What You Have Heard Is True

by Carolyn Forche

  * * *

  They have taken blood again. The ceiling comes closer and the doorway shrinks to a smaller box of light. This will help me to sleep. “It is only a tremor,” Leonel had said, when the sofa I had been sitting on galloped across the tile floor to the other side of the room. The tiles clattered like stones in a surf and settled into place again. “We have many tremors here,” he said. “The earth is moving beneath us, sending fire through any volcanic apertura it can find and many of these volcanoes are asleep, but don’t kid yourself. Izalco had been sleeping too until the night of the uprising. When I was a young man there was an earthquake in Ixcán not far from where my adviser lives, the man who predicted you. This is how we met. I had gone to Ixcán to offer help and what should happen but a city landed by helicopter in a remote place near a ruined village, a city made of heavy rubber balloons filled with air, balloon walls and roofs, everything pumped into place, balloon medical tent, balloon canteen, even the food rations the Americans sent were made of air. I helped, what else would I do, and that is how we met, the Mayan elder and I, and ever since he has allowed me to talk to him and even though he doesn’t have a telephone he always seems to know when I will come to the day, almost to the hour and always he takes a nap then so I have to wait. I was never a patient man until then, I am still impatient. The reason they are taking your blood is that they have to monitor your platelet count. It can’t go below a certain number or you will develop the hemorrhagic dengue. Your fever is high now, Papu, so you might see people who aren’t here. They will come and go, so let them, it is normal.”

  All night I had heