What You Have Heard Is True

by Carolyn Forche

  The highlands were fog wrapped from a distance, and as it was January, the coffee harvest was still in progress, although coming to an end. Harvesters were among the coffee trees, pulling the last of the coffee cherries into the canastas tied at their waists. When these canastas were filled, these cherries were poured into a sack that the harvester dragged behind her, and when the sack was full, the coffee would be weighed and the harvester paid so many centavos for each tarea of coffee, almost nothing, Leonel explained, downshifting around a curve, filling the silence that still hung between us.

  “It has always been almost nothing—nothing and a tortilla. Maybe. And you know, it wouldn’t have gone as well if you had known any more than you did,” referring to our visit with Medrano. And then he asked if I knew when coffee consumption had begun, and for a moment I saw the Leonel who had visited me in California.

  Without waiting for an answer, he shouted over the engine: “In the fifteenth century in the Sufi shrines of Yemen.”

  “No, I didn’t know that.”

  “Well, then, there might be other things you don’t know. Such as when these sons of bitches interrogate someone, they tie the man to a chair, put his hand on a table, cut off one of his fingers, and they flush it down a toilet before asking the first question.”

  He glanced at me, barely taking his eyes from the road. I tried not to react.

  “And our Colonel Chacón has a friend he works with, and this friend claims to be a doctor but I don’t know. The doctor injects the spine of a victim with anesthetic, then he slices through the person’s abdomen with a scalpel, reaches in, and starts pulling out guts while the person is conscious and can see what is happening. And then the colonel gets to his first question.”

  “All right,” I said. “All right.”

  Pushing a cassette into the player, he asked if I minded music.

  “This is Silvio Rodríguez,” he said. “In one of these songs he is singing to poets from a fishing boat named after the landing place for the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961. Playa Girón, Bahía de Cochinos. As I told you in San Diego, the CIA sent fifteen hundred armed Cuban exiles to fight against the new regime of Fidel Castro. That little war lasted seventy-two hours—what?”

  “I’m not sure I’m following you.”

  “Chacón! The man I’m telling you about, who chops off fingers and has people disemboweled? Where do you think he gets his foot soldiers? It has been sixteen years since the Bay of Pigs and those Cubans are still angry, and if they can’t overthrow Fidel, they’ll work for any hijo de la gran puta who hates Communists.” Any son of a whore.

  Silvio Rodríguez sang plaintively from the dashboard. One thing did not have much to do with another at this moment. I didn’t fully understand the lyrics, but in this song Rodríguez seemed to be asking poets how to write about a fishing boat named Playa Girón, without sounding sentimental or political. To be fair, he seemed also to be asking musicians and historians how they would sing about such a boat or write the history of the men who defended Cuba at Playa Girón. The music went well with the wind, the afternoon light, and Leonel’s angry history lesson—Leonel whose single refrain had been, until now, that war is coming. It was much like riding in an open convertible with someone close on a cloudless day, wrapped in wind and music, except that I was with a near stranger in a jeep listening to a revolutionary song, with a gun in the well of the gear shift.

  “Where are we going?” I asked, raising my voice above the wind.

  “I’m taking you to see how most people live. Most people in the world.”

  He coasted to a stop along the gravel shoulder toward a roadside stand and when he returned, he was carrying what appeared to be two wooden balls with straws stuck into them.

  “Peace offering, Forché,” he said, handing me one. “Coconut milk. Why don’t you get out and stretch your legs? We still have a way to go.”

  He was talking to the coconut vendor, as he seemed to talk with people almost everywhere he went. The coconuts were not the hairy kinds one sees in supermarkets in California—they were pale and smooth like wood, piled into pyramids beside the stand. The vendor was a small man, almost skeletal. He took off his straw hat as I approached, then opened another coconut with his machete in one slice of the blade and handed it to Leonel. He took mine and hacked it into a few pieces.

  “So you can get at the meat,” Leonel offered. “Try it.”

  “Yo no sé,” the man was saying, “ha sido muy tranquilo.” It’s been quiet.

