What You Have Heard Is True

by Carolyn Forche

  “You’ll get a kick out of this,” he said, just the way an American would say it. He barely gave me time to glance at the documents before he began talking again.

  “Can you imagine? And the Salvadoran military, by the way, is beginning to be interested in cocaine, but we can talk about that later. Right now, I need to tell you about something else. Remember the dead American? Last year, an American citizen was murdered while in the custody of the Salvadoran government. His name was Ronald Richardson, or James Ronald Richardson, or something like that. He was a black man from Philadelphia. He’s in Guatemala and he gets picked up for staying too long on a tourist visa. He tells the Guatemalan authorities that he’s a Vietnam veteran and would like to offer his services to them as a military mercenary. This wasn’t of interest at the time to the Guatemalans, so they decided to deport him. Richardson pleaded, for some reason, not to be deported back to the United States. He clearly did not wish to go there. Okay. So, the Guatemalans decide to send him to El Salvador or Honduras, you know, pass the problem along to someone else? Maybe they needed military mercenaries in Honduras or Salvador, I don’t know.”

  Leonel often finished his explanations of things with the phrase I don’t know, offered dismissively. At such times as this, he could talk without stopping, pacing about the room, marking off his paragraphs by retracing his steps.

  “The American embassy in Guatemala then sends the American embassy in El Salvador a cable marked ACTION CONSULATE as this was a matter concerning the whereabouts of a presumed American citizen. Okay. Soon after that, the consular office of the American embassy in San Salvador receives a report from the Salvadoran government that a person claiming to be an American citizen named Richardson had been picked up for nonpayment of hotel bills or something like that and was being held, once again it seemed, pending deportation. Are you following this? The American embassy gets asked to verify that Richardson is an American citizen, so some American consular officer interviews Richardson and fills out a report that is sent to the United States, while Richardson remains in custody and the whole thing lands in somebody’s inbox in Washington. That’s the word, isn’t it? ‘Inbox’?”

  Leonel sat down, but quickly got up from the table to pace the room again.

  “So, what do we have so far?” he asks. “By way of review—we have an American citizen waiting in a Salvadoran jail for American paperwork. Let’s rest. Let’s go to the beach.”

  * * *

  We walked in a cloud of ground fog, the girls running ahead, gulls hovering, taut winged and crying out as the surf heaved to the sand and withdrew. Pebbles murmured beneath us as the water pulled back its sheet of light. There were dried kelp beds and piles of bladder wrack here, stinking under swarms of sand flies.

  “Richardson, the man I was telling you about? He ran out of time. Maybe he’d been in prison in the States, I don’t know, or maybe he had watched too much television, but when his offer to become a mercenary didn’t work, he decided to tell the Salvadoran authorities that he knew something about cocaine—that he was, in fact, part of some cartel, and he was prepared to give these authorities information about this cocaine, in exchange, of course, for his freedom. To understand what happened next, you have to know something about a certain Salvadoran colonel, who was the director of immigration at that time, but also chief of the military regime’s intelligence operations.”

  The girls had returned to Leonel, one on each side, holding him by the hands, showing him cowrie shells, part of a dried gull wing, and the carapace of a sand crab. He spoke softly with them, pocketed their shells, pushed a gull quill into the sand, and rose, continuing in English with me.

  “This man’s name was Colonel José Francisco René Chacón, director of immigration, chief of ANSESA, the Salvadoran national security agency.”

  Then, nodding toward his daughters, and with a knowing look, he whispered, “To be continued.”

  We climbed the sand steps carved into the embankment. The fog had lifted, and behind us the beach was bathed in sun. Leonel toweled the sand from his daughters’ feet, then from his own while I did the same with a separate towel he had given me. He shook the towels out, folded them carefully, wrapped them in a garbage sack, and laid them in the back of the Hiace, neatly beside some black metal footlockers. He took a canteen from the back and poured water over the cowries in his palm, then put them in an empty film container and snapped the lid shut.

  * * *

  —

  On the way home, when he saw in the rearview mirror that the girls had fallen asleep, he began again.

  “In order to understand the significance of Richardson’s error in saying that he knew about drugs, you have to know something about what happened a month prior to Richardson’s arrival in El Salvador. The first ever cocaine bust in Central America was accomplished at the Camino Real Hotel in San Salvador during an operation orchestrated by the Drug Enforcement Administration of the United States. Two Peruvian women were arrested, a mother and her daughter, carrying ten kilos of pure cocaine. They were what they call mules. That operation was a success, except that within days the police had been paid off, the judges had been paid off, and the women were released to return to Peru. The cocaine, however, had already been delivered to the American embassy, where the political officer of the time burned it in a fifty-five-gallon drum. The story made the papers, of course, and it was widely reported that the cocaine that was burned in the drum had an estimated street value of up to two hundred million dollars. Two hundred million,” Leonel repeated, nodding on each word. “That’s a lot of money. And in El Salvador, when anything is worth that much money, certain people get interested. Colonel Chacón, for example, informed the American embassy that he would be happy to assist in future drug enforcement operations, as did several other so-called civic-minded senior-ranking officers.”

  We had reached the house. He lifted the younger one from the backseat into his arms, the older girl following, holding a corner of his shirt, rubbing her eyes. He whispered endearments to the sleeping child, stroking her back as he walked to the front door, standing aside as I unlocked it. He then carried the child up the stairs, the other walking behind, and I left them alone.

  I don’t remember what I thought about any of this at the time. I only remember what happened and what was said. At that time of day, if I wanted to work on poems, I would have made coffee, as I was still young enough to be a late-night writer. I would have gotten out pens and paper and stared into space. Our table, however, was now covered with butcher paper thick with diagrams and drawings, maps and charts, figures, arrows, x’s. There were also the objects Leonel had gathered, and the documents stacked on the place where he’d drawn waves to suggest the Pacific Ocean. Where Mexico would have been, there were the books he’d brought along to show me or to read. I would have sat at the table with my coffee and would also have lit another cigarette.

  Huffing down the stairs, he continued. “Meanwhile, Richardson is in the custody of Colonel Chacón, who is now quite interested in whatever information he can supply regarding drug operations. So he lets Richardson go, and even has him put up in a hotel at the colonel’s expense, where Richardson begins to run up another bill, charging women and drinks to his room and generally enjoying himself while he pretends to wait for word from his Panamanian contacts, and Chacón begins to make arrangements for Richardson to leave for Panama. But when the hotel bill comes due, the fool Richardson has it sent to Chacón himself for payment, Chacón, whom he now imagines as his patron. Mirá, Carolina, if you are going to smoke another cigarette, I’m going to light my pipe if you don’t mind.”

  He took a pinch of tobacco from the pouch and packed it into the bowl, then held a struck match over the bowl and puffed, drawing the flame several times into the bowl.

  “After a while,” he went on, shaking out the match, “Chacón begins to suspect that Richardson doesn’t know anything about the cocaine t
rade, and so he has him taken into custody again. Also, meanwhile, the American embassy learns that the addresses Richardson supplied are all false. There are no relatives in Philadelphia, and there are no friends. There is no record of a Ronald James or James Ronald Richardson’s having served in the American military at that time. He is not a veteran of the American war in Vietnam. No one knows who he is, or anything about him, only that he appeared to be an American, as he claimed, when the consular officer visited him in jail. And his face was on an expired driver’s license issued by the state of Hawaii. The political officer of the time thought that Richardson was, and I quote, ‘a lone drifter with mental problems, a small-time con man, perhaps fleeing a real or imagined legal problem, a nobody.’ An American nobody,” Leonel repeated, crossing out the word Richardson on his drawing.

  We sat in silence for a while, Leonel tapping the table with a pencil.

  “And then?”

  “And then, under orders of Colonel Chacón, Richardson was taken, along with a few political prisoners, for a short helicopter ride over the Pacific, and they were tossed alive into the sea.”

