What You Have Heard Is True

by Carolyn Forche

  “How do you think I knew who you were when you opened the door? Your author photo looks just like you, by the way.”

  “I don’t think it does.”

  On the title page, Maya had added:

  Para Leonel, que entenderá por qué le estoy enviando esto, con mucho amor, Maya.

  For Leonel, who will understand why I have sent this, with much love, Maya.

  “So that is why I’m here. Because of your poetry book, and Maya’s letter. She told me all about you.”

  I didn’t tell him that Maya had also told me some things about him. Once, on one of our walks along the beach, barefoot with our jeans rolled up our calves, she had said that her cousin Leonel had given some of his land to the peasants—but who knows? And people say that he sleeps on the ground with his motorcycle in his arms—can you imagine? As she talked, the lace edge of the surf washed over the murmuring stones and the sanderlings hurried across a mirror of water. Gull cries tore at the air above the drying kelp beds and, barely moving their wings, drifted out to sea.

  * * *

  —

  “You drove all the way from El Salvador—?”

  “Yes, my dear, I did. More than four thousand kilometers. I wanted to talk to you.”

  “But that’s such a long way. What if I hadn’t been here? I do go away sometimes, you know.”

  “Well, I took the chance. And this might also be my last opportunity to spend time with my daughters, maybe the last for a good while, and so I brought them with me on this—this camping trip.”

  The moment had passed to ask casually what Maya had told him about me, but perhaps I would have another chance.

  “Your daughters are beautiful,” I said, getting up to turn off a whistling kettle. “What do you want to talk to me about?”

  “What I told you. Among other things, I want to talk to you about a certain dead American.”

  This was his manner—to toss out in a flat voice “dead American,” and then refuse to elaborate, as if he were tugging lightly at a fishing line, leaving the lure adrift on the surface.

  “What dead American? What do you mean?”

  He rose to pace the kitchen, hands thrust in his khaki pockets, pivoting at the end of each sentence to walk a few feet in the other direction, as if tethered to a fixed point.

  “Okay. Maybe I should start at the beginning.”

  “Why don’t you tell me why you’re here. I don’t think it’s because of poetry.”

  He sat down again, studying his own hand-drawn map, picked up his drawing pen, and began a bit wearily, “I’m a coffee farmer from El Salvador. My farm is small but produces high-quality beans. I’m also an inventor, you might say, and a social critic, and a painter, although I no longer have time to paint.”

  Miniature coffee trees had appeared on the map, drawn as he spoke.

  “And a motorcycle racer? And a champion marksman?”

  Maya had also told me that Leonel had gone to school for a while somewhere in the United States, a military academy, she thought, she wasn’t sure where, and he had been a world champion marksman and racer of motorcycles. There was a wall of trophies in his house, she said, and once, in competition, he had even been awarded a handmade AK-47 assault rifle with a gold-plated inscription. She thought him handsome, and intelligent, but also “too mysterious for most people.”

  He seemed at once exasperated and pleased by this description.

  It was true that Maya had told me these things, but her father had gone further.

  “It was possible,” Bud said one evening as we sat in the dark on the terrace under the stars, “that he is with the guerrillas, as some people say. Possible.” Then, drawing deeply on one of his frequent cigarettes, “it is also possible that he is with the CIA.”

  In the flaring light between his fingers, his face was entirely visible then, his jaw set, his eyes narrowing, and I heard a sharp intake of breath from Claribel, who spoke her husband’s name as if it were a stone cast over a balcony wall.

  “She asked me,” he’d said evenly. “I’m answering.”

  Leonel sighed at this and said quietly, “I don’t race motorcycles anymore. I do other things.”

  “And?”

  “Well, that’s it.”

  “And why are you here?”

  “I already told you—because you are a poet.” He stiffened in the chair. “Okay, we’re wasting time. Mirá, I have about three days here before I have to start back. Three days. And we have a lot to talk about.”

  He began drawing check marks on the paper: birds flying in a child’s sky and, with a few quick strokes, what appeared to be a brigantine at full sail, with a few smaller ships receding to the edge of the paper.

  “You wanted me to begin at the beginning, he said, dropping his pen down among the ships. “This is the beginning.”

  I studied his drawing. “Pirates?”

  He thought I had deliberately made a joke. “You might say so, but no. I was trying to draw the Spanish galleons of the conquistadores. Do you see? A brigantine would carry both oars and sails, but the galleon is entirely under sail. The brigantine would have two masts. The galleon, as you see, has three or four.”

  “Mr. Gómez?”

  “Call me Leonel. A brigantine would have greater maneuverability. But I was about to tell you about Pedro de Alvarado. Do you know who he is?” And without waiting for what would have been my no, he held forth for an hour or so about Alvarado, sent by Cortés to conquer the isthmus of the Americas, Alvarado whom the Indians called The Sun, not (as the red-haired Alvarado thought) because they considered him a god but because they thought his head looked as if it were on fire.

  “He was brutal toward Indians,” Leonel said, “and did all the things you might expect: ordering them flayed alive, roasting them over fires on spits.”

