The Last Love Song

by Tracy Daugherty

  Behind the scenes, in the outposts and archives, in the safe houses and bunkers, a logical, continuous, and traceable—if findable—narrative was unfolding all along.

  Who would have imagined that, after the American hostages were freed in Tehran, when President Reagan inscribed a Bible to an Iranian official, it might have some connection to TOW missiles, half a world away, sold to the Nicaraguan Contras? Who would have suspected that the Nicaraguan rebels might have something to do with a rash of cocaine deaths on the streets of Los Angeles?

  As it turned out, the narrative ties were there. It wasn’t that the premises of our national story weren’t valid, as Didion had once feared; it was that the premises were different from what we’d been led to expect.

  * * *

  “I’m not sure that I have a social conscience,” she averred at the time. “It’s more an insistence that people tell the truth. The decision to go to El Salvador came one morning at the breakfast table. I was reading the newspaper and it just didn’t make sense.”

  In fact, Robert Silvers had “expressed interest in having one or both of us [she or Dunne] write something about it,” she told Hilton Als in 2004. For several months, they’d considered a Latin American trip: The newsman Tom Brokaw had made them “desperate to go.” One night at a dinner, he’d told them “he’d been in Beirut, but El Salvador was the only place where he’d ever been scared.” Sent in March 1982 to cover the “elections”—a performance staged to suggest that the Salvadoran government was “making a concerted and significant effort to comply with internationally recognized human rights,” giving Reagan cover for military aid—he “woke up in the middle of the night and the fear came over him.” He took his mattress off his bed and put it in the window, he said, afraid of getting shot.

  Could be a hell of a story, the couple agreed. Besides, Didion was wrestling with the early drafts of a novel (the manuscripts that would eventually coalesce into Democracy). She worried she’d never finish. She needed a break.

  “What’s she doing here? Wearing those big dark sunglasses,” Paul VanDevelder remembered thinking on June 15, 1982, the day Didion stepped off a LACSA flight from LAX and walked across the patio of the Sheraton Hotel in San Salvador, chaperoned by Christopher Dickey, the Central American bureau chief for The Washington Post. VanDevelder was a photojournalist working for United Press International. John Newhagen, UPI’s bureau chief, was also struck by Didion’s “large sunglasses and sun hat”: The press corps knew who she was and she had not arrived unnoticed. Many of the veteran journalists considered her an “effete literati” who’d hang around for two weeks, make notes for a book on the war, and “split” (which is pretty much what she did). They were wary of her because they spent much of their time drinking beer around the pool at the Sheraton or the Camino Real, recounting how they’d broken this story or that and some other writer had seized their reporting to become famous. The more sauced they got, the more the journalists fired one another’s distrust. So Didion and Dunne—who tended to keep their distance—were sources of bitter bemusement. VanDevelder: “I remember over drinks one night at the Camino Real, someone looking at John Gregory Dunne across the room and saying, ‘What a bummer to be John Gregory Dunne, the second-best writer married to the first-best writer.’”

  “We all wore T-shirts that said across the back ‘Periodiste! No disparate!’ (‘Journalist! Don’t shoot’),” VanDevelder explained. “It was a scary time. Four Dutch journalists had just been killed—one of them was the boyfriend of Sue Meiselas,” the well-known Magnum photographer.

  A year and six months before Didion went to El Salvador, four American Maryknoll nuns had been murdered on the road to the San Salvador airport. Not quite a year before that, Archbishop Oscar Romero had been shot to death while preaching a sermon. And then in December 1981, evidence surfaced—including several photographs taken by Susan Meiselas—suggesting that a massacre of mostly children, adolescents, and pregnant women had occurred at the hands of government troops in a village called El Mozote. The Salvadoran leadership’s “concerted and significant effort to comply with internationally recognized human rights” appeared meager at best, but this did not deter the Reagan administration, which was determined to fund the troops in order to beat back Communism (Reagan’s bugaboo since his days as president of the Screen Actors Guild) and to “revise” America’s failed counterinsurgency efforts in Vietnam.

