by Héctor Tobar
There was so much about her current life that was rewarding. Her granddaughter. A young woman whose life would extend deep into the twenty-first century. Calhoun said Kathy would live to see an era when women began to run the world. This is why I love Calhoun. The powerful, simple observation. He sees things in geologic time. The eons. Precambrian, Paleozoic, Mesozoic. Within those great passages of the millennia, the shortness of our lives. There was comfort in the reliable routines of life with Calhoun. The uncluttered orderliness of their apartment home. Calhoun’s health a bit better. All good things are fragile and passing. How many good years left for us? Inflation 10.3 percent, we live on a fixed income. The accountant in her says: inflation will unravel us. Middle-aged men in unbuttoned shirts, women with short hair and long pants with high waists, a new kind of formality with rules I don’t understand. Creeping sideburns, aluminum and plastic everything, shoddy. Once upon a time, the hearth fire, the iron skillet, a ticking wind-up clock. Now the march of digital minutes, glowing red hours, abstract and electric. The sense that each week, each year marches past more quickly. The open Courier on the table. A line of soldiers with polished helmets in El Salvador, and peasant people, walking on a road with their belongings.
* * *
JOE AND HIS COLUMN of rebel reinforcements skirted the San Miguel volcano in a slow curve of a march around its base, through the fields planted on its steep slopes by industrious peasants. On the higher elevations, the cornfields dissolved into the fog, as if they were standing below the entrance to a peasant heaven. The fog shifted around them, rising and drifting, taking the shape of migrating animals and spaceships as it slowly burned off. The day turned hot. Their boots kicked up dust from the path on which they walked, all day, and then the sun set to the west behind the cone of the volcano and they walked by starlight, reaching the edges of the largest city in eastern El Salvador. Bright lights of San Miguel snuffed out in the hazy mountain dawn and rising blood-hued sun, Joe wrote in his journal the next morning. Lucas and his fellow rebels reached an open plain where they met a peasant who was hauling a huge water tank inside an oxcart; they stopped to drink and rest, and finally they arrived at the camp Joe called “Coconut Grove” in his journal, the headquarters for a “front” of about one hundred soldiers. The compas in Joe’s unit began climbing trees and whacking coconuts. They split open the globes with the same machetes they used to clear brush on the march, carving out white flesh on the blackened blades, and someone produced sugar and a bowl and they began mixing. Soon the young fighters were drinking coconut water from hollowed-out shells, looking like an army of Robinson Crusoes. One of the older rebels approached him. “Lucas, I have some bad news for you.”
Seems my old pal and mentor Sebastián was captured, Joe wrote in his journal later. Doing political work in La Unión, apparently unarmed. Disappeared, presumed tortured and dead. He and Máxima had patched up their quarrel and continued their companionship. She was with him in La Unión, likewise captured and presumed tortured and dead. They were on a hacienda when the army arrived; two other captured compas had fingered them, no doubt under extreme pressure. On the long walk to Morazán, they were two silhouettes in the night marches, one in front of me, the other behind. All of us eating possum together on the march. Their relationship a story Sebastián told me with his New Jersey accent. Their unrecorded whisperings to each other, their promises, sucked into the void. What does love leave behind? Silence. What we tell, what we write down, what Sebastián told me. “I’m in love with that woman. Can you tell?” Yes.
* * *
LUCAS AND HIS COLUMN went back on the march, and they reached an ancient railroad track of sinuous steel and termite-ridden ties on the western outskirts of San Miguel. El Che said the army was using this old line to bring in supplies. Lucas watched as rebel sappers placed the charges on the track. They were going to blow up a train, which struck Joe as a wonderfully anachronistic thing to do, like stepping back in time to the battles fought by Lawrence of Arabia and bands of marauders in the U.S. Civil War. A platoon of swashbuckling swordsmen on horses should come riding through any minute now. Lucas and his comrades retired to a station platform a kilometer away, and waited. Several hours later, at 6:00 p.m., El Che said the piece-of-shit train wasn’t coming, it probably broke down, so they went ahead and blew up the track anyway. Five minutes later the army train approached the broken rails, stopped, and set in reverse and withdrew. Mission accomplished. Sort of. Not really. The rebels made the station platform their base for the night, and Lucas set his plastic sleeping sheet on some remnants of cardboard boxes. There was something very familiar about the humid tropical air and his contented state. The dry season was ending. Déjà vu. It was going to start raining any day now. Joe opened his notebook and turned on a flashlight.