  “Why not just give him back to the Americans? This doesn’t make sense.”

  Leonel shrugged, removed his glasses, and rubbed his face with his palms, then, after wiping the lenses on his shirt, put the glasses back on.

  “I was told,” he said, “that Chacón gave the order dispassionately, that he was simply cleaning out his inbox, as they say, taking care of routine matters, and now it seems to be routine to dump political prisoners into the sea. I know that this is true because some of the bodies of the disappeared have washed up on our beaches. But Richardson? No. There’s been no sign of him.”

  His pencil rolled toward me, and the refrigerator hummed and went quiet.

  * * *

  —

  In the darkness of my room, in half sleep, the helicopter lifts, then hovers, a long green military gunship, and on the bedroom ceiling, whitewashed by headlights from passing cars, the rotor blades flicker and in the open door of the chopper, one man after another appears and is pushed into the air, with hands tied behind their backs, legs pumping as if they were riding bicycles, until even the legs are still, and, like corpses wrapped in cloth, they enter the water. The helicopter hovers awhile longer. A soldier in the doorway trains binoculars on the surface. When nothing is seen, he motions with his free hand and the chopper tilts back toward land. The rotors flap like playing cards clipped to the blades of a fan.

  * * *

  It was morning when I opened my eyes to the sound of the front door’s opening, closing, opening, closing again. I seemed to have fallen asleep in my clothes, so I leaped from the bed and hurried downstairs, nearly bumping into him.

  “Good morning, my dear!”

  He was now speaking in a feigned German accent.

  “It’s about time you got out of bed. First of all, I’m about to starve to death, and second, we have work to do.”

  He set a grocery bag on the counter and began unpacking bananas, a carton of eggs, milk, Cheerios, cheese, and a few jars.

  “I’m going to make breakfast,” he bellowed. “Do you have a small pan?”

  “Leonel.”

  “I’ve been out, as you see.”

  “Where are the girls?”

  “They’re with the rabbits. Do you have a spatula? I’m going to prepare one of my famous omelets. How do you work this thing?”

  “You have to turn the knob and listen for the clicks.”

  “Self-igniting. Very interesting.”

  The girls were again in the kitchen, holding the rabbits. I stood near the butcher-paper mural taped to the table and lit a cigarette.

  “You don’t make coffee by any chance, do you?” I asked him.

  “I could make you some. But not with this fancy coffeemaker. Sit down.”

  He sent the girls to return the rabbits to the hutch, and then set places for them on the mural and served them cereal and oranges before turning his attention to the butter foaming in the shallow pan and the beaten eggs. The girls returned and ate the cereal quickly, taking the oranges with them as they ran back outside.

  “We have to talk more about the Richardson case. There are things I haven’t told you.”

  From then on, he would refer to this story as the “Richardson case.”

  “Leonel, why do you care so much about this one American? You spend more time talking about him than anyone else, more than the priests, why do you care?”

  He set the omelet before me, perfectly folded, a delicate wallet of egg and melted cheese with a twist of pepper, and then returned to the stove to make another.

  “Interesting,” he said, with his back turned. “You’re not the first American who has asked me that.” Then, bringing his own plate to the table, and setting it on a drawing of a military base, he said, “Because of Chacón.”

  Perhaps, as was often the case, I looked puzzled to him, a bit blank or tired. Again, I wasn’t listening well enough, or couldn’t put the pieces together. Later he would learn the expression “Connect the dots” and we would do a great deal of dot connecting. So, by way of an explanation, he let fall to the table a few more pieces of his puzzle as he paced back and forth, perhaps to see if I was capable of assembling it myself:

  “Batalla de Girón. Bay of Pigs, 1961. The failed invasion of Cuba. CIA-trained mercenaries out in the cold. Soldiers of fortune, mobsters, gangsters, and guns for hire. Enter Chacón, one of the most corrupt senior officers in Salvadoran history. Chacón organizes his own paramilitary forces throughout the isthmus. The so-called Chacón Group. The White Warriors Union. Mano Blanca. Are you listening, Papu? You asked me to tell you about them. Chacón has those he kills butchered, ground up, and kept in a freezer to feed to his dogs. And he does other things. The U.S. government turns a blind eye as Chacón and his fellow officers steal American aid. They call this the cost of doing business. They say clichéd things like ‘He might be a bastard but he’s our bastard.’ Then something strange happens, a thing I hadn’t seen before . . .”

