What You Have Heard Is True

by Carolyn Forche

  He hoisted one bag, then another into the back of the jeep, duffel after duffel, and despite having so much with me this time, I was waved through customs without so much as a glance.

  “Jesus Christ, Papu, what have you got in here?”

  “Supplies.”

  “Don’t I feed you enough?”

  “They’re for Vicky. Only the blue one is mine.”

  “How much time do you have?”

  “Two weeks.”

  Now we were shouting over the engine, the traffic, the wind flap of canvas, and I was back, as if I hadn’t been away, and as before we were driving somewhere known only to him. Things have changed since you were here, he told me over the engine noise. Many more people have disappeared, and many more have turned up dead, and if you want to find a corpse, people say to watch for vultures or schoolchildren as both are drawn to corpses, and it’s time not to be seen in certain places with certain people, and to remember always and everywhere that they are listening, they are watching with many eyes and ears, and at night, especially at night when people think they are safe in their beds, well, that is no time to relax anymore because any moment they might come and break your door down and drag you out and shove you into a Jeep Cherokee with black windows or a panel truck and that would be it and you don’t want me to tell you how the end will come.

  In those days, the people I knew in the city moved around, house to house, never staying long in one place or traveling by the same means or route. No one was known by his or her given name, and several had taken more than one pseudonym: a woman I knew as Ana someone else knew as Carmen; Roberto became Mario and then Balthazar; and I knew even less about Leonel’s whereabouts, or what names he was known by, but as I was later to learn, he was called El Gordo by one faction of the guerrillas because they regarded him as fat. He knew my precise whereabouts most of the time.

  “You will always have a person,” he’d said, “a contact, a compañera, and you’re to stay close with this person. You might spend the morning with the nuns, the afternoon with Margarita, then Rene, Alfredo, but as often as I can, I will be there, and if something ever happens, I will find you. If by some chance you are taken, talk. Right away. Say anything. Say everything. It’s a myth that people don’t talk under torture. We know what you know, and we can take care of ourselves. Unless this happens, you will be all right. If you get scared, go to the hotel Camino Real where the journalists stay, but always, always let someone know where you are, at all times, so I will know. ¿Vos entendés?”

  Did I understand these instructions? Yes. But the full nature of our situation, its precariousness, the invisible guillotine blade that hung above us, no. When I worried that his life was in danger, he would say yes, yours too, everyone’s, but what matters is to work, to bring the sin to the eye, to make many acts of denunciation, large and small, to get word to the world and to arouse conscience, this is what matters, and fate will decide which of us survives, fate or God if there is a God, but not us. We don’t get to decide. And by the way, in my opinion, he said, there is no God, but we could help our chances a little by following some basic principles, and these he spelled out, drilling them into me whenever there was a free moment between his monologues of endless analysis.

  On three occasions things would go wrong, but, as he would remind me years later, all three times I hadn’t followed the rules.

  When I awake, there is a chink of raw sun coming through a break in the lámina, and the yellowed newspapers that serve to cover the window openings aren’t flapping as they did during the night. It is too still for that. The animals’ brays, grunts, and barks that woke me earlier are now quiet. The hammock tied to posts across the room is no longer spread like an open wing, holding the sleeping mound of someone already asleep when we arrived. I was not given a hammock for myself, but rather a more comfortable bed, a pallet raised from the ground and covered with flat-woven rugs. Pallets are the hardest beds I have slept upon, but I did sleep without waking until the rooster crowed and scratched the ground, tilted his head, and with his quizzical, black bead of an eye seemed to ask what I was doing here. A village pig also came to the hammock. I heard and smelled the pig before I saw it.

  I went deep under the rugs, which smelled of smoke. That morning I had asked Leonel again what he was doing, why he had brought me here, and I thought he would give his usual answer having to do with educating a poet, or he would say that his reason had evolved over time, but this time he had another answer.

  “I’m learning to imagine being a North American,” he said. “In order to think in a certain way one must learn how to enter the mind of another, as a guest to be sure, but to feel another’s reality from within. I’m not studying you,” he said, “I’m learning you, and you could use your time here to learn what it is to be Salvadoran, to become that young woman over there who bore her first child at thirteen and who spends all of her days sorting tobacco leaves according to their size. Now that would be an education.”

  Leonel thought it might be a good idea for me to pay more visits to the U.S. embassy, or at least to be seen coming and going from there, so he arranged for me to meet with the health programs officer. I believe that was her title. He wanted me to ask her about U.S. aid to El Salvador in the area of human health. I was again on U.S. territory, and even the air felt carpeted.

  “We do have some excellent programs,” she began, smiling, “the most important being a promotional program designed to encourage campesinos to use their local facilities.”

  “Hospitals and clinics?”

  “Well, yes.”

  I remembered that, according to Dr. Vicky, the people passing by her hospital could hear screams coming from the operating room. They were afraid to come here, she’d said. I wondered what sort of promotional program would remedy that.

  “Have you visited the local health facilities?”

