by Janet Dawson
Watching Claire in action, Rod had to admit she was in her element when it came to socializing with growers. He could talk business over cocktails when necessary, but he was more comfortable one-on-one with a grower, discussing crops, prices, and shipping details.
On Wednesday Rod and Claire arrived in Santa Ana, capital of the department of the same name, and the second largest city in the country, with a colonial flavor, its old buildings fronted by wide streets. The city, ringed by green hills and surrounded by plantations, was the beating heart of El Salvador’s coffee production. They visited plantations where coffee was grown and harvested coffee cherries were processed into beans ready for roasting. They were guests for two nights at a landowner’s mansion, feted at a lavish dinner.
On Friday, they drove northeast to Chalatenango, the large department along El Salvador’s border with Honduras. The Aragón finca was located in the southwestern corner of the department, a parcel that contained wide valleys and rolling hills, mountains with timber, and green slopes planted with coffee. The reason for Claire’s visit became clear. Severino Aragón, a major in the Salvadoran army, was home. Rod knew from the company grapevine that Claire had an off-and-on relationship with Severino. He felt annoyed all over again as he realized why she’d revised the itinerary. Claire wanted an interlude with her lover.
The Aragón colonial-style house was encircled by a wide first-floor veranda. Balconies opened off second-floor rooms. Humberto had a master suite at the front of the house, the south side, while Claire and Severino were in adjoining rooms on the east side. His own room was at the northwest corner of the house. When he stepped onto the balcony, he had a view of the garden, the outbuildings and the mountains to the north.
The sun was low and the temperature must have been in the eighties. He felt tired and travel-weary, impatient to go home. He stripped off his clothes and took a shower, then dressed again in clean slacks and a shirt. He went downstairs to have a look around. There was no one else in sight, though he heard voices in Spanish coming from the kitchen at the back of the house.
In the living room, one wall held family photographs of Humberto, his wife, and their three children. Severino and the younger son, Roberto, looked like their father, dark and stocky. The daughter, Cristina, and the late Mrs. Aragón were both slender, with honey blond hair. In another picture, a much-younger Humberto linked his arm with a slender, beautiful woman in a white satin gown. The other man in the photograph was Mr. Dunlin. So this was Humberto’s younger sister, Annabel’s mother.
“My aunt Inés,” Severino said as he joined Rod. “I didn’t know her very well. I was a baby when she married. I only saw her three times after that, twice when she and George visited El Salvador. Once, when I was ten and Annabel was six, we went to San Francisco. We stayed in a fine hotel on Nob Hill and I rode the cable cars. Come, it’s time for dinner.”
On Saturday morning, he joined Humberto at breakfast. Plans for the day included visits to several coffee groves and the large processing plant on the finca. But it was now past nine, no sign of Claire or Severino. Rod lingered on the veranda, drinking coffee. Finally Claire appeared. She wore her blond hair long these days. She was fiddling with it, fastening it back with barrettes. Her blue eyes glittered and the set of her mouth told him she was in a waspish mood.
“I heard gunfire,” Rod said. “Señor Aragón tells me it came from his shooting range. He has a militia.”
“All the growers have militias,” she said. “It’s the custom of the country.”
If he’d heard her say that once during this El Salvador trip, he’d heard it a dozen times. He didn’t much like the custom of the country. The feeling of disquiet returned. Why take a business trip in the middle of a war zone? He didn’t want to get shot by someone simply because he was visiting a coffee plantation.
“I’m sorry to keep you waiting.” Severino strolled out onto the veranda. “I always sleep better here at home. There’s something about one’s own bed.”
“We had hoped to get an earlier start,” Humberto said. “Have you had breakfast?”
“There’s nothing in the dining room. Ana’s taken it all away.”
“She should have left it out for you and Claire.” Humberto called for Ana, a thin middle-aged woman, who scurried from the kitchen. Severino spoke to her in Spanish, ordering coffee and pan dulce. She left and reappeared a few moments later with a tray, setting it on a low table. Two Jeeps drove toward the house from the outbuildings and braked to a stop. The occupants wore uniforms in a dull shade of bluish-gray and black boots. They carried semiautomatic weapons.
“Here is Cruz now,” Humberto said.
The man at the wheel of the first Jeep got out. Big and broad-shouldered, he had a hard face. A scar extended from the outer corner of his left eye all the way to his chin. His nose looked as though it had been broken a couple of times, and his eyes were cold. Ana gave him a wide berth as she left the veranda. Rod realized she was afraid of Cruz.
Humberto told Cruz that they would be ready to leave on their tour of the finca in fifteen minutes. As Cruz returned to the Jeep, Claire poured herself another cup of coffee. “What a plug-ugly. Where did you find him?”
“In a San Salvador jail,” Humberto said. “In for assault, I believe.”
“You chose wisely,” Claire said. “He looks like he’s ready to handle any kind of trouble.”
Or instigate it, Rod thought.
Severino finished his breakfast and they left on their tour. After visiting groves planted in coffee trees, they headed for Humberto’s processing plant, Jeeps speeding over a gravel road along a ridge. The plant was a long low building with a loading dock and several bays, where campesinos gathered, awaiting the patrón and his visitors. Down the slope Rod saw a village, huts grouped around a small adobe church, and beyond that, a pond held back by an earthen dam.
El Salvador’s processing facilities were among the most mechanized in the coffee business. Coffee began fermenting as soon as it was harvested, so it required quick processing. Seeds were separated from the other organic material—a thick, sticky substance known as mucilage, a papery membrane called parchment, and a thin coating called silver skin. During processing, the skin and pulp of the coffee cherries were mechanically removed, and the mucilage was dried. Then threshers removed the parchment, all the while taking care not to contaminate the beans, which would be roasted.
“My beneficio, my processing plant, is state-of-the-art.” Humberto beamed as he showed Rod the plant. In the background, hovering like ghosts, campesinos swept floors, scrubbed and polished mucilage dryers. “Come, I’ll show you my latest production figures.” The landowner led them toward the office.
An old man carrying a bucket stepped from the shadows. Dirty water splashed on Rod’s trousers. “A thousand pardons, Señor,” the old man said softly in Spanish, setting the bucket on the floor. “Please forgive me.” He offered Rod a cloth to blot the water.
Cruz struck. Blood trickled from the corner of the old man’s mouth. “Clumsy fool,” Cruz snarled. He drew back his hand for another blow.
“It was an accident.” Rod moved between the old man and Cruz, who didn’t lower his hand until Humberto barked a command, ordering all the campesinos to clear out and go home. Rod gave the cloth to the old man, who pressed it to his bleeding mouth, picked up the bucket, and disappeared.
“It was an accident,” Rod said. “Hitting that old man was out of line.”
Claire shrugged. “Intimidating peasants is what Cruz is here for. That’s the way things are done around here. Come on. Our host wants to show you how much coffee he produces in a year. Isn’t that what we came for?”
I did, Rod thought. But not you.
* * *
At dinner Rod picked at the food on his plate as though worrying a scab. Don’t get involved. Focus on business and nothing else when dealing with people in other countries and other cultures. Don’t get involved in politics, don’t form opinions. Don’
t let personal feelings get in the way of business.
Rod usually didn’t get involved. In country after country, he maintained his detachment, ignoring beggars and troops in the streets, the faces of poverty and war. Why was it different in El Salvador? Was it the immediacy of the civil war? The stark disparity between rich and poor was not unique to El Salvador. Why did conditions here, no different from a dozen other countries, bother him so much? It was as though an aching tooth, ignored for too long, had finally abscessed. He recalled the despairing eyes of the young woman he’d seen by the side of the road, so devoid of hope, focused on nothing but basic survival.
“I hope you are enjoying your visit, Señor Llewellyn,” Humberto said.
Rod forced himself to lift a fork to his mouth. The steak was excellent, as his host had boasted, beef from Humberto’s own herd. Rod swallowed and sipped wine. “During the past week I saw peasants, walking along the roads. Claire tells me they move from place to place, looking for work.”