  He let this hang in the air or, rather, waited for all he had said to sink in, and as I started to gather the empty plates, he motioned for me to sit back down, then he carried the dishes to the sink, running them under water, reaching into the cupboard below for the soap, spreading a dish towel on the counter. He tucked in the flap at the top of the Cheerios, wrapped the cheese, and put it, along with the eggs, in the nearly empty fridge, then polished the counter with a dishcloth the same way I had seen him polish his van, circling methodically, “. . . and the strange thing was,” he said, “that I was able to get the American embassy interested in the Richardson case—I mean, beyond the consular section. They were willing to go beyond the usual pro forma—is that how you say it?—response. Maybe, I thought, it was because of this new human rights policy coming out of the White House, or the State Department—which I can tell you really pissed off the Salvadoran military. I don’t know, but that’s what I thought at first, that this was going to be a new day in American foreign policy. That we were going to be seeing a different kind of American animal.”

  He paused, seeming to realize that he was still wiping the counter. “Even I thought this. And I’m not a man easily fooled.”

  The phone might have rung, in my memory it is ringing, and it is Barbara, telling me that she will be back in two days, and how is everything? I wove the phone cord through my fingers and found myself trying to sound casual, as if I had been all this time alone grading papers, trying to write, and eating Cantonese takeout from paper cartons, but getting something done, and yes, everything is fine, yes, I’ll see you then. As for the books, the soup bowl filled with cigarette butts, the paper-covered table, the van in the driveway with its hood open and Leonel now bent over its engine, and as for the girls who had built a house for the rabbits under the table, covering the dinin
g chairs with bath towels, perhaps the less said. I would tell her about it when I saw her, and if she arrived while they were still here, well, she would see for herself. I hoped that they’d be gone. I didn’t want to have to explain what had transpired during the past few days.

  “Okay,” she said. “You sound a little strange. Are you feeling all right?”

  “I’ve been grading papers.”

  “Get some sleep,” she said.

  Leonel had spread a chamois at the edge of the raised hood and laid a small, open toolbox there. The tools were arranged by size, tucked into their respective slots. Most toolboxes I had seen in my life, my father’s, for example, were gaping, tiered, and jumbled collections of screwdrivers, monkey wrenches, and pliers through which one rummaged for something not usually found.

  “Well,” he went on from beneath the hood, “both the American ambassador and the political officer tried to find out what had happened to Richardson and to get the State Department to push the issue with the Salvadoran government. They really tried,” he said, pressing a metric wrench into its slot. “Or I think they did. The ambassador at that time was a Republican newspaper publisher, appointed to his post by your President Ford. The political officer was a career foreign service man—one of those best and brightest types, as you people say, one who joined during the Kennedy administration and thought he was going to do something good with his life. Well. Guess what happened? Take a guess.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Very good. That’s right. Nothing. Do you happen to have a rag or piece of cloth I can ruin? A paper napkin would be good.”

  He wiped the dipstick across the rag I found for him in the garage, left there by the previous tenant.

  “Nothing. Yes. Carter gets into office, and you know, every new president has the right to make his own diplomatic appointments, so when Carter is inaugurated, the ambassadors from all over the world automatically submit their resignations. Some of these aren’t accepted, and those ambassadors continue in place. But some of the resignations are picked up, and in those instances, the ambassador is out. Gone. Replaced. Guess who was among the first of the ambassadors to have his resignation accepted by Carter, even though the administration knew, and of course the State Department knew, that the Richardson case was active, and they knew why? Guess.”