  In response to what had occurred at El Mozote, American embassy officials worried only about crafting a report that would “have credibility among people” in Washington “whose priorities were definitely not necessarily about getting at exactly what happened.”

  “Consider the political implications of both the reliance on and the distrust of abstract words.” … “The consciousness of the human organism is carried in its grammar.”

  In spite of Susan Meiselas’s photographs of mass burials, charred skulls, and children’s decomposing bodies in the mud, in spite of detailed accounts of El Mozote by Raymond Bonner in The New York Times and Alma Guillermoprieto in The Washington Post, the Reagan administration insisted there was no credible evidence of a massacre; no credible evidence that the Salvadoran army’s Atlacatl Battalion, trained by U.S. Special Forces and armed with M16s firing ammunition manufactured at Lake City, Missouri, had committed any such atrocity.

  The facts on the ground disappeared. Didion wrote, “El Mozote entered the thin air of policy.”

  Just change the script.

  Trust me.

  * * *

  Didion was uncomfortably aware that these events were occurring “only six years” after Gerald Ford had cheered America’s renewed pride, and “most of us [had] watched the helicopters lift off the roof of the Saigon embassy and get pushed off the flight decks of the U.S. fleet into the South China Sea.”

  On their first day in El Salvador, the Dunnes rented a car. “I was just panicked about driving,” Didion recalled. “There were a lot of roadblocks, and if it got difficult, if it got beyond the range of my rather limited Spanish, it could have been really unpleasant.”

  “But it’s the only way you can really see a country,” Dunne insisted.

  Back home in Brentwood, they had recently hired a housekeeper from El Salvador, a woman named Maria Ynez Camacho. Before the Dunnes boarded the plane in Los Angeles, Camacho had given Didion “repeated instructions about what we must and must not do,” Didion said. But on the ground, amid pervasive threats of violence, one’s choices were severely confined—if they were really choices at all.

  “[W]e went out to the body dump,” Dunne said: Puerto del Diablo, craggy slabs of moss-covered stone, just south of San Salvador.

  “It was like throwing a child in a swimming pool. The idea of getting over my fear by going to a body dump!” Didion said. Standing on the edge of a large open pit, sweating, aware of the silence, hearing only the shriek of cicadas, she experienced a “cumulative impact” as she viewed the “pecked and maggoty masses of flesh, bone, hair.” “You just switch into another gear,” she recalled. “You don’t remain yourself, quite. You perform.”

  “Nothing fresh, I hear?” an embassy officer said to her when she returned to the city. It took her a moment to realize he meant that there were no new bodies on the pile.

  Dunne tried to keep her spirits high, to distract her, telling her funny stories and pointing out odd details wherever they went. One day, in the military zone in San Miguel, he called Didion’s attention to a young soldier wearing fatigues and a baseball cap, standing against a chain link fence surrounding an army base, his AR-16 slung upside down on his shoulder; through the fence, he was getting a blow job from a woman on her knees on the other side of the perimeter.

  Didion’s pocket notebook from the trip, housed now in the Bancroft Library at Berkeley, is marked “Restricted,” but the day I visited the archives, I discovered a broken seal. A previous researcher must have cut it. I opened the notebook’s blue cardboard cover and saw Didion’s
precise, tiny handwriting pinning quick impressions to the page.

  Guards everywhere.

  Translucent corrugated plastic windows.

  An embassy officer at a party one night saying there was no more bang bang in the Falklands now, so the journalists would probably all come scurrying back.

  Little blond children in the streets.

  Where were the birds? (Circling the dumps, plucking the eyes of the corpses?)

  A taxi driver crossing himself as he passed through an intersection.

  The Restaurant Gran Bonanza.

  What of the future?

  On certain pages of the notebook, the handwriting began calmly, legibly, and then devolved into large, hurried loops, as if Didion were sprinting for her life.

  * * *

  She chose several lines from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as an epigraph to Salvador. Across the pages of Kurtz’s report on the “Suppression of Savage Customs”—a compendium of “noble words” expressing “civilization’s” work in underdeveloped countries—the real story explodes in a fevered hand: “Exterminate all the brutes!”