  “Gracias, compa,” Leonel said, tapping the vendor’s shoulder. To call someone compa, or the longer form compañero, meant something, I would later learn.

  “Who was that? You seemed to know each other.”

  “Oh, just someone. A friend.”

  “Why be so mysterious? You always seem to be hiding something, even when it’s as simple as buying a coconut. Why don’t you answer questions?”

  We had turned onto a dirt road and I had to hang on to the side bar as we rocked into deep grooves and swerved to avoid protruding boulders.

  “Maybe we should have lesson number two. Please don’t ask me who people are. They wouldn’t want me to tell you.”

  “Lesson number three,” I said, “you don’t have to condescend. I’m not stupid.”

  “That isn’t lesson three. Lesson three has nothing to do with you.”

  * * *

  Thickets of banana palm, bamboo, and ceiba walled the roadside, and a hard white sun wetted the leaves. The jeep engine was the only sound, and there was no wind. We went on and on, bouncing, downshifting, lunging from side to side to avoid the deepest holes. The silence between us was coming now from me. There’s something wrong here, I remember thinking. I thought this often in those first days. I was guessing that it was Leonel’s reticence and seeming dishonesty. Where was the affable man who had taken such pains to describe things, the man who had bent over butcher paper for hours, illustrating his monologues with pen sketches? Now, he seemed to be hiding something.

  He stopped the jeep in the middle of the road.

  “Papu, what are you seeing?”

  “What do you mean? A road. Trees.”

  He put the jeep into reverse and began backing up.

  “What are you doing?”

  He kept backing up.

  “No, really, Leonel, did we miss a turn?”

  His arm was around the back of my seat, and he was facing behind us into the wedge of dust that followed the jeep as would the wake of a ship. Then he stopped, just like that, in the middle of nowhere.

  “Okay, we will try this again. When you see something besides trees, tell me and I’ll stop.”

  We drove slowly forward, so slowly that the jeep seemed to be struggling.

  Then I saw, through a sparse stand of corn stalks, a glint of metal, and what appeared to be a rubber tire, and finally a shack with walls made from the corrugated metal used for security gates. “Lámina,” I would learn it was called, a beautiful word I would write in my notebook, perhaps someday to use in a poem. Farther along, there was a cluster of shacks that appeared to have walls made from newspaper, could that be so? Palm leaves hung over the other shacks that were made of woven twigs. Then, although I hadn’t seen them the first time we drove up the road, the shacks were everywhere among the trees.

  “Wait. I see dwellings, I think.”

  “Dwellings,” he repeated, as if this word were new to him. “Those are champas. Okay. What else? Maybe we should get out and walk a little, don’t you think? I know someone in this caserío.”

  “Walk?”

  There was no place to pull over, and perhaps it didn’t matter as there was no one else here, or so I thought. He took a canteen out of the back and motioned for me to follow him. Now I saw a little path leading from the ditch into the trees. He pushed the palms aside, ducked under a branch, and went
in, with me following behind. I smelled smoke and thought I heard chickens. The water swished as the canteen banged against his hip. A twig or something on the path snapped, and we were in a little clearing. A mud-splotched child with a ballooned belly was peeking out from the opening of one of the shacks, but quickly darted back inside, and an old woman emerged, wiping her hands on her apron. I didn’t see anyone else, but I did hear another child’s voice. The woman nodded at Leonel but her expression was solemn, not so much afraid as wary. He was speaking with her and gesturing toward me, but I wasn’t close enough to hear, and their voices were low. She nodded again and he called out: “It’s okay, you can go inside. Josita invites you.”

  The woman was going through the opening in the champa, her house, turning to see if I was following behind her.

  “She invites you,” he repeated.

  I entered the small, mud-walled room, where she offered me a stool and a metal cup of water, smiling, her hair tied back, her eyes bathed in a light that had no source other than within her.

  Gracias, I whispered, thanking her for the cup, but I didn’t want to drink this water.