  The girls had come in with furry rabbits cupped in their hands, whispering to their father again, who laughed and shook his head at whatever they were saying. Then he might have told them to go play, because the rabbits were set loose on the kitchen floor, and the girls followed them on hands and knees around the house and up the carpeted stairs to the two bedrooms.

  Arrows appeared on the map indicating the route Alvarado’s soldiers had taken inland. I would learn that Leonel was particularly interested in military history, logistics, weaponry, strategy, and tactics, beginning with the ancient world’s bowmen, slingers, and hoplites, their infantries, and cavalries of archers mounted on horseback, and later in Genghis Khan’s supply routes, military intelligence, and the art of feigned retreats. In the woolen bag woven with a pouncing jaguar, he kept, bound together, a worn copy of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, Carl von Clausewitz’s On War, and Machiavelli’s The Prince, all of them falling apart and rubber banded, with marginalia in the tiniest script I had ever seen. In the seemingly bottomless bag, he also had the transcript of American congressional hearings and other “documents,” as he called them, but first he led me into his dream narrative of the Americas before the conquest, most especially of the isthmus connecting the two continents: a starlit world whose civilization began, according to the Mayan Long Count calendar, on August 11, 3114 B.C.E.

  He began with the Pipil Maya, as he called them, artists of milpa cultivation, descendants of astronomers and poets who fled their ancient cities after some catastrophe, possibly having to do with drought. Or cannibalism. It was a world, he said, lit at night only by fire, and they were a people who mapped the stars, for galaxies beyond our own, without the aid of telescopes.

  I asked why he was telling me about these things.

  “I thought it might interest you—as a poet, I mean—the history from the beginning. Surely poets are interested in this? But we can start somewhere else, anywhere you wish,” he said, pulling more papers and pamphlets from his bag and stacking them on the table.

  “L
et’s start with two dead priests and some deported nuns, or with three hundred dead campesinos. Here—these are the proceedings of your own congressional Subcommittee on Inter-American Relations. Read them. I have underlined the relevant passages for you. When you’re finished, we can talk about the dead American.”

  Was he angry? I wondered. What had I done to anger him? But he seemed calm, steel voiced, matter-of-fact. He could have been telling me about scientific research or the history of the Goths and Visigoths.

  “Leonel, I’m sorry, but you say you’re here because I’m a poet. What does this have to do with poetry?”

  “Maybe nothing. I don’t know yet. This is what I’m trying to find out. But let’s go eat first. I’m starving. Do you know a place where we can get hamburgers?”

  “Hamburgers? That’s what you want?”

  “Yes. Hamburgers and also ice cream.”

  The waters of the Pacific resembled hammered silver under that cloudless noon as he drove us north in the Hiace, the girls in the back with all the windows open, the music of Peruvian pan flutes floating from the dashboard. This was a drive we would take several times over the next three days, up the road and a little inland, and each time I would run inside with his money and the order—burgers and Cokes, always the same—and other than these trips, and errands to buy what he described as “supplies,” we mostly talked at the kitchen table, or rather, he mostly talked while I listened and smoked. Early in the evenings, I would run a bath for the girls and then he’d tuck them into my absent housemate’s bed. Sometime after midnight, when I couldn’t listen or think any longer, I would go up to my room and shut the door. He would take care of himself, he said, and the house went quiet.

  * * *

  I lay awake, drifting in and out of my journey that past summer, when I was twenty-seven years old and in Europe for the first time.

  “Come with me,” Maya had pleaded. “Come to Deià. Why not? You can work on the translations in the mornings while Mami is writing, and after siesta you can show your work to her and ask questions. She’ll help you. And you’ll love Deià. It’s the most beautiful village on Mallorca. And you’ll be happy to know that your English poet Robert Graves lives there, just down the road from C’an Blau. He wrote I, Claudius there—do you know that novel? Surely. Robert is a friend of Mami’s. We’re all friends there. And if you insist upon being serious, well, most evenings Mami and Daddy hold a salon on the terrace where people talk about all sorts of things: books, politics. We could also hike to the peak of the Teix one afternoon. You like hiking. And we could go to Soller and Palma and—wait—we could take the trip I’ve always wanted to take, through Andalusia by train, to Granada, where Lorca lived. The Sacromonte. The Alhambra. Do you know Tales of the Alhambra? Surely. We’ll go there, and to Sevilla for the flamenco. And . . .”

  “Maya? This all sounds beautiful, but no.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t think so. It would be expensive.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous! If you are going to be a poet, you must see the world. This is what your poet Rilke wrote, wasn’t it? In order to write a single poem, one must see many cities, and people, and things; one must get to know animals and the flight of birds. Many cities, Carolyn, and fountains and cathedrals and paintings! How are you going to write if you don’t know these things? You have enough saved for a ticket and that’s all you need. It will cost you less to live there than to stay at home. And as you said yourself, you can’t translate Mami’s poems without help. If you don’t want to go, fine, but don’t say you never had the chance. Here is your chance.”

  Maya shook her head, loosening her long, dark hair and, pushing her chair away from the table, rested her case. Someone was singing on the record player in the other room, not Edith Piaf regretting nothing, not Mercedes Sosa being grateful for life, someone else. On the table before us there was a bowl of lemons. My cup of coffee was going cold.

