The Last Great Road Bum

by Héctor Tobar

  Virginia was unaware that when Joe addressed his envelope he had done so left-handed, as a security precaution to keep his American-educated handwriting from arousing the suspicion of Salvadoran postal workers or anyone else glancing at the mail. The seemingly childlike writing on the envelope worried her. Who wrote this? And how did they get her address? She found herself trembling as she stood before the mailbox in the village’s common area, and finally she gathered herself and opened the envelope, and she was relieved by the familiar sight of her son’s cursive. The code 1200 was missing. But it did begin with a relaxed Howdy all—

  21

  Villa El Rosario

  MANGOES HUNG FROM BRANCHES like fleshy teardrops ready to plop onto the leafy soil. In his journal, Joe named the place “Limetree” for its orchard feel, because there were avocado trees too, and zapotes, a tree whose fruit, when opened, was the deep orange of a persimmon. The members of Lucas’s rebel column rested and picked these fruits from the trees and ate them at will, and they feasted on big meals of beans and handmade tortillas as thick as the pancakes you’d find at an American truck stop, all prepared by campesina women who were like mothers to the young men and women of the rebel column; these women laughed as they served Lucas and they said things in their rural accents he did not always understand.

  The Salvadoran Air Force did not possess enough bombs to hit every hiding place in this corner of Morazán, and the ground approaches to their base were wooded and intercut with steep ravines. A few weeks earlier the Salvadoran Army and its new “rapid-force” battalion, an elite unit trained by United States Army advisers, had attempted to invade La Guacamaya from the north, but the rebel army had humiliated them, capturing soldiers and weapons, as Joe heard many times in war stories told over campfires. “The cuilios were crying on the radio, they were running away. For three weeks they tried to come back at us, but we stopped them at El Mozote. Many cuilios died there.”

  After a few days Joe felt like his old bumming self again, fitter than ever and ready for his next mission, but no order came, and the days slipped past one after the other, the monotony broken only when another pair of air force planes arrived—small jets, whining as they cut through the air with strange, V-shaped tails. Fouga Magister, French made. A toy, really. I could probably fly that thing. They dropped their bombs and from his foxhole under the mango trees Joe heard explosions and the sound of shrapnel cutting through the trees like hundreds of American garden tools hacking at the branches and leaves all at once. The planes made big turns and jet-squealed away. No one around him was hurt, but the compas said one of the planes had dropped napalm near the spot where the radio station operated, and soon the order came to march down and across the ravine to the Radio Venceremos base.

  As they got closer to the transmitter they could smell the forest burning, and they climbed the ridge toward the radio’s cave and saw the fitful flames of leaves burning here and there in the treetops. The small fires consumed themselves quickly, and blackened leaves spin-danced to the ground, and the smell of gasoline and burned oil filled the forest. Such a familiar scent. Where, when? Years ago, years and years. Like yesterday. Urbana. The driveway, Steve working on his MG. Fiddling with the engine and flooding the carburetor with leaded gasoline. The Illinois sky covering them. A cloud-spotted shell with the power to warm him with sunshine and awe him with thunder.

  Drops of falling water tapped at the leaves in the trees. Está lloviendo. The radio man Santiago emerged from the overhanging rock that protected the transmitter and noted the napalm fires were out. The rain thickened and Joe remembered the word for downpour in Spanish, aguacero, and this useful noun cleaned the gasoline vapor from the air.

  The next day Joe marched back to this same spot in the rain, and began his new assignment—as a member of the radio station crew. The order had been given by the top commander in the rebels’ mountain redoubt, a leader whose nom de guerre was taken from the name of a Biblical prophet.

  * * *

  AT THE AGE OF TWENTY-EIGHT, Comandante Jonás was the most respected field general in the rebel army. He was a big, burly man (by Salvadoran standards) with a copper face, a mustache thick with what looked like black carpet threads, and the confident and self-possessed bearing of a judge. His nom de guerre was Spanish for Jonah, and in Joe’s journal he became “the Whale.”