  A packed mud floor, I later wrote, well swept. Two walls made of twigs, two of mud bricks, a roof half lámina, half open to the air where clothes are hung to dry. Against the far wall, a grate with an open wood fire, a winding scarf of smoke rising to a hole in the ceiling, pots hanging on the walls and stacked beside the pit, a broom, a big flat stone, light coming through the twigs and pooling down through the hanging clothes, a basin filled with some kind of whitish-yellow mush on the floor.

  She sat next to me on another low stool. Light also fell onto the floor between us from a hole in the lámina roof. She rested her blue-rivered hands on her apron.

  “Pues . . . ,” she began, and told me some kind of story in a soft-pebbled Spanish, something I didn’t understand but for a few words: hijo, muerto, esposo, montaña, Dios mío. These were all the puzzle pieces she gave: son, dead, husband, mountain, my God. She took from her apron pocket a small card on which was printed a replica of a painted portrait of Jesus as a fair-skinned young man with long, dark-blond hair. Señor, she whispered, Señor, Señor. This is what she called Jesus. Then she let silence take the place of everything, setting her dark eyes upon mine for a good while without letting go, her blazing eyes. After a few moments of this she smiled again, revealing that she had no upper teeth and, still holding my gaze, nodded that she was finished. I nodded back.

  “¡Vaya con Dios!” she said as I ducked through the doorway. I didn’t know what to say back, so I turned to her and touched my heart with the fingers of my right hand.

  “Por favor,” Leonel said, and then seemed to be telling the woman that I had to relieve myself. To me he said: “Go to the toilet. Josita will show you.”

  “But I don’t have to,” I said in English.

  “You’d better. You won’t get another chance for a while. Go ahead.”

  I followed her through the trees. The stench reached me before the sight of two boards placed over a pit. The woman showed me that I was to put one foot on each board, squat down and, when I felt steady, relieve myself in the opening. She pointed to a stack of dry leaves, smiled encouragingly, and left. The waste in the pit was jeweled with green flies and I found myself unable to stand on the boards, but neither could I take my eyes from the pit, as I was far off, again in my own childhood in Michigan, having gone to play where it was forbidden to play, with the children who lived behind the scrim of poplar and birch that marked our property line, where the Joneses and the Keens lived in their tar-paper and cinder-block shacks, and behind those shacks, there were dollhouses or playhouses, as we called them, and in fact we used to play in them, but they were also called half-moon houses—outhouses—benches with oval holes sawn into them, covered by wooden lids that when raised revealed deep wells of feces and paper, lye and darkness, but there were benches, and the hole was deep, and it was possible to sit down rather than squat while balancing on wooden planks, listening to the drone of flies, and I remember as a child wondering if the flies ate the feces, and if not, why were they hovering so attentively over the pit? I stepped back and stood in the dead air. My mother was not calling me. It was Leonel.

  “Papu? Is everything okay?”

  He was somewhere behind me.

  I don’t think I answered him then but remember turning around and finding him back in the clearing when again he asked if I was okay.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Okay, then, listen to me. There’s a young man who lives here sometimes. He’s Josita’s nephew. Anyway, this young man hasn’t been seen for a while and it seems that people here are worried, so we are going to see what we can find out. I’m going to do what I can, but I also have to get back to San Salvador.

  “Okay,” I said, wondering what this had to do with me.

  “Which means we have to stay until tomorrow.”

  “Here?”

  “No. Somewhere else. Nearby.”

  Josita came out of a champa, holding a naked toddler on her hip. Was she the grandmother? He said no, she was the grandmother’s mother. The grandmother is about thirty-five years old, he said, and the mother is fifteen. He’s known this family for a long time, and the missing boy too, he’s known him since before he was born, since he was in his mother’s womb, he said. “We have to help.”

  When had he begun to say “we”? I couldn’t remember another time, so as part of this “we,” I asked where everyone else was, as there seemed to be no one here but the elderly and the babies.

