounds that went on above us. And when there was no more screaming and the soldiers went away, we came out of our hole. They had killed all of them, my wife, my mother and my little girls, and all were raped, my six-year-old girl and my nine-year-old girl and my eleven-year-old girl, all raped and murdered, with their bodies lying on the floor in a pool of blood. The eleven-year-old girl was called Catherine, and she had heard stories from Father Paco about Saint Catherine, so she decided she would be a nun. That is all she dreamed of, to grow up and be a nun and help people, the way Sister Abigail, who is a nun from your country, helped us before this happened. Now she will not be a nun.” He began to clip the grass, a few blades at a time. In El Salvador, there is no need for lawn mowers. Labor is cheap enough for the grass to be cut by hand, a blade at a time.
Forcing herself to speak calmly and quietly, Barbara asked him what had become of his son.
“Ah, señora, he is gone. At first he said nothing. He helped me to bury his mother and my mother and the three little girls, and then he said, Goodbye, Papa. I go to the guerrillas. That is how the guerrillas have an army. When such things happen, the brave young men go to them. I am not brave. I could not kill another man. I pray. I pray that in heaven God will be kind to my little girls. They were innocent children.”
That evening, in the bar at the Sheraton, after she had put down a large martini, Barbara told the story to Cliff Abrahams. “I can’t handle it,” she said hopelessly. “You’ve been down here forever. How do you handle it?”
“I don’t handle it. I write about it. That’s my catharsis.”
“Just like that?”
“Bless you, Barbara, not just like that. But how much blood does a chap have? If I bleed for every bloody incident down here, I’d soon be dry as a kipper. Do you know, I used to hear stories from the older members about the big fire bombing of London and the abattoirs where the Jews were murdered. I’d wonder how the silly clerics kept their faith in God after all of it. I still wonder, but my faith’s washed out. I don’t believe in one damn thing, because there’s not one damn thing left that’s worth believing in.”
“Still, you come off as a nice guy. You wouldn’t kick dogs.”
“Only because they’re a lot more decent than people.”
“Let’s get drunk,” Barbara said.
“You don’t get drunk. My money says you’ve never been decently drunk. Truth be told, you’re a proper, upright Church of England lady who has eschewed sex and other worldly things to do good deeds in the parish.”
“Bite your tongue and order another round. I’m not an easy drunk. I put your buddy Carson Devron under the table a few weeks back. How do you think I got down here?”
“I often wonder. What do you imagine you’re going to get if you put me under the table?”
“An interview with one of the guerrilla leaders.”
“No.”
“I’ve learned nothing here except that if you’re frightened enough, you must find a john or dirty your pants. I must talk to the other crowd, the resistance.”
“You keep calling them the resistance. The resistance fought the Nazis. These poor buggers are fighting the death squads, which makes them commies, not heroes.”
“Cliff,” she said coldly, “I am not joking. Either you make this possible, or I’ll go to someone else. But I prefer you: I know that you talk to them and that they trust you.”
“How do you know that?”
“Word gets around.”
It was three days later that Abrahams said to her, “I’ll be by to pick you up tomorrow, seven o’clock, and you’ll have your talk with the other side.”
“You’re an angel.”
“I’m a bloody damn fool.”
In the morning, a wet, steaming, nasty morning, ribbons of fog like snakes on the road, Barbara sat next to Abrahams in his jeep, excited, eager and reasonably frightened. During sleepless hours the night before, she had argued herself out of going. She would tell Abrahams that it was a dumb, dangerous notion, and she decided that, having heard this, he would be delighted and relieved. But when morning came, she realized that she would never forgive herself if she missed this opportunity, that her story would be fleshless, and that when all things added up, her whole journey to El Salvador would amount to no more than an aging lady’s jaunt.
Thus it came about that she was seated next to Abrahams, cold, tired, her arms clasped, shivering partly from the damp cold and partly from fear. He assured her that if they got out of the city without being stopped by either police or soldiers, they would be all right. “They don’t prowl outside the city, not at this hour.”
“Why?”
“They’re afraid. It’s still not properly light. The guerrillas like the dark and they like to set an ambush in the dark.”
“How do you know they won’t ambush us?”
“An unarmed man and a lady in a jeep?”
“That’s poor comfort. Where are we going?”
“Up in the hills.” He pulled off the road onto a dirt track. “You can breathe easier now we’re off the Pan-Am. No soldiers on this road. They don’t like the narrow, unpaved roads. Too easy for the guerrillas to block, and anyway, another few weeks of the rainy season, and this road will be a muddy trap. We’ll just go along nice and easy, no more than ten or fifteen miles an hour.”
“Cliff, where are we going?”
“A little village called Isplán. No one lives there. It’s been fought over and ravaged until there’s nothing much left of it. It’s only a few miles from here, and when we get there, someone will pick us up.”
“What do you mean, pick us up?” Barbara demanded nervously.
“Love, you talked me into this, so either relax or I’ll turn us around and push back to the city. Now look, I don’t know my way around here. I know how to get to Isplán, because the government took us there on a junket to demonstrate how ruthless the other side is. But a burned-out house doesn’t tell you who burned it. Anyway, there’s to be some sort of chap waiting for us at Isplán, and he’s to take us to Constanza María Gomez. I thought you’d prefer talking to a woman. Am I right?”
“It depends on the woman. Who is she?”
“She’s a remarkable woman, depend on that. She’s one of the top people in the FDR.”
“Democratic Revolutionary Front.”
“Right. If you’re going to talk, they’re the best lot to talk to. They’re a combination of everyone who hates the death squads. The FDR
are Christian Democrats, priests, anarchists, peasants who have no affiliation except revenge for the murder of family, intellectuals — a grab bag of every decent element in this society. Now let me tell you something about Constanza. She’s twenty-nine years old, but she’s lived through more hells than we can imagine. Seven years ago, the National Guard picked her up. She had slipped into San Salvador to see her mother, who was dying. They laid a trap for her, took her, beat her day and night to force her to divulge the location of her unit, raped her over and over, applied electric shock to her vulva — enough beating and torture to kill her. I got this from the confession of a National Guard soldier who was captured by the guerrillas. The confession finally got to Reuters. Well, somehow she recovered. She’s a lawyer, a devout Catholic and an absolutely extraordinary woman.”
Barbara nodded, unable to trust herself to speak.
“She’s as good a story as you’ll find.”
“I’m not much good with any of this,” Barbara whispered. “I have a chronic condition of wet eyes.”
“I know the feeling.”
An hour later they were in sight of what remained of Isplín: broken walls, blackened beams, and a roofless church. The place gave the impression of having been abandoned decades ago, but as Barbara learned, its destruction was only two years in the past. The broken and burned houses lined a single pitted street. The sun had burned off the mist, and with the wet heat there was a smell of mud drying, of sweet rot that Barbara would always remember as the smell of death, the scent of El Salvador.
Abrahams pulled up, almost to the church, and then cut his motor and the two of them sat in the jeep and waited. The sky had cleared, and the sun baked the wet road. A dog came out of one of the destroyed houses, paused to stare at the car and its occupants, and then ran off. A buzzard drifted down in slow circles and settled on the road, where it pecked at something in the mud. It pulled up the rotten flesh it had found, and then strutted stiffly to the side of the road, the bit of dead flesh hanging from its beak.