  Comandante Jonás was one of the original members of the Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo. He was as well-spoken as the university-educated comrades in the organization, but unlike them he possessed deep reserves of street cunning. His career in popular resistance had begun when he was a ten-year-old passing out leaflets in support of striking teachers alongside his older brother. He was from a poor family that lived on the banks of the riverbeds that surrounded San Salvador, in homes with dirt floors and cardboard walls, and like a small and alert minority of the hardened people who lived in such places, he had come to believe that only a revolution would restore and protect the humanity and the dignity of the people he loved. By the time he was twenty he’d become a leader of the ERP’s underground urban cells, and he may or may not have been among those responsible for the purge that led to the secret execution of Roque Dalton, El Salvador’s most renowned writer.

  Roque Dalton wrote sardonic poetry about the Salvadoran oligarchy and injustice, and he had been thrown in jail by the government, escaped and spent some years in exile in Cuba. But he never lost the air of happy-go-lucky bohemian, and he soon found himself in conflict with the hardened and humorless men building the ERP’s underground organization. When he suggested that the ERP was too focused on armed struggle, the leadership lured him to a safe house outside San Salvador and accused him of being a lush, a womanizer and a CIA agent. They may or may not have held a “secret trial” before they executed him. Although no one in the ERP now spoke of Dalton openly, his death had become one of the threads of fear and discipline that held the organization together. When Joe met Jonás he had wondered but did not dare ask if he had been one of the leaders present at Dalton’s execution. No other leader he met seemed to intimidate the compas around him as much as Jonás did. His soldiers believed the comandante was ruthless, a quality that also delivered victories on the battlefield. Now Jonás said that Lucas was to work with the radio station support crew, and that he was to be kept away from combat: “He’s our only gringo. We have to protect him.”

  At about the same time, Jonás gave the order to attack and occupy one of the smaller towns in Morazán, Villa El Rosario.

  * * *

  IN THE EARLY-MORNING darkness Lucas and his unit set off to the southwest, and two hours later they reached a hillside where a town was visible below their mud-caked feet; a cluster of red-tile roofs centered around the tall façade of a church. One thousand one hundred souls lived down there. From his rearguard position Joe heard a flurry of gunfire, and when his unit received orders to enter the town, thirty minutes later, he walked carefully down to a road, then past a sign that read VILLA EL ROSARIO, and finally down empty streets of cobblestone and dirt, alongside Carlos, the handsome young compa with a narrow face who had been assigned by Jonás to be Lucas’s bodyguard.

  Women and children stared at the rebels through the windows of whitewashed adobe buildings. It had been two months or more since Joe had been in any truly built-up place. He approached the first little tienda he saw, held up a bill of the local currency and asked, “¿Cigarros?” The girl behind the counter trembled as she handed him a pack of cigarettes. He lit a smoke and strolled through the town. With a camera in his hands and nicotine coursing through his veins, he reached the open lawn of the central plaza and saw the thick stone walls of the Catholic church and the moment felt dreamy, as if he’d been killed and had entered a rebel heaven. Joe saw a group of compas surrounding the two National Guardsmen they had captured, and he stepped forward to take their picture, because that was his job now—official Radio Venceremos photographer. Equipped with a 35-mm camera and an M16 rifle. One of the
prisoners was several inches taller than the rebels around him, and the rebels took the shirt off the soldier’s back and held it up and riffled through its pockets quickly, and then tossed it to Joe. “See if it fits you, Lucas.” Joe removed his pack and tried it on, and yes, it fit very nicely. Just in time too. The blue denim shirt his father had given him ages ago was falling apart, and from that moment forward Lucas wore the olive drab of a National Guardsman, and sometimes he felt more soldierlike than he had before, and at other times he felt like an old man playing at being a soldier.

