The Last Great Road Bum

by Héctor Tobar

  * * *

  THE RADIO VENCEREMOS CREW set up in the ruins of an old hacienda, but once again Joe found a spot to sleep alone, and to think—an abandoned peasant house nearby. He began to write a letter home, still unsure if and when he would be able to mail it.

  Just finished my morning pot of coffee and I know for durn sure y’all don’t go to half the trouble I do to get a little caffeine in my system, he began, just after putting the date and his location at the top of the letter: April 28, countryside. First, swipe somebody’s sack of coffee beans, spread them in the sun to dry, toast briefly over open fire, bust the shells open with a mortar and pestle, flip remains in the air to let the wind blow away the husks and the chaff, put beans in flat metal pan to toast over fire until dark brown, grind again with mortar and pestle, and you’re all set to throw the grains into a pot. And after all that work, you’ll want two pots!

  He told his mother and Calhoun that he was eating well, and had put on a little weight. I’m happy as a clam. My new digs are on the outskirts of a hacienda, in an abandoned peasant’s house I call “the Manger” because a bunch of goddamn cows occupy it at night (wreck everything, eat my bananas, crap all over the floor). Have a bamboo table to do my scribbling. Armed peasants passing by on the trail with their cows give me fresh milk every morning. After a dozen days of fighting in this area, the guns have finally fallen silent and everyone is beginning to relax. No doubt about it, the bad guys definitely got their butts kicked. He stopped and put his pen down, and did not work again on the letter for three days because he was still uncertain how or when he would be able to send it home. Finally, one afternoon, as he sat with the radio people who were about to begin transmitting again, he heard a series of explosions.

  “Mortar fire!” Santiago called out. The army was across the ravine, maybe a couple of kilometers away. A half dozen shells fell, like the first one, harmlessly into the brush, hundreds of yards off target. Joe heard gunfire. A ground assault was underway too. Somewhere out there the army was flailing in the mud. More mortar shells whistled overhead. If it was possible to slow the mortar shells down, and study their winged bodies as they fell, would Joe see the muddy handprints of the soldiers on their steel tips? The order came to move out, and they began to march, and the sun gave way to clouds and a light rain, and sprinkles gathered on the peasants’ heads and the dripping water drew muddy lines on their faces, as if soil were oozing from their pores, and they all moved along, rebels and refugees, carrying pots and pans tied to their belts, and burlap and cloth and nylon bags, and when they had walked for a day and escaped the army, again, Joe found another quiet place to write and continue his letter home.

  At his new location Joe renewed his “nesting instincts.” Inside the shelled remains of a schoolhouse, he found a teacher’s desk and moved it out under a shade tree. By now, several more compas in the radio crew had noted his desire to be alone, and they discussed among themselves this peculiarity of the gringo Lucas, who also needed his supply of cigarettes, and was willing to beg for them, and his writing supplies, and a few were beginning to resent him for these peculiarities; though petty resentments were common on the radio crew, because rebel life was harsh and most of them were educated people who were not used to sleeping on the ground and eating the same meal every day.

  Spoke too soon, Joe wrote home. Bastards started shelling us and had to move off to a new location. I did, however, remember to carry along my bag of coffee. My scholarly companions are pretty useless when it comes to preparing a cup, but among the hundreds of refugees who departed with us I’m sure to find a scullery maid or two. They moved twice more, and each time Joe found a new place to write and be alone, following long days of taking photographs, monitoring English-language radio broadcasts, and sometimes even cooking meals for his comrades before the crack of dawn. The math gurus seem pleased with my work and with me—always the closet masochist, I cheerfully put in 15-hour workdays. First to see the dawn, last to snuff his candle. And I love it, of course! So keep that quart of vanilla ice cream (and chocolate syrup) in the refrigerator and tell that dirty son of a bitch new president to stop dropping bombs on El Salvador so we can get some sleep already, and he playfully ran thin Xs through dirty son of a bitch so that he could pretend at being polite. Found a friendly pigeon to see this letter on its way. Hope it doesn’t take too long to reach y’all. Ignore the postmark. Breakfast time. I’ll swap tortillas for pancakes anytime! Love. J.

  Lucas gave the letter to a rebel agent who was headed out of the country, one more small envelope among a dozen different messages and reports for sympathizers and fund-raisers and procurers of armaments. When Joe’s letter arrived eleven days later in Urbana, it was with a U.S. postage stamp, and an Oakland, California, postmark, and a return address listing the sender as an “R.M. Roofs” of Mexico City.