  Come with me.

  * * *

  When I came out of my room in the morning, Leonel was at the kitchen table in his same clothes, reading one of the books or magazines he’d brought with him, including, I noted, The Prison Notebooks by Antonio Gramsci, the political philosopher imprisoned by Mussolini, and a magazine about Formula One racing cars, but he didn’t look up right away from whatever he happened to be reading—which was a relief, as I preferred to have coffee alone before engaging the world. I usually drank it while standing on our small porch, from a spot where the ocean was visible on clear mornings. When asked if he wanted coffee, he would reply No thank you, not yet, I don’t usually drink it this early in the day, and then as I headed toward the door: Hurry back, we don’t have much time.

  By then, it seemed that I had implicitly agreed to host him for a few days along with his girls, as he could stay only that long he repeatedly said, a few days, and then they would drive back—a round trip of more than eight thousand kilometers for a visit of a few days. I don’t know why I didn’t question what sort of sense this made.

  It seemed that the work we had to do involved me sitting opposite him at the table as I attempted to follow his braided monologues, while the diagrams, stick figures, and other illustrations flowed from his special pen until there was almost no space on the butcher paper for the helicopters he drew meticulously near the end, resembling an armada of dragonflies in the sky above his sketched hills. On this day, we were somewhere in the midst of the conquest of Mesoamerica, with emphasis upon the military maneuvers of the Spanish, and the ways in which the Indians resisted them, by coincidence using some of the tactics developed five hundred years earlier and a world away by Genghis Khan.

  He had read the experts on the great pre-Columbian civilizations of Mexico and the isthmus, he said, and while he found some of the material “useful” on the subject of armed resistance, it was “useless” on matters concerning the consciousness of these peoples, their views of the cosmos, their science, and their art. Nothing is known about them, he insisted several times, especially about the Mayans—for example, why they invented the wheel but used it only for toys, or why they abandoned their vast cities, which he believed now to be hidden in the cloud forests of the highlands. But most important, they were “farmers,” he said, “excellent farmers,” and the crop they developed in all its varieties was maize, “the greatest cereal crop in the world,” Leonel said. When maize is grown in a cornfield they call a milpa, it is grown along with beans, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, chilies, avocados, amaranth, and jicama, so the soil is never depleted, he said. There have been milpas under cultivation “for thousands of years, thousands,” he said, as he drew beans climbing maize stalks, squash blossoming along the ground, and beside the stalks, a cartoon man in a straw hat and an avocado tree heavy with fruit.

  “If you’re interested,” he was now almost whispering, “beans and maize form a complete protein for the human diet. Neither is sufficient alone. The Indians also learned that something had to be done to the maize if they were to prevent pellagra, a disease caused by niacin deficiency. Before modern medicine, a thousand years before Christ, they developed nixtamalization, as we call it, from their word, nixtamal, a Nahua word for their method of soaking maize before grinding it in a water bath of ashes and lime. The alkaline wood ash releases niacin into the maize. It also softens the hull. Ingenious! They understood the value of sweet potatoes and amaranth. They were brilliant nutritionists, and so it went for thousands of years, until their lands were confiscated by the Europeans to establish the great haciendas, first for the cultivation of indigo and cacao, for the raising of cattle, and then,” he said, moving his pen to the other side of his map, “when the demand for indigo plummeted, the lands onto which the Indians had been pushed—the blue volcanic highlands—were discovered to be excellent for the cultivation of coffee, and their remaining lands were taken in an inexorable process of theft.”

  He set the drawing pen on the paper.


  “Here is a pamphlet on the subject. Today, there isn’t much land left for the milpas. A small family requires ten hectares of land to grow enough food to feed itself, but if you have too many people on too small a land, the milpas will not produce enough and the people will starve.”

  There were maize stalks inked all the way to the edge of the paper.

  “My grandmother did that, and so did my father,” I told him. “They planted corn in the same hole as the beans so the beans could climb the cornstalks as they grew. They spread the very same carpet of squash along the ground. I remember picking the yellow blossoms.” I seemed not to be at the table any longer with this strange visitor, but was moving down the row again after years, dropping two kernels of corn and two mottled beans into each hole scooped from the tilled row, as beside me my grandmother’s pronged hoe covered them over one by one, quickly because of the crows cawing above us, all the while whispering prayers.

  “Anna taught you that?”

  “Wait. How do you know her name was Anna?”

  “You wrote a poem about her, remember? Why don’t you read it to me?”

  “I thought we had work to do. If talking like this is what you mean by work.”

  “We do. The grandmother was from Czechoslovakia, right? They make high-quality weapons. The assault rifle, for example, the Vz.58, which you might mistake at first for a Soviet AK-47, but the Vz.58 has an entirely different internal design. The Czechs also make fine revolvers and machine guns, like the CZW-762, which is fed from thirty-round AK magazines.”

  Well, I thought, they did say that he was a champion marksman, and perhaps this accounted for his encyclopedic knowledge of firearms, but to move so quickly from prehistoric maize cultivation to poetry to weapons?