  The health programs officer patted her stiff hair and stared at me.

  “The clinics,” I prodded as gently as I could. “Have you visited them?”

  “Well, there are only so many hours in a day, and as you can see, I have plenty of work to do right here at my desk.”

  It was true. Her desk was stacked with papers, bound and loose, some in manila folders, the topmost marked CLASSIFIED. There were no personal photographs to link her to any other life. Her nameplate was such that it could be slid from its holder and replaced by the name of someone else.

  “We also have programs for population control and latrinization,” she said.

  Perhaps the look on my face prompted her to elaborate, so she added: “To provide condoms to men and also latrines to the rural areas to help prevent contamination of groundwater.”

  She handed me leaflets for these programs, with cartoon instructions for how to put on a condom and how to set up and use a latrine. There were no words to accompany the cartoons.

  The U.S. embassy was located in the city then. When Leonel took me there, he preferred to wait outside in his jeep or the Hiace, parked on a side street. He would read while he waited, usually a magazine, especially the ones he asked me to bring him from the States, having to do with marksmanship and racing cars. It must have been May when I met with the health programs officer, because the Formula One Grand Prix at Monaco was one of his consuming interests at the time, and most especially he hoped that this race would be televised in El Salvador.

  He had advised me always to walk slowly out of the embassy, to stop just outside the fence and look around, as if making sure of something.

  “Pretend that you are taking precautions against being followed or watched.”

  “Am I?”

  “Of course not, my dear! Remember the symphony of illusion. One of the reasons I bring you here is so that you can be seen going and coming. The other is that I want you to learn something about your own country.

  “Welcome back to El Salvador,” he s
ang out as I climbed into the passenger seat this time. “How did it go?”

  “It was odd. She doesn’t go out. Never leaves the embassy except to go home. She stays in the compound all day and that’s it. I think I have seen more of this country than she has. And it’s her job!”

  “What’s her job?”

  “She’s in charge of the U.S. aid for health programs here. Presumably—”

  “Don’t presume, Papu. Never presume. She arrives each morning at eight forty-five a.m. wearing her badge. She leaves precisely at five in the afternoon. She moves pieces of paper from one basket to another. That’s all. Her job, my dear, is to move papers.”

  We passed the front entrance, not heavily guarded in those days. Two U.S. Marines in their dress blues stood on either side of the glass doors like nutcrackers beside the two flags. Through the iron fence and the rattling palms, the building was blinding white.

  The Americans did something about twenty years ago,” he said over the wind. “There was malaria, and they sent crop dusters to spray for mosquitoes. The malaria disappeared for a long time. After that, they wanted to clean up the country because there was so much dysentery. This is because the poor have no place but the fields to relieve themselves, as you have seen. They sent several thousand latrines they called portable toilets. Johnny on the Spot. They were blue plastic, with doors and ventilation, and it was explained to the campesinos how to use the chemicals to get rid of the waste. The campesinos live in houses made of mud and cardboard. One man said to me, ‘How can we live in a cardboard box and shit in a plastic house?’ So what do you think? They took apart the latrines and used the materials to make better houses. Even now, today, walking in the countryside, you will find the blue toilet seats scattered around.”

  All of this was shouted as we drove with a jeep’s canvas roof rolled back.

  “Latrinization!”

  “What?”

  “That’s what she called the program. ‘Latrinization.’”

  “Yes, well. You see how well that worked. And the condoms? You find those too. The kids thought they were balloons. As for using the rural hospitals, a supply of anesthesia would be helpful.”

  “What about the incubators Vicky showed me? They looked new.”

  “The Swedes. Actual supplies seem always to come from the Swedes. And some crazy Pekingese poet, a descendant of Genghis Khan, who shops in San Diego.”

  He winked and patted my leg. “Let’s go find a television so I can watch the race at Monaco.”

  With most people, especially rural laborers, I never said anything about writing poetry, not because I was hiding something but because it didn’t seem important. There was one night when I did confess that this is what I did in my other life, my life in los Estados Unidos, a place still remote in the imaginations of most Salvadorans, not yet a destination for survival, economic or otherwise. I was in a casita on a cooperative farm with a group of labor organizers, and one of them, José Rodolfo Viera, a friend who would be killed within a year, was, on this night, in a house full of guns—not military weapons, but small arms carried for protection—and he was talking quietly with the others about the possibility that paramilitary death squads would attack that night, or soon. They were discussing how to preserve the cooperative in the aftermath of their deaths. It was a calm, matter-of-fact conversation concerning what was to be done. My friend turned to me several times and asked if I was afraid, as if he were asking if I was cold, if I needed a jacket. When I said yes, of course, there was supportive laughter all around, and when it died down, there was more serious talk.

  Finally, one man asked me something I didn’t quite understand, which happened a lot in those days.

  “He is asking what your work is,” Viera translated.

  “My work?”

  “Yes, not here but at home. What do you do at home?”

  That is when I confessed that I wrote poetry. It seemed an odd thing, and I was a little embarrassed about it at the time.