  * * *

  EACH TIME THE REBEL TRANSMITTER MOVED, its new location became a hub of activity. One person after another came to tell a story to the radio people, or to get information because the Venceremos crew monitored the BBC and Voice of America and Radio France. Comandante Jonás visited often, and Joe also met a Mexican doctor who had worked in emergency rooms in that country, and a farmer-turned-explosives-expert named Nivo who talked to Lucas at length about his plans to make a small tank from an old tractor—he’d heard Lucas was a smart gringo, and thought he might offer some advice, but instead Lucas peppered him with questions about the manufacture of gunpowder and detonators. Joe also met a former Salvadoran Army officer who had defected to the rebels, and a guerrilla fighter named María, whose true name (Ana Guadalupe Martínez) was known to everyone, because she was the published author of a book, The Clandestine Prisons of El Salvador, describing the seven months she’d been tortured and raped by army intelligence. She had the well-spoken and approachable disposition of a young and beloved high school teacher, her voice a calm string analyzing the intervention of the Americans; she wanted to talk to Lucas about the U.S. military advisers who had arrived at the Ilopango airbase to train elite units. With a series of patient questions about the U.S. Army and its training methods, she got a better sense of what these elite units might do. And from her Lucas heard more about the early days of the revolution in Morazán, including the story of a campesino who had escaped from the army and the rural police so often, local legend had it he was capable of transforming himself into a banana tree.

  But mostly Joe wrote in his journal, usually in the cool air of the early morning, and it was on one such morning that a woman in crisp olive-drab fatigues who had caught his eye suddenly came up and started speaking to him.

  “Lucas. El famoso Lucas.”

  “I’m famous?”

  “You are, here among us. And you will be to everyone when we read your statement.”

  “What statement?”

  “The statement the comandantes say you’ll make about the war. It will be my job to translate it into Spanish and then we’ll read it on the radio. If you’re willing.”

  Her nom de guerre was Mariposa. She was the second “butterfly” Joe had met in El Salvador, and she possessed large, dark eyes that were like the spots you might see on the wings of certain Lepidoptera species. Unlike most of the other younger women he’d met in the guerrilla army, she was unafraid to speak to him, or to stand in his tall presence; she had grown up with four rambunctious brothers, one of whom was a rebel soldier. When she spoke it was with a crisp, enunciated, radio-announcer’s voice. After three long conversations, including a walk through a grove of trees, she had learned all about Lucas and his travels, and about his hometown; the other compañeros in the radio and medical units who saw them on these walks falsely pronounced them a couple. Their conversations were, however, the most intimate Joe had had with any man or woman since becoming Lucas. Among other things, Mariposa coaxed from him a summary of his relationships with women.

  “The last one you mentioned,” Mariposa said. “What was her name?”

  “Mafa
lda.”

  “She sounds like the one you were destined to be with.”

  “She’s married now, unfortunately. With children.”

  “Well, that’s convenient for you. Because it seems to me that’s exactly what you’re looking for: someone who cannot have a commitment to you. You’ve never stayed in one place for very long for the same reason. You never completely committed yourself either to a woman, or to a cause.”

  “I suppose you’re right.”

  It was difficult for a Salvadoran man to admit to a woman that she was right, but Lucas did not argue with her or seem otherwise upset. Mariposa liked talking to Lucas because he was older and mellowed, because he had seen everything there was to see outside El Salvador. He could say things that were either silly or profound. Jokes she didn’t understand, and the observation that the best thing about traveling around the world was meeting so many children, and answering their questions. Why are you riding this ship? Where is Illinois? Do you miss your mother? When Joe met a child, he was in the presence of the hopeful, inquisitive essence of humanity, and he found this was true everywhere he went, even in the places where children suffered because of war and poverty.

  After hearing this, Mariposa took him to see the farm hut with the bombed-out roof that served, now, as a school for about fifty students split into two groups. They visited the younger class. “Eme es para mama, mango, manzana,” said the teacher, who had left her old M1 rifle leaning against a wall by the entrance; she stood before twenty boys and girls seated on the floor, and a wooden board that served as a chalkboard now displaying the maternal consonant. “Eme. Mamá. Mango,” the children said, and they practiced the four strokes that produced a capital M, a sound born from the lips of suckling infants. Mariposa explained that a few of the children had living parents among the fighters, but most were orphans.

  The class ended, and Lucas and Mariposa watched as five boys and one girl took to their jobs; they were the “intelligence officers” Joe had seen in Villa El Rosario. The children turned on captured radios and scanned frequencies; hearing no army transmission, they talked to Lucas and Mariposa. They said they knew the different voices of all the army commanders, and they could tell when an officer was hungry, or in a bad mood. When an officer thought the war was going well, and when it was going poorly.

  “What do you hear from them now?” Mariposa asked. “In these last days. Since we took Villa El Rosario.”

  “They’re very, very angry,” said a boy of about eleven. “They want to kill us all.”