  The relaxed voices of the compas joking, and the sight of their boyish and girlish faces began to bring the people of the village out into the streets. A man who seemed to possess some official authority stepped into the town square and waved. “The mayor,” Carlos said. Jonás approached the man and identified himself, and the mayor began to nod furiously in agreement with everything the comandante said. When Lucas tapped his cigarette ashes onto the street, the mayor turned to look at him, his eyes bulging with fear. The mayor believed this smoking, light-skinned German must be the rebels’ executioner. He could not stop staring at Lucas, and Joe finally took a few steps toward him, and held out a cigarette, and the mayor reached out and took it, and Joe could see tears in the mayor’s eyes as Lucas struck a match and lit the mayor’s smoke for him. Jonás gave the mayor a light tap on the back and said, “Don’t worry, hombre, nothing will happen to you. Because you are on the side of the revolution today.”

  A compa reported back to Jonás that the perimeter of the town had been secured, and there were no army troops in sight. Villa El Rosario belonged to the rebels, and Jonás told the mayor, “Let’s gather the people here, in front of the church. We’re going to address them. Explain things.” Four dozen women and children, and the mayor and a handful of other men watched as Lucas’s unit found a table and set up the radio equipment before the church. They were going to broadcast live on Radio Venceremos, using a mobile unit to bounce their signal off the transmitter in La Guacamaya, and when everything was ready a compa named Maravilla, who was Venezuelan, like Santiago, took the microphone and began to speak. “People of El Salvador! This is Radio Venceremos! Broadcasting from the liberated town of Villa El Rosario, in the department of Morazán, occupied this morning by forces of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front! Now Comandate Jonás will address the people gathered in the town square!”

  Comandante Jonás spoke calmly into the microphone. If Joe had been writing down his speech, he would have used plenty of commas and periods, and a few semicolons, but not a single exclamation point. Joe expected the eloquence and idealism of a Che Guevara, or a Danton, but instead Jonás spoke to the people of Villa El Rosario and the radio audience about “one more step in the advance of the revolutionary cause,” and sounded a lot like a Marxist schoolteacher. He explained how the rebels had been slowly building up their forces in Morazán, defeating enemy invasions and building networks in the mountains, and the comandante’s drone caused Joe’s thoughts to drift away, to wondering what they all might be eating that evening. But the flatness of the speech did little to take away from its impact in the rest of El Salvador, as thousands of people listened in their kitchens and bedrooms. During the comandante’s pauses they could hear a barking dog, the murmur of a crowd, and some scattered applause. And the call of an owl, or was that some sort of radio interference or modulation that sounded like an owl? The voices and noises that came through the static and the electric warbling on the radio’s speakers announced that something new and dramatic was happening. Many saw, in their mind’s eye, a crowd of peasants with machetes and a town several times larger than Villa El Rosario’s actual population.

  Maravilla took the microphone again and began interviewing a few local citizens whose countryside voices carried a mountain lilt. “We’ve seen the rebels march in and, honestly, they have all behaved very well,” a woman said. “They’re all very young and respectful.” The hourlong broadcast was heard as far away as Nicaragua and Guatemala, but its greatest impact was felt in the colonias of San Salvador, where the revolution had been defeated three months earlier. The cause came back to life again as crackled voices proclaimed victory from Japanese-made radios, the volume turned down low enough to keep the sound of the miniature insurrection from passing through the walls for their neighbors to hear.

  * * *

  NIGHT WAS FALLING in Villa El Rosario and the compas looked for rooms in which to sleep. Carlos said he’d found one, and he was showing Lucas the way there when he saw a woman of about twenty-five with a stethoscope over her neck and a revolver on her belt walking in his direction. She had the confident, slightly haughty mien of the Salvadoran middle class and was not a fighter, but one of the women who worked in the rebels’ medical and public health units; the feline smile she gave Carlos suggested they knew each other. Carlos walked past her, took four steps more and stopped. “It’s the last house down the street,” he told Lucas. “Knock on the door. They’ll be expecting you.” With that, Carlos abandoned his gringo-protection duties and spun on his heels and walked after the woman. He disappeared for an hour.