  * * *

  Time and again, in her published reflections on El Salvador, Didion portrays herself venturing from her hotel room into gruesome sites of murder, rape, and other violations of the human. In a world under siege, a person learns to focus only on what’s in front of her—a strategy for steadying herself, of calling no attention her way—“the models and colors of armored vehicles, the makes and calibers of weapons, the particular methods of dismemberment and decapitation used in particular instances.” These are the details “on which the visitor to Salvador learns immediately to concentrate, to the exclusion of past or future concerns”—that is, to the exclusion of narrative—“as in a prolonged amnesiac fugue.”

  But after a while, once she gets used to the fact that terror “is the given of the place,” she discovers links among accumulated details. However unfathomable war may seem on the ground, in the nitrate fog of gunfire, threats, and disappearances, it does not erupt without reason. Its causes may be complex and hidden, but they are also specific. Step by step, Didion begins to understand the “mechanism[s] of terror.”

  For example, she learns that “names are understood locally to have only a situational meaning, and the change of name is meant to be accepted as a change in the nature of the thing named.” If a government organization is reported to have committed human rights abuses, it simply changes its name as a means of escaping the charges. The Didion who wrote Play It As It Lays and the essay “The White Album,” suffering severe narrative doubt, would have been content to note her inability to keep a grip on the facts in the white noise of El Salvador’s linguistic madness. But now she understands that renaming is a deliberate government “tactic,” an attempt to “solv[e] a problem” by obfuscation. She connects the dots between the ill-constructed surface and the narrative reasoning behind the scene. She starts to grasp that many, if not most, of the confusions of contemporary life are purposeful, serving particular political ends.

  * * *

  On June 28, 1982, after twelve days touring El Salvador, the Dunnes caught a TACA flight to Miami, transferred to Eastern Airlines, and spent the night in the Hotel Carlyle in New York. Sitting in the restaurant, staring at her blue pocket notebook, Didion felt as great a disorientation as she had ever known. It was accompanied by a sense of urgency. Almost immediately, she began to translate her notes into a narrative, working faster than she ever had. Maybe she was experiencing the magic realism of the astonishing Colombian novelist, Gabriel García Márquez: a sense of existing simultaneously in two different worlds, the El Salvador of the U.S. press, holding free elections and observing human rights, and the El Salvador of the maggoty Puerto del Diablo.

  Quintana flew from Los Angeles to join her parents at the Carlyle on June 29. On July 1, they all drove to Hartford in a rented car to visit Dunne’s aunt Harriet. The following day, the Dunnes dropped Quintana at Bennington. She was sixteen now and had started to think about college. Bennington offered a monthlong summer program for high school students that provided the experience of living on a college campus along with opportunities for “refining … artistic expression, combining hands-on work with independent study and research.”

  Quintana’s parents had told her she had a “great ability to sense things that are going on, like observing other people the way a writer does.” She’d also developed an interest in photography. Recently, Kurt Vonnegut’s wife, Jill Krementz, had interviewed and photographed her for a book called How It Feels to Be Adopted, featuring the stories of nineteen teenagers. Quintana was getting used to being a literary character, appearing in people’s pages. Maybe it was time she really tried a book of her own—perhaps Bennington could help her decide.

  In the meantime, her parents flew to Paris and London, Didion writing all the while. In New York, she’d received all sorts of material from Robert Silvers, news clippings and statistics, to help her with her story. She worked throughout the summer, having returned to Los Angeles in mid-July. Finally, she sent a draft manuscript to Christopher Dickey. He fact-checked it for her, corrected some of her spelling of Latin American place names and organizations, and declared it “terrific.”

  Robert Silvers ran Didion’s entire account of her trip in three installments in The New York Review of Books—on November 4, November 18, and December 2, 1982. Simon & Schuster offered her a $35,000 advance for the book, to be published the following March.