* * *
20:00. Hot muggy evening full of moonlight and mosquitoes and quiet voices along the railroad tracks in a dusty village. It was the kind of night when a seven-year-old boy would watch shooting stars burst through the night skies of America, slurp down bowls of homemade vanilla ice cream, capture sphinx moths hovering over the morning glory flowers, go frog hunting with his father and brother in the swamps. It was the kind of evening when a 14-year-old boy would ride on the dark, muggy streets of a Midwestern town on his bicycle, desperately wishing for a girlfriend to love. A night like the sultry, moon-drenched evenings along the Ohio River when he was 19 and found love amidst the sweat and the sweet taste of straight bourbon whiskey and French kisses. A night with a ring around the moon—a moon dog—that promised rain. A steamy night within which he roamed the streets of Kingston and Port of Spain, in the jungles of the Guianas, along the beaches of Arica, Ipanema, Guayaquil, evenings spent on the decks of boats, hotel rooftops, along a thousand roads and highways throughout the world when he was 23, 27, 35. The evening was hot and muggy, the voices quiet, and for a brief moment he fondled the taste of youthful dreams between his tongue and the roof of his mouth, and it held a long and familiar savor … 3
As Joe wrote he became more sentimental, and also more confused and embittered, and the words he composed to express his thoughts were as muddled as his feelings. He wrote in the authorial third person, describing on the page a tortured soul who was him. Another hot, muggy evening, moonlight and quiet voices, and a brief moment of contentment before he remembered he no longer carried a butterfly net, but rather, an automatic rifle … He was nearly 40 years old, and no longer had the aching virgin hunger he’d had as a boy, and he recalled the loss of his innocence after his first, long overdue fuck, and how unfulfilling that act was. The child within him was pure; the man was not. The man had killed a soldier, and felt a deadening loss of innocence afterward, and he had seen many corpses—dead flesh … numb and useless. Joe the author foresaw the death of his protagonist, Joe/Lucas, and the loss of the last sanctuary of innocence that was his own flesh and blood—bullets coming his way like rosebuds of spinning lead, that would strike him for the first and last time. Life was beautiful, and it was cruel, and the protagonist of Joe Sanderson’s unpublished masterpieces had seen so much of it. Joe Sanderson the writer (“Joe”) and Joe Sanderson the adventurer (now named “Lucas”) were both prepared to bring their story to a conclusion. Here in El Salvador, if the muse called for it; or by driving down Race Street again, to his Mom’s senior abode, for a book-concluding serving of Virginia Sanderson’s macaroni and cheese.
* * *
LUCAS MET MORE of the local comrades, and in his journal Joe gave them nicknames: Heavenly Hope (a woman whose nom de guerre was Esperanza), Sparky (for his bright eyes), and Danny Boy, who was a local commander born in the city of San Miguel, a middle-class university graduate who had the lively mustache and untamed hair of a Velasquez self-portrait. Danny Boy was Lucas’s new squad leader, and he was familiar with these villages and towns where he now guided the guerrillas in a semi-aimless meandering around the countryside, eating watermelons and free tortillas in the daylight amid the local popula
ce, like ordinary road bums. Danny Boy said their guerrilla-bumming was a military-political act—it proved to the locals how weak the army was. They visited a small pond where Lucas took one picture of the compas mingling with peasants and their oxcarts, and another of women washing clothes, and Joe had another flashback. Setting reminded me of India or British Guiana, the surrounding countryside of flat fields and dusty roads the same. They returned to the railroad line, and entered a settlement called San Carlos El Amate, and Danny Boy announced it was time to stir up the passions of the local villagers by gathering them up to explain why the FMLN had opposed the recent, farcical elections.