  The rebel occupation of Villa El Rosario drifted into a second and then a third day, and Carlos kept seeking out his new love interest. Once when Carlos and the rebel nurse were talking in the plaza, Joe approached them, and Carlos gave him the same look Steve had when Joe was cramping his style with a girl in Urbana. All across the town of Villa El Rosario, the defeat and retreat of the army had set loose romantic impulses, and members of the rebel columns and support units and a few of the locals exchanged suggestive glances, and every day at sunset a few couples walked to the fringes of the village. Under a sky colored the cherry and orange of carnival candy, they whispered to each other, and allowed their fingertips to touch and even to intermingle, and they adjusted the weapons on their shoulders, and a few dared to set them down, and to Joe they seemed as young and chaste and sexually frustrated as he was in Illinois twenty years earlier. He wondered if the arrival of darkness would see their inhibitions finally in retreat. Probably not. These young salvadoreños were all pretty prudish and frightened about sex, and when the sun rose the rebel army remained as virginal as it had been at sunset.

  Each morning began with a flurry of activity, because Jonás had the compas busy creating a little commune in the village. The mayor, the postmaster, the town judge, and the members of the town council had snuck off, so Jonás appointed a new council. He ordered a census, and the rounding up of abandoned livestock, and the establishment of a health clinic, and the publishing of a village newspaper, and the creation of a town garden, and Joe grinned as he pulled weeds and helped plant tomato seeds at said garden, because everyone knew the army would be back eventually, and these tomatoes were more likely to be eaten by an army sergeant than a rebel jefe. Sure enough, on the fourth day of the occupation of Villa El Rosario, at about the same time that Lucas was discussing with a local resident the problems in raising watermelons, they began to hear gunfire coming from outside the town.

  The army was trying to cross the Río Torola and attack the town from the south. But with the recent rains the river had started to rise, and the rebels ambushed the cuilios as they waded in a waist-high current. Two enemy soldiers were killed, their bodies floating away, beginning the slow drift toward the Pacific until army medics retrieved them. In the village, Joe took pictures of the victorious rebel unit returning to town, covered in mud and grinning with a war booty that included a 60-mm mortar and an army radio. Joe had snapped his last shot when Carlos approached him from behind and said, without preamble, “She’s angry with me. She’s not talking to me now.” That night as Lucas set down his piece of plastic sleeping tarp on the dirt floor of a village home, he tried to rest on a spot next to Carlos and was kept awake by the rebel soldier’s anguished murmurs. When Joe closed his eyes he could hear the psychic furniture rattling around inside Carlos’s brain, and he vowed to sleep somewhere else, alone.

&n
bsp; At dusk the next day Joe wandered through the town and found the post office, a building identifiable by its timeworn and fungi-stained official sign; he noticed the door was ajar, and walked in. The post office, it turned out, occupied only the front room of the building, and the rest was a residence, now empty. He stepped into a room with a bed. ¡Gracias a Dios! Tonight I’m going to sleep like an old man. Joe felt happy to be alone, at last, after months of the forced companionship of his rebel existence, after eating, sleeping, farting, yawning and scratching his bug-bitten arms and his itchy crotch alongside the limber boys and girls of the revolution. A room of my own. Finally, a room, a bed, quiet, me all by myself. And what’s this? A toilet too! After weeks of defecating in the woods and bushes, the comfort of porcelain, a slow twenty-minute exercise of his bowels while reading a magazine dedicated to Mexican soap opera stars and their entanglements. Life is good. As the occupation of Villa El Rosario entered its second week, Joe slept in the post office residence, and when he woke up, he took up his old habits in the hour before sunrise and sat at the postmaster’s table, underneath a wall of mail sorted in slots. He wrote in his journal, describing the Easter procession he’d seen that day, a hundred or so people marching through the town, carrying a mini Jesus on the cross, the wood-carved prophet casting a perplexed stare at the machine-gun-toting rebels lining his route. Such a pleasure to be alone to write.