  “The others had to go to another place to sleep, up the mountain. It isn’t safe here for them.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just that it isn’t safe. And I’m tired,” he said. “I shouldn’t be tired so early. I need to eat something. And I need to think.”

  He unscrewed the canteen’s cap, took a long drink, wiped the opening on his sleeve, and handed it to me. The water was surprisingly cold.

  Again we drove, and for a long way, until a glittering lake appeared on my side of the road and then I think we were in the town of Chalatenango.

  “I have a doctor friend,” he said. “She works in the hospital here, and it was always part of my plan that you should spend some time with her. She’s a good woman, and you wouldn’t believe the conditions under which she practices medicine. By the way, would you like to go for pupusas? I’m so hungry I could eat a goddamn goat.”

  In the bluish light of a crowded pupusería, a stack of pupusas with the slaw called curtido was set down on a platter between us. I ate one pupusa, and Leonel the rest. We both drank orange sodas after he told me that it was not that he didn’t like beer, but he couldn’t afford to drink alcohol of any kind, as he had to keep his wits about him.

  “I don’t mind it for others,” he said, “but I can’t work with people who drink. I cannot trust them.”

  “And cigarettes?” I asked. “What about those?”

  “That’s up to you. They’re bad for your health, but the only time they present danger here is when there is a need to be invisible in the dark.”

  “Tell me about Josita’s nephew.”

  He looked puzzled for a moment.

  “Oh,” he said. “That’s not her real name. I didn’t realize who it was you were asking me about.”

  “The missing boy.”

  “Yes, well, several things could have happened. He might have been captured. He might have gone up to the mountain. He might have run off with some girlfriend, I don’t know.”

  Something prompted him to say: “I don’t think it’s about the girlfriend. We’ll see. I just hope he’s not dead. I hope they didn’t kill him. And if they did, I hope it was quick.”

  “They?”

  “Mirá, it is dangerous here, very dangerous, especially in this region, but also in other areas. About the only
place it isn’t so dangerous right now is in La Unión. We’ll be going there because there is something I want you to see, but for the moment we have to focus on this so-called human rights visit.”

  “Why ‘so-called’?”

  “Because I’m not sure, as I told you before, about these people, and I’m not sure that the outcome will have anything to do with human rights. By the way, what did you see in that village where we stopped?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m asking you what you saw, your observations.”

  “The people seemed very poor. The houses were made of mud and twigs, and things you would find in a dump. The woman’s champa was kept clean and orderly, given the circumstances. The child appeared to be malnourished. And the pit . . .” I stopped. I had torn the Styrofoam water cup into little scraps.

  “At this moment,” he said, taking up where I left off, “eighty percent of the country lives that way, without a decent place to take a shit. The small amount of land they might once have had has been carved up over generations. They don’t have enough to feed themselves. They are forced into illiteracy by lack of education. Their life expectancy is about forty-seven years for the men, slightly more for the women. I told you that one in five children dies before the age of five, mostly of dehydration caused by dysentery and also by diseases like measles. These kids don’t get vaccinated for anything. Their drinking water is polluted. Average household income is about four hundred dollars a year. A year. And one more thing: Most of them work from dawn to dusk.”

  I might have been looking around the pupusería because he added: “You won’t see many campesinos in here. They can’t afford this. The people in here work in machine shops or some other goddamn thing. These are urban people, the luckier ones. Barrio people.”

  “Leonel? Do you mind if I smoke?”

  “Go ahead. It won’t help.”

  “Is this a lecture?” I asked, pulling one of my last cigarettes from the pack.

  “I would call it a briefing. I prefer that you find things out for yourself, but sometimes it’s just more efficient if I give you the context. The people in your embassy will tell you, when you meet them, that you must view conditions here in a context. What they mean is that poverty in countries such as this should be considered to be normal, the way of the world, something that cannot be helped. They will ask you how many so-called Third World countries you have visited, so as to suggest that there is nothing special about this one, and also to imply that you are naïve. They will tell you to view the situation of El Salvador in context, so that is what I hope I have provided.”