What You Have Heard Is True

by Carolyn Forche

  Some mornings I walked in the village, past the morning glories shivering on the wall alongside the torrente, the houses closed up and silent with only the tienda door open, a little grotto of a shop that sold eggs, lemons, goats’ milk, and pastries. The only people I saw along the street were the widows, walking in pairs in their long black dresses, carrying baskets of lemons or eggs. If I greeted them, they nodded, and walked past in a cloud of quietness. Of those I met that summer on Mallorca, I most wanted to know who these women were and what had happened to them. In their dried faces and onyx eyes I saw my grandmother, back from the dead but no longer knowing me.

  I walked alone among the twisted olives, or climbed the tamped goat paths up the Teix until the sea was visible, and the calla, as they called the stony inlet where the fishermen put in, and where we sometimes swam in the afternoons. Maya liked to sit on the wet rocks there while her other friends dived into the icy waters and emerged, shaking their long, wet pennants of hair and laughing at how cold it was. I felt myself invisible, perched beside Maya, watching the red-fleshed German bathers make their precarious way over the stones, and the willowy younger women remove their tops and walk with arms raised into the sea.

  I might always have thought myself invisible, and I wasn’t sure why, but it had by now become a comfortable state—not to be part of what was going on but to be outside, watching and listening. Once as I stood in an orchard, a sirocco arrived from the Libyan desert, shaking the almonds as wildly as if it were winter and the blossoms were snow, or a flock of snow geese had suddenly risen to fly north. I could barely breathe for the blossoms, and felt a surge of joy in my heart.

  Sometimes I wrote on the terrace at C’an Blau, at the little table under the bougainvillea, the sun having risen on this side of the island, goat bells clanking in the heat, goats hidden beneath the olives below. The tiles were still wet from the daily mopping by the maid, and I watched the water shrink from them, with no words coming from my pen. I was blank then, as my mother’s eyes had been on certain afternoons in summer. This was all right, I told myself, and then I would write: the sirocco comes, a wind without beginning and proverbs I’d read such as the dead open the eyes of the living. The lines of poetry seemed to come from elsewhere, from someone else.

  Before I left, Maya stuffed an old, empty olive-oil bottle with special amulets for my protection: pebbles from the calla, a string of beads she was giving me, some pressed flowers. This bottle, she said, was a tradition on Mallorca. It would bring luck and blessings on my future life, which Maya much hoped would be an enchanting one, lived in some beautiful city, with poetry and music and most of all with a love who was a grand passion, this last in her perfect French. I couldn’t fit the bottle into my already-overstuffed suitcase, so she offered to mail it to me, by slow mail, by boat, and it would arrive, she said, just as I was settling in again to the daily life of teaching, and it would remind me that much else was possible.

  The bottle was lost in the mail. If it had arrived, perhaps things would have gone differently.

  Shortly after my first meeting with Margarita, there was an automobile accident on a remote stretch of road outside the city. Leonel somehow received word of this, and he told me that Margarita’s aunt had been in the passenger seat. When we arrived at the accident site, there were no police. It was dark, but Leonel had brought a flashlight with him, saying he wanted to investigate, and as the automobile was still there, with its spiderwebbed windshield and accordion-folded hood, this was the best time to do it, before any police arrived, and when I asked why there was only one wrecked car here, he acknowledged that this was a good question. The other vehicle must have left. The other vehicle would also have been pretty badly damaged. But the other driver would still be alive to drive away. Obviously.

  Leonel bent down near the car, planting his boots in the crushed glass.

  “Get me the keys,” he said, “the keys from the ignition, could you reach in and get them for me?”

  The driver’s door was crumpled but the passenger side was open. I couldn’t see, because Leonel had the flashlight, but he pointed it helpfully toward the open door, and leaning on the wet seat, I took out the keys.

  “I have them.”

  Leonel studied the tread marks in front of the wreck, not this vehicle’s marks but the other’s. He knelt again and ran his flashlight across the undercarriage, raised the hood, and shone the light on the engine, then tested the lug nuts on each wheel. We stayed quite a while, but by the time we left, the police still hadn’t yet arrived.

  “They must be busy with other things,” Leonel said, “they don’t have time for car accidents it seems, even fatal ones.”

  He had removed items from the car: a plastic tote bag, a small toy that had hung from the mirror. “Take these with you,” he said, “but give me the keys.” When I asked again what we were doing, he said we were trying to find out what happened.

  “And did we? Find out what happened?”

  “No. But we did learn that the police aren’t interested in this. They are busy with other matters, or they aren’t interested for another reason.”

  There was blood on my clothes but I didn’t know this until Margarita saw me in the bluish light of the hospital entrance. Her dress was also splotched with blood, perhaps from pressing herself against the gurney used to roll her relative’s corpse into the morgue. I held the tote bag out to her, containing the toy and some other things that I no longer remember, but she stepped back and held me at arm’s length.