Instead of one big meeting, compas broke off in twos and threes and chatted informally with folks up and down the tracks. Everybody eating fruit, buying crackers, bumming tortillas. Sparky came through like a champ, bought me sausage, cookies and soda, and finally cigs and a whole bag of sweet bread. In another village they met with a group of peasant rebel collaborators who had been given some homemade grenades known as “papayas.” They told us they had succeeded in stopping an army tank by placing a papaya in the treads, but couldn’t quite manage to blow it up. In the town after that, there was a flurry of excitement that had nothing to do with the revolutionary cause. Compas passing around tattered remains of a skin magazine, slathering over gringüitas, Joe wrote, while ignoring the half-naked, taut-breasted compañeras bathing only five meters away. In Morazán, the rebel army was a disciplined fighting force; here in San Miguel the army was as mellow and naughty as a band of California musicians. Finally, Danny Boy gave an order with clear strategic purpose: they were to march off into the campo to blow up an electrical tower. Some of the squad leaders and fighters bickered over who would haul the TNT brick, made in a Morazán workshop, apparently, and Joe remembered a similar scene in the Hemingway novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, when an American helps a group of Spanish Republican guerrillas blow up a bridge. Was imagining myself accompanying an elite commando squad of specially trained and disciplined sappers, off on a crucial mission, but my fantasy quickly got mushy around the edges. To reach their target they walked through brush and through cotton fields, and sandy streambeds and finally they came upon four strands of wire, and they followed those cables for a kilometer. We found some unfinished business. An operation in August had left the towers badly damaged, but not quite wrecked. The wounded tower resembled a praying mantis that was struggling to rise on its hind feet. Danny Boy did a little on-the-job training with the TNT and an ordinary industrial fuse and detonator rig. A single charge brought down the tower-insect and they ambled over to the next town and heard complaints from a store owner: “The power just went out again. The government can’t do anything right.” The people in the town were leery and edgy of the guerrillas, Joe wrote, but they sold Lucas cigarettes—and a safety pin to keep the gaping fly of his pants shut, the zipper having surrendered the night before. That night, they reached a rebel camp with sixty combatants. Here, Lucas received new orders. El Che will head south to pick up a load of clamshells and eat shrimp, while I participate in acts of revolutionary vandalism on behalf of the people. Sounds like a lousy deal to me. As the informal unofficial unauthorized chronicler of the El Salvador revolution and playboy gadfly of the Eastern Front, and member in good standing of the Fraternal Members of Leftist Non-sequiturs, I insist that my bones be buried in the wall of some McDonald’s hamburger joint in San Salvador. That night, they camped near a waterhole, ¾ moon hazy from dust kicked up by the winds and the oxcarts. The air was as muddy as the swamp fog in the Cajun towns where Joe Sanderson once slept in the back of his truck while painting flagpoles. Mango trees here, cypress trees there. Close my eyes and I can see the Spanish moss casting moon shadows. Open my eyes, and it’s Sunday evening, up late passing the time with the compas. A fighter called Pepe gestured for Lucas to come over to the plastic sheet where Danny Boy and several compas were gathered. “Hey, jodido! Come over here. No jodás hombre.” By which they meant, Don’t keep to yourself, Don’t remain solitary, sad, isolated, Joe wrote in his journal. He was aware of his growing apartness from the struggle for which he was risking his life, and he was grateful to Pepe for pulling him into the group of squad leaders who had assembled around Danny Boy to shoot the breeze.
“We’re discussing the military-political situation, Lucas,” Danny Boy said. “What do you think?”
So I offered my two centavos’ worth, Joe wrote later. Lucas said he believed that more guerrillas should be sent down from Morazán to fight in the lowlands around the eastern cities of San Miguel, Usulután and La Unión. “The enemy has proven they’re not strong enough to defeat us in Morazán. It’s time to move the revolution down from the hills, southward. We should live in the larger population centers, operate more against the enemy here, show the people we can win.” The assembled rebels, all reclined on the ground, nodded their heads in agreement.