  Michael Korda, Didion’s editor at S&S, thought she had done for El Salvador what Graham Greene had done for Panama in his famous writings about Gen. Omar Torrijos Herrera.

  Didion was disappointed in the end. Though it had been “gratifying to write something so topical … and to produce it fast,” the book “had no impact,” she said. “Zero. None. It was discouraging.”

  (In 1983 the State Department invited Didion to join a cultural exchange tour in Buenos Aires, apparently unaware of, or indifferent to, her take on its Latin American policies. She accepted the invitation.)

  A number of reviewers and scholars—among them, Ken Smith and Georgia Johnston—scorned Didion’s lack of objective reporting in Salvador, and the paucity of her historical and political knowledge. They complained that, as she had done in her writings about Bogotá and Hong Kong, she depended on local color and sensationalistic detail to jar the reader’s emotions (though, in the book, Didion claimed she was not at all interested in achieving easy irony through “color”). She substituted particular anecdotes for more general ideological observations.

  These criticisms stirred the debate, once more, between mainstream journalism and the New Journalism. In a useful overview, Sandra Braman, a teacher of mass communications at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, compared Raymond Bonner’s reporting for The New York Times from June 1982 to Didion’s coverage of the events in El Salvador during the same narrow period. Bonner filed thirteen stories, on deadline, in June. “According to the text,” Braman writes, “Bonner collected facts by attending public ceremonies and press conferences, reading newspapers and magazines, listening to the radio (or reading CIA-supplied transcripts of broadcasts, per a description of the process provided by Didion), and then making phone calls or seeking personal interviews with officials to get their responses to statements made by other officials.” By contrast, Didion kept a running list of random notes and personal observations throughout the month. “She attended to information from her own senses of sight, smell, hearing, and touch,” Braman says. “Her written and aural sources were extremely diverse.”

  The “geographic source of news” for most of Bonner’s dispatches was San Salvador and Washington, D.C., political capitals in the business of dispensing official information. By contrast, Didion “participated in informal and formal social gatherings, and absorbed facts during daily transactions such as at the drugstore or in a restaurant … quasi-official sites such as the morgue, and unofficial sites like a numbe
r of neighborhoods.”

  Braman concludes, “Bonner and The New York Times rely almost exclusively upon facts that list numbers—of dead, of disappeared, of land titles, of votes—and names—the Land for the Tillers program, the election, the president. Didion, on the other hand, specifically notes the uselessness of this kind of fact in El Salvador: ‘All numbers in El Salvador tended to materialize and vanish and rematerialize in a different form, as if numbers denoted only the “use” of numbers, an intention, a wish, a recognition that someone, somewhere, for whatever reason, needed to hear the ineffable expressed as a number.’” Bonner’s accounts were “disjointed.” “Two kinds of stories appeared: Ray Bonner reported on the violence, and the next day there was an anonymous story repeating a State Department statement that the killing had declined.” For Didion, “[c]ollecting facts was a 24-hour job and occurred whether a situation was explicitly reportorial or not.”

  As Braman says, whatever one thinks of the virtues of traditional reporting versus the techniques of the New Journalism—or even if one acknowledges the benefits of both—it’s impossible to ignore the fact that corporate news outlets exist primarily to disseminate “the passage of bureaucratically recognized events through administrative procedures.” For better or worse, subjective accounts remind us that human life is a “perpetual frontier.”

  Either way, the problem remains: finding a “diction that won’t be outflanked by events,” in the words of Terrence Des Pres.

  * * *

  During the war in El Salvador—perhaps as in any war—imagination may have been scarcer, and more necessary, than objectivity.

  In a remarkable book entitled The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry writes that “what is quite literally at stake in the body in pain is the making and unmaking of the world.” Torture, she says, “not only deconstructs the ‘products’ of the imagination, but deconstructs the act of imagining itself.” This is true in the case of an individual body and it is true in the case of a country, especially when tortured, dismembered bodies are left as messages to survivors that they are not allowed to imagine an alternative to oppression: “If you bury this body, the same will happen to you,” the Salvadoran death squads warned intimidated citizens.