  “You are—all right, Carolyn?” she asked in halting English, looking down at my bloodstained clothes.

  Other people had arrived and were pulling Margarita toward them, embracing and surrounding her, while Leonel stayed off to the side, speaking quietly with one man after another until he came to my side and said it was time to go.

  “I’m taking you to Margarita’s. She’ll be there later.”

  I had been watching the triage from the entrance, and it seemed that I had gone backward in time. Some of the nurses were Catholic sisters and wore traditional habits while the other nurses still wore starched white uniforms with white caps pinned to their hair. These caps had always reminded me of the sails of toy boats, and that would mean that the very air of the hospital corridor, of the nursing station, of emergency and triage, was a sea of something. Apprehension. Bodies under sheets. A sea of suffering.

  “Papu, what? We have to go now.”

  * * *

  “Does Margarita want me to stay with her? You’re sure? I don’t want to go unless . . .”

  “It’s okay. She was touched that you came tonight.”

  That night, he was driving an old pickup, finding his way through the darkened streets where people slept on flattened cardboard near rippled security gates. A few vendors were still selling their wares, and others were moving about as radio music came and went or a tarp wall fluttered. We drove in silence until he said that we had to pick up someone first, and then he would take me to Margarita’s house.

  “Margarita will be there by then. She will show you some things. I have to be away for a while.”

  “But where are you going?”

  “Papu. Don’t ask things like that. If I could tell you, I would.”

  After a time, he pulled to the curb under a sodium lamp that sprayed its cone of light to the walk, where a beautiful woman in a black dress stood. Leonel opened the driver’s side door and climbed out. They stood close together, talking in the light, before she climbed into the truck from his side and sat between us, nodding to me, then turning toward Leonel, who was now at the wheel again. The truck filled with the light scent of jasmine, and the woman leaned close to him, her hand resting on his thigh.

  “Y mil besos!” she whispered. Leonel laughed and said something I didn’t understand, and they continued speaking in low voices, one and then the other, until we arrived in the colonia where Mar
garita lived.

  “Carolyn, I will see you in a few days. Get some rest. Do some writing.”

  He called me by my given name in a voice slightly raised and businesslike, with instructions about resting and writing, as if these amounted to the same thing and could be accomplished at the same time, and gave not so much as a name for this beautiful, fragrant woman in the whispering dress.

  “Margarita’s maid is just there,” he said, nodding toward a woman at the gate with her hands in her apron. “She will let you inside. So. Take care. Ciao.”

  “Ciao,” I said, climbing from the truck in my bloodied, disheveled clothes, with the rucksack and bag slung one on each shoulder, trying to sound nonchalant. “A few days, then.”

  “Do you want some coffee?” Margarita asked, after showing me the room where I would stay, the bath I would use, the towels, and the way the louvers opened and closed.

  “You don’t need a key,” she added, “the maids are always here to let you in or out.”

  “Coffee, thank you, if it isn’t too much trouble,” I answered, settling on the couch. Anything to keep her here, I thought, to learn something, anything, about her, about Leonel, and anything not to be left alone, and for what would probably be more than a few days.

  Margarita told the younger of the two maids to bring us coffee and then, smoothing her skirt, sat on the chair near the couch and lifted a silver case from the glass table.

  “Do you smoke?”

  “Yes,” I said, “a bit too much, in fact.”

  “You would like one?”

  There was a lighter on the table, also silver, and she held it to me and then to herself.

  “So, Carolyn, tell me. What are you doing here? Do you know where you are?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “What am I doing in El Salvador?”

  “Look, Carolyn, I don’t know what is your relationship with Leonel and I don’t want to know, but our situation is dangerous, do you understand?”

  “Relationship? I’m not in any relationship with Leonel. He’s . . .”

  “No? You are not? Then why do you look—so upset when you arrived here tonight?”

  “Did I? I didn’t mean to look upset.”

  Margarita exhaled her smoke and tapped her ash. The young maid brought a tray of coffee cups and saucers, a bowl of sugar cubes, little tongs for the sugar, a pitcher of cream, and set it down without rattling the cups. Margarita poured the coffee from the pot.

  “Sugar?” she asked. “Cream? Or you prefer milk?”

  “Margarita, I’m really grateful to stay with you. I hope we didn’t get off to a bad start. And I’m so sorry about your aunt.”

  “Listen to me, Carolyn. I’m going to try to explain you.”

  That is how our Spanglish developed, with Margarita’s artful and improvised English interwoven with my poor command of her language.

  Explain me, I thought to myself, good luck.

  “You have to be aware here, very aware, but more important, you have to be your own person. You have to think for yourself, do you understand? Leonel is very intelligent but he is working alone. He has his own—his own project. This is dangerous, Carolyn. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

  I nodded and drew on my cigarette. Margarita appeared surprised.