“Yes, that would be the ideal strategy,” Danny Boy said. “That would be our best chance to end the war quickly. Unfortunately, it’s not for us to decide, Lucas. But rather for Atilio and for Jonás.” The men at the top of the ERP would not risk what they had already built up by emptying Morazán of its best fighting units, Danny Boy explained, and suddenly Joe had a vision of the future. Of many, many battles more, and thousands more dead, and how the years of violence would age the faces of the young men and women gathered around him. Worry lines would spread across their smooth copper faces. Their cheeks and foreheads would grow grayer and less taut, until they resembled the weary road bum Lucas saw when he looked in the mirror at Joe. Years from now, they’ll say, The revolution took our youth from us. Danny Boy, the oldest of the guerrillas present, also saw this future, and his shared thoughts echoed Joe’s.
“We’ll launch another big offensive, and then the army will hit us with a counteroffensive, and the killing will go on,” Danny Boy said. “I’m afraid killing might become part of who we are, permanently. Like a poison in the soil. This is what happened after La Matanza, fifty years ago: forty thousand people murdered in a week, followed by generations of violence. We all want to think that the final victory will be like a huge pill of happiness. But after all this death it’s hard to imagine peace could follow.”
The next day, during their ordinary rambling through the San Miguel countryside, Lucas marched with Sparky, who related a story about Danny Boy. Three weeks earlier, Danny Boy’s uncle had been murdered in San Miguel. A death squad killed him, KKK style, in front of his store, Joe wrote later in his journal. Neighbors marked the spot with stones and flowers. Danny Boy has since taken care of the three orejas4 who betrayed his uncle. Must still be spies on the loose, but not too active anymore. Apparently, now there’s a price on Danny Boy’s head.
* * *
LUCAS AND HIS UNIT entered places that were as poor as any Joe had seen in El Salvador. Villages all seem sad and defeated and in disrepair. Mud-covered tin structures, rusty rebar holding up roofs. Globe bellies of children filled with swimming parasites. Nakedness everywhere. Naked boys, naked girls, genitals exposed to the dust, bare feet and blackened toes, and finally Joe wondered if it was the wet air eating away at the people’s clothes, because his own wardrobe was also coming apart. I’m once again a fairly shabby guerrillero. Knees ripped on my jeans shortly after the zipper and back pockets gave way. My National Guard T-shirt and khaki long sleeve won’t last too many more ops. Later that day, Lucas finally acquired another pair of pants. Became the proud owner of a new pair of Jaguar blue jeans. Hate to part with the souvenir mortar rips in my old pants, but you can’t have everything. More than ever, he was ready to leave El Salvador. Time to exit. 13 months here and bearing down hard on 40 years old. I feel shipwrecked. Sometimes I think my physical as well as psychological strength is just plain giving out. One morning he awoke from sleeping on the ground—as he had for most of the past thirteen months—to find his upper back muscles completely seized up. I was semi-paralyzed. I felt my vertebrae clicking and cracking
when I moved my right arm. I wondered if it might be something psychosomatic. Definitely not in top fighting condition. That day, he eschewed carrying a pack while on patrol and his seized-up back muscles relaxed. I start to imagine how pleasant it would be to spend a few time-killing hours in the Midwest, let’s say cruising the Champaign-Urbana junkyards on a Saturday p.m. with brother Steven—talking and drinking canned Cokes and looking for $5 tires.
* * *
8 APRIL. 09:00 HRS. After breakfast, and without fanfare, it was announced that we’re going to do some executing today. A family of army collaborators would be our first targets. Little reaction from the compas. Unlikely the first time for most of them. I was reminded of the eerie disclosure Sparky made to me not long ago: He and the compas W. and U. had been part of a special revolutionary death squad, full-time executioners. Some 50 deaths to their credit, Sparky said. W. had been traumatized by their very first hit—a 13-year-old girl for some reason unclear to me. W. became “psychopathic” toward the end—so the chiefs sent him away. They had gone from using guns to using knives, machetes, killing by hammering pegs into the skull, garroting, etc., etc. Grim business. “It’s not difficult,” Sparky said. “Splas! Splas! And it’s finished.” Later, Joe reflected: Saw nothing to indicate such backgrounds in W. and U. Nor is it easy to imagine Sparky carrying out such tasks. How will I react if I’m ordered to kill someone unarmed? Probably they won’t ask. Doesn’t look good, no, to have a foreigner bloody his hands that way.