  Poeta, poeta went around the room. A man, fingering a straw hat shaped like a fedora, asked me if I would please say a poem for them.

  “Recite?”

  Yes! came from all around the room. “Can you say one of your poems?”

  “I’m sorry, from memory? One of my own? No, I don’t know them by heart.”

  This seemed to surprise them. “Do you know of the poet Roque Dalton?”

  I was relieved to answer yes, I know his poetry.

  “He was one of us. The poet Roque Dalton.”

  “Our compañero,” added another, holding his fist against his heart. “And he was killed also by one of us.”

  “I don’t understand. One of you killed him?” This couldn’t be true, I thought. There is something I’m not understanding here. I would ask Leonel later about it.

  “We are honored that you are a poet and are here with us,” Viera said on behalf of the others, and then there was a bit of commotion, suddenly it seemed it was time to go. Trucks and jeeps had pulled into the compound. We had to move somewhere else.

  “¡Apúrate! ¡Apúrate!” someone was shouting.

  “Come with me, this way,” Viera said, taking hold of my arm and steering me toward his truck as one by one the other vehicles skidded off in clouds of dust. Once I saw him behind the wheel, I realized how small he was, thin, more so than the others, and he was without a weapon, which, in any case, he didn’t need because, according to Leonel, Viera said that he wasn’t even able to kill a chicken, let alone could he take the life of a man, and so to reassure me that he could well outrun anyone who might have been coming for us, he took his eyes from the road to smile so broadly that some source of light from the truck cab caught on his gold front tooth that matched the gold crucified Christ around his neck.

  The death squads left their marks and warnings, publishing lists of their targets in newspapers, making calls in the night and hanging up. The dead click was enough to send the message. In San Salvador, the warnings of Mano Blanca appeared: fingers and palms dipped in white paint and slapped against doors and walls at night to dry by morning, handprints that resembled the paintings of schoolchildren if they weren’t also a sign of being marked for death. I asked Leonel why he never entered churches, on whose doors many handprints appeared.

  “I believe with my life,” he said, “with how I live.”

  We were somewhere near the unfinished cathedral and the plaza where for a few hours in the afternoons and also at night vendors sold holy cards, ice cream, and open sodas from stalls that closed with rippled security gates. I was with Monseñor Ricardo Urioste, a quiet, studious priest whom I knew as a friend of Monseñor Romero’s. He was walking calmly but with long steps, and I walked beside him, but it was hard to keep up. The weather was white with the coming rains.

  We had been talking about the views of the religious community toward the armed struggle when suddenly he fell silent, holding his hand out before him, palm down. He had stopped walking and had fixed his gaze on the street ahead of us. I tried to see what he was seeing but saw only the traffic, bumper to bumper, brightly painted buses with their black exhaust and sacks tied to their roofs, cars nosing behind them with windows down and radios blaring. The voice in the commercial was calling out “Domingo Domingo Domingo,” then the horns, voices, and motor scooters died down. The cars had stopped too, many of the drivers now seeing what Monseñor Urioste saw.

  A panel truck had stopped just ahead of us in the street, and men were leaping from the back. Two of them grabbed a teenager wearing a student’s rucksack and wrestled him into the vehicle. Everyone stopped, or moved away from where they had been, some ducking behind the buses, and right beside me a security gate was suddenly slammed onto the sidewalk. Monseñor Urioste crossed himself as others around us vanished into alleys and shops. There was a stillness then and the truck peeled away with such a scream of tires that the sound seemed to st
ay in the air after it could no longer be seen.

  “We must pray for that boy,” Monseñor Urioste whispered.

  This was the first and only time I witnessed an abduction, the moment when someone is made to disappear, to become desaparecido. Before and after this, I encountered the desaparecidos only in the body dumps, in the morgue, on the roadside, and along the beach, or I would study their faces in the photographs provided by their families and ask, sometimes aloud, Where are you? Over the years these faces have grown younger and younger.

  WRITTEN IN PENCIL:

  When someone joins a death squad he is in for life if you quit you might talk and no one wants to be fingered later for these crimes the first time such a man goes out on an operation he is tested by the others they tell him he must rape the victim in front of them then cut off certain pieces of the body they want to see if he has the stomach for this after that he is as guilty as the others and he is in his reward is usually money why isn’t it enough to kill a victim why must each also suffer mutilation the death squad members must all be guilty of every murder so one rapes another strikes blows another uses the machete and so on until it would be impossible to determine which action had caused the death and the squad members are protected from each other by mutual guilt also when mere death no longer instills fear in the population the stakes must be raised the people must be made to see that not only will they die but die slowly and brutally.

  It was now the rainy season. It rained for a few hours every morning and also in the late day. At night, the death squads did their work. Morning came, and in front of a school, a corpse would be found with its shirt pecked open and its eyes gone. Margarita had to leave to visit her father in Ahuachapán, so it was decided that I would go with a woman they called Luisa to the house of her friend V, who lived in a quiet colonia shaded by the rustle of manaca palms.