  “You do? You are sure?” Then, leaning forward so she could speak in a low voice, “Listen. There are some things I must ask of you. Please don’t tell anyone where I live, or that you are staying here with me. Don’t tell anyone that you know me, and don’t bring people here. And please, if you are going to do something with the project of Leonel, I should not know about it.”

  “Of course.”

  “And your clothes, give them to Alma. She will clean them. And in the morning, she will give you breakfast. I am going now upstairs to say good night to my girls. Maybe I see you tomorrow.”

  “Margarita? May I ask you something? There was a woman with Leonel—”

  Margarita appeared irritated. “You want to know who she is? Is that what you want? I told you. Be your own person.”

  The maid, Alma, came to get the tray and Margarita whispered something to her while gesturing toward me. Alma nodded. She would appear a short while later at my door to take the bloodied clothes.

  I lay in that room awake in the dark the first of many nights, with the guest bed pushed against the wall, beneath the louvered window opposite a half-empty closet with its doors open, books and papers stacked and jutting from the bookcase, painted figures on the top shelf: a peasant woman with a market basket on her head, a replica of the blue city bus painted with flowers, a cross on the wall with a bright, primary-colored village in the place of the crucified Christ. I should go home, I thought. No. There is no relationship. This has nothing to do with him. There was already a man in my life, even though I hadn’t seen him for months. Or there was no one, and that was just as well. It was Leonel’s secrecy that bothered me, I reasoned, not the fact that he may or may not be with someone.

  From time to time I thought I heard a sound, just beyond my window. Headlights passed over the walls. The telephone rang in another room without being answered. When I woke, a door was slamming behind children’s voices and shortly thereafter car doors, and then an engine started up.

  “I am bringing the girls to school,” she had written on a note left on the dining table set for breakfast: tortillas wrapped in a cloth, already-poured juice, a pot of coffee. As soon as I sat down, Alma brought the rest: white cheese, black beans, a papaya cut in half and filled with slices of lime. She poured the coffee for me.

  “Thank you, yes, I have everything, muchas gracias.”

  There was a clatter of dishware in the kitchen, and from the street occasional voices, dogs barking, motor scooters, and horns. I wondered what time it was, even what day. I scooped the beans and cheese with a bit of tortilla and ate.

  By the time Margarita came back, I had wandered the house, studied the bookshelves, sat on the various chairs and sofas, taken off my shoes, and slipped through the sliding glass door into the garden, where birds of paradise spiked against the walls and coral bougainvillea climbed them. That is where I was when Margarita found me.

  “¿Qué tal, Carolyn?” She touched my shoulder, leaning forward to kiss the air near my cheek.

  “Fine,” I said. “I’m fine, and you?”

  “You had breakfast? You would like something else?”

  She was different this morning in the way she held herself, relaxed and younger seeming, not much older than I was.

  “I have to go to La UCA, the Catholic university. Would you like to come with me?”

  “Yes I would! I mean—yes.”

  “Good, we’ll go. But first I will show you something.”

  Her manner toward me had somehow changed during the night.

  We wove through San Salvador in the exhaust of trucks, through barrios and past open markets, shut security gates, open shops and shacks, cook fires and roasting grates for corn, and in those days, cántaros that were still made of clay and seemed to float on the women’s heads without tipping as if they were weightless. The women also carried baskets of live hens, and beside them their children, half clothed and barefoot, faces streaked, noses running, held or didn’t hold on to their mothers or sisters, and there were skinny dogs hoping not to be noticed, spilled wash water on the street, blankets spread with vendors’ wares, and all across the walls, acronyms written in black and red from spray cans: FPL, BPR, ERP, RN, FAPU, FECCAS-UTC.

  There were whole words as well: ¡Cesen la represión! ¡La lucha continúa! Stop the repression. The struggle goes on. Then a bullhorn broke through the honking buses and traffic, shouts and radios, a voice bellowing something over and over.

  “That is nothing, Carolina—an advertisement.”

  Like the knife sharpener’s cry, I wrote in my
notebook, or vendors calling out prices for vegetables in the market, a litany of prices. She had called me by the Spanish version of my name.

  Margarita smoked even while driving and drove in the same manner as Leonel, always looking about and many times into the rearview mirror, but there was no weapon between us. We were on the outskirts approaching the Catholic university, La UCA, as she called it, when Margarita saw something and slowed the van: a group of fifty or so campesinos standing in line, waiting for something—men in straw hats carrying gourds and machetes, women with aprons over their trousers and skirts, holding baskets or cántaros, children surrounding them, waiting in line.

  “Something has happened. Do you see them, Carolina? They rarely come into the city, so something has happened.”

  “Do you want to stop?”

  “We cannot,” she said emphatically. “I will explain. But we must tell someone that they are here.”

  She drove slowly past, then turned toward the campus still checking the mirror, expertly shifting and working the clutch.

  “You must get a camera, Carolina. And you must write things.”

  “I have a camera,” I said, taking the Olympus from my bag to show her, “and I have a notebook. But I’m no photographer. And I’m not a journalist either.”