  22

  Cerro Pando. Perquín

  THE LIEUTENANT COLONEL entered the minds of his men at reveille, and he remained with them until they returned to the barracks and to their stiff cots, to sleep underneath the portraits of Miss December and Miss April they had taped to the walls to help them forget about the lieutenant colonel. He was an order or an observation floating down the chain of command. A tactical insight, a hope, an urge first expressed in his spare sentences, his raised eyebrows, the ridges of his fingerprints resting on a map. His desires became the commands of his captains, his lieutenants and his sergeants, and these were the voices that were heard by the rebels’ child-intelligence officers on their captured army radios. The lieutenant colonel was the two gold stars of his insignia on the shoulders of his loose-fitting battle fatigues; and he was the cow, goat and chicken blood his crazier grunts painted on their faces when they went into battle. To the public, the lieutenant colonel was a media celebrity. He was the man photographed grinning with visiting journalists and dignitaries: the joie de vivre of his gap-toothed smile was precisely the opposite of what people expected, given his reputation as the leader of the most ruthless unit in the Salvadoran army. The lieutenant colonel was a series of quotes attributed to him, which he may or may not have said, including: “That radio transmitter is like a scorpion stuck up my ass.” He was the nickname the rebels gave him, “trompita de cuche,” for the swine snout they saw in his weak-chinned face. To the United States military advisers who met him he was very Salvadoran-looking, that mix of Indian, African and European that was common in the middle of the Central American isthmus. Less European maybe, they observed, above average on the melanin spectrum, certainly. Dress him in jeans, give him a rake and send him to Miami to work as a gardener and no one would know the difference, they said privately, and they chuckled over their beers as they said so. In the field, the lieutenant colonel usually wore a floppy-brimmed hat, and sometimes a bandanna tied over the curly sponge of his hair, an affectation that added to the American-trained-paratrooper myth of Lieutenant Colonel Domingo Monterrosa. In the quiet of his office, he studied topographical maps and aerial photographs, and reports of interrogations of captured men and women, a pensive index finger on his lips. It was raining hardest now, and Morazán was muddy, but then a new weather report landed on the lieutenant colonel’s desk. A three-day break in the rain was forecast. He gave the order for the helicopters to start up the following morning, and he watched two of the best platoons of the Atlacatl Battalion set out, bouncing up off the ground at the airbase in the provincial capital San Francisco Gotera, to probe and study the terrain to the south of the guerrilla bases.

  * * *

  JOE STOOD ABOVE the Radio Venceremos typewriter, pounding out Lucas’s statement to the American people. In the novel I’ll be Lucas too. The characters are all around me: Santiago, who is in love with Marcela, who is in love with Rafael; and this little guy, El Cheje, which means “worker” and “woodpecker.” He’s a laborer from Mejicanos. Santiago calls him an “hácelotodo.” A jack-of-all-trades. He can fix anything. He’s here working on the generator, and he’s telling me stories about Mejicanos, but Lucas has to focus, because now this typewriter has become an instrument of the revolution. In between Cheje’s anecdotes Joe typed one declaratory sentence after another. I call upon the Congress of the United States … My Road Bum’s Manifesto from El Salvador. Our representatives in Congress have traded the freedom and the safety of the people of El Salvador to serve the interests of a few Salvadoran exiles in Miami.

  Joe typed out and revised and retyped out two double-spaced pages, and showed them to Santiago, who read some English. I write to my Congress not only as a witness to the suffering and the agony of the Salvadoran people, but also as a North American citizen and combatant who is working hand in hand with the people, fighting the dictatorship and its North American advisers. Santiago gave a summary to Comandante Jonás, who gave his approval, and Mariposa read out her Spanish translation of Lucas’s statement on the radio. “No entiendo porque nuestros representantes en el congreso…” Yeah, that’s me, my words—in español. After a good twenty years of trying to publish a novel, it was the first time Joe’s writing was reaching the general public. As if the radio signals were the pages of a book, floating down from the sky, falling into backyards and farm fields, and onto the roof of the United States Embassy, transformed into the disembodied voice of a woman.

  * * *

  THE EJÉRCITO REVOLUCIONARIO del Pueblo had a number of women in positions of authority: women who had seen combat, women who had helped bury other women and girls who had died in battles and bombardments. It could be said that the war was a battle for women’s power, and a war to defend women against exploitation and violation, as much as it was a war of national liberation. As the uneventful days of the rainy season dragged on, the women cooks of the ERP grew more frustrated with, and finally complained about the base injustice to which they were being subjected. Why was it, they asked, that all the cooks were compañeras, that no men were getting up at 2:00 a.m. to begin the kitchen work? They said they would go on strike until the gender inequity was addressed. In response, Comandante Jónas ordered that the men in the rebel army would be required to perform kitchen duties, and so it was that Lucas found himself awake in what seemed like the middle of the night, preparing corn masa, sitting over large pots of beans and sweating inside the cooking tent. Of the men in the radio unit
who were required to cook, only Lucas and the Venezuelan compa Maravilla did not complain about it. After four days of male cooks, a countercomplaint rose from the ranks: the food stunk. The beans the male compas prepared were undercooked, their tortillas were misshapen globules, oblong spacecraft with raw centers, inedible. ¡Puta! ¿Qué es esta mierda? The strike ended and the women returned to their cooking pots and posts in the predawn darkness and Lucas was suddenly ordered to report to Comandante Jonás. His new assignment would be with la comandancia, the central command of the guerrilla army. No explanation was given.