“Coffee needs many hands,” Humberto said. “With such a large finca, we have much seasonal labor, especially during harvest, and when the trees are being planted. Before World War Two, we had more campesinos living on the finca. We grew only coffee. But a one-crop economy isn’t wise. We learned that during the Depression, when prices sank so low. After the war my father and I diversified, expanding into new crops, like cattle and cotton, which don’t require as many workers. We started a cattle ranch in a valley with good water and plenty of grass. When we bought our first herd, I told my father that valley was perfect for cattle. So it was, once we cleared away the village.”
“You moved the village so your herd could graze there?” Rod asked.
“Moved it? No, we tore it down.”
“How long had the village been there?”
Humberto shrugged. “Since my grandfather’s time. It was a lot of work to knock down the houses and church to prepare the land for cattle, but worth it. We have done well with cattle.”
Like the Highland clearances in Scotland, Rod thought, crofters cleared from their land when landlords needed more room for sheep to graze. Here it was in modern form. “The people who lost their homes, where did they go?”
Humberto smiled. “Their homes? This is Aragón land, ours to do with as we please. The campesinos are here to work, nothing more. They come and go, with the harvest, the custom of our country. These campesinos aren’t like us. The ruling class, my family and people like me, we’re of European stock. The campesinos, they’re mestizos, with the Indian strain, ignorant and lazy. They require a firm hand. Like children, they are simple and easily led. That’s why many of them fall prey to Communists.”
Rod had heard these sentiments before, expressed over dinner in fancy houses on large estates, spoken by coffee barons and their wives and sons and daughters, all convinced of their innate superiority over the huge population of poor people who did the work. They viewed the campesinos as a separate, lesser species. Humberto only voiced the opinions commonly held by the coffee elite.
Now Humberto fumed at the thought of changes to his comfortable status quo. “Land reform, they call it. Theft is what I call it.”
Severino reached for his wineglass. “Land reform is dead, Father.”
“Dead for now, but for how long? These Communists tried it in the Seventies, and again in the Eighties. They’ll keep trying until they’re eradicated,” Humberto said. “These rebels want to take my land, divide it into parcels and give it to ignorant campesinos. My father’s legacy to me, and someday to my son, and they want to take it away from me. Ridiculous. I won’t tolerate this land grab. They won’t take this finca that I have built with my own labor.”
Rod almost laughed. The only people laboring on the finca were the campesinos in the coffee groves and at the plant, and the servant here in the house. The estate was a feudal fiefdom, with Humberto as lord and master.
“In my father’s day it was different,” Humberto said. “Men of his generation knew how to handle Communists. A firm hand and no mercy, like la Matanza. That was ’thirty-two. I was a boy, but I remember it well. Communists incited the campesinos to revolt. Gangs with machetes swarmed from the mountains and took over towns, murdering government officials and cafetaleros like my father. Our neighbor was hacked to death on his own veranda. We were sure our finca would be next. We were afraid for our lives, barricaded right here in this house, with guns, even me and my mother. Fortunately the attack never came. The cafetaleros formed militias, called the White Guards. Together with the army they put down the uprising.”
Put it down hard, Rod recalled from his reading of El Salvador’s troubled history. La Matanza meant the massacre, not of landowners, but of peasants. In the weeks following the revolt, thousands of campesinos, whether they’d participated in the uprising or not, were slaughtered indiscriminately—men, women and children, anyone who looked like an Indian or a peasant, anyone who happened to be carrying a machete. Most historians put the death toll at thirty thousand, a significant percentage of the rural population. La Matanza had also set the pattern for how El Salvador’s ruling class would respond to future efforts at reform, with fear and repression.
“Again the Communists incite the campesinos and we fight a war to keep things under control,” Humberto said. “Fortunately your government understands the extent of the danger, especially since the Communists took over Nicaragua. Of course, we have stupid outsiders, like those American women who were killed when they tried to run a roadblock, foolish women mixing in where they don’t belong. Communists have even contaminated the church. Priests give their allegiance to the devil instead of God. They deserve to die. We need another bloodletting like la Matanza, to purge my country of the evils of Communism that threaten our way of life.”
You’re getting your bloodletting, Rod thought, if half of what I read is true. Chief among the priests Humberto Aragón excoriated was the late Archbishop Romero, murdered in March of nineteen eighty. The foolish American women were three nuns and a lay worker, killed the same month. The Jesuit University in San Salvador had been bombed repeatedly, in response to the church’s increasingly leftist stance. The right-wing death squads operating throughout the country distributed leaflets that read: “Be a patriot, kill a priest.”
The man is crazy. How soon can I get out of this place?
Humberto glared at his son. “Now these damned rebels have overrun Los Árboles. I tell the army to clean them out, but to no avail.”
“We will retake the town, soon,” Severino said.
“I give you an example of the pernicious gall of these Communists,” Humberto said. “The shopkeeper Tránsito told me a rebel comes to San Blas, the village near the processing plant, comes to my own finca preaching revolution to the campesinos. His mother lives in San Blas and shelters him. On my land, in a house I built. How dare she?”
“You should nip that in the bud.” Claire poured herself another glass of wine. “Don’t let a guerrilla come and go like that. He’s scouting for a soft spot on your land, hoping to establish an outpost on your finca. Send Cruz and his men up to San Blas to throw a scare into them.”
Humberto struck the table with his hand. “By God, you are right. These campesinos will know who runs this finca.”
The French doors were open to the warm night. Rod heard shouts. Something thudded outside, as though a body had come into contact with the wooden planks or railing of the veranda. They pushed their chairs away from the table and walked out onto the veranda.
Cruz had another man backed up against the railing, pummeling his victim with his meaty fists, like a prizefighter moving in for the kill. Other men hovered in the background, silent as they watched Cruz beat the other man. Then the man stumbled and fell to the ground. Cruz kicked him. Humberto ordered Cruz to stop. The bloody, bruised man on the ground moaned. His companions carried him away.
“I am sorry for this disturbance.” Humberto turned to his guests with an indulgent smile. “These men
, sometimes they drink and get out of hand.”
“Obviously you didn’t hire Cruz for his social skills.” Claire looked amused.
“Just as well,” Humberto said. “I doubt that he has any.”
Both the Aragóns and Claire laughed. Rod frowned as he followed them back to the dining room, where Ana waited in the doorway. Humberto ordered her to clear the table. She did so, then she returned from the kitchen, carrying a heavy silver coffee service. She poured the dark fragrant brew.
“Coffee, our lifeblood,” Humberto said, as silver spoons tinkled against delicate china.
The coffee tasted bitter. Rod set the cup back in the saucer.
* * *
On Sunday after lunch they sat on the veranda outside the dining room. Claire fiddled with her hair, taming long blond strands with barrettes. “I don’t know why I let it grow. I swear, I’m going to cut it when I get back.”
“I like it long,” Severino protested, wrapping one lock around his finger.
Humberto talked of plans for the following day, but Rod wasn’t interested in seeing any more Aragón operations. Work was piling up on his desk during his absence. He’d been gone far too long. He was ready to head for San Salvador right now, but he and Claire weren’t due to leave the Aragón finca until Tuesday morning.
Cruz approached, with a campesino who held a straw hat in front of his chest. “That’s Tránsito, the shopkeeper from San Blas,” Severino said as Claire put her arms above her head and stretched like a lazy cat.
Humberto rose and stepped off the veranda. The campesino bowed to Humberto and spoke in a low voice. Humberto glowered and dismissed Tránsito with a wave of his hand. As the shopkeeper trudged away, Humberto snapped, “That rebel is in San Blas right now. He walked into the church this morning. The fools treat him like an honored guest.”
“Unacceptable,” Severino said. “We must do something. We can’t tolerate this.”
“Agreed,” Claire said. “You’ve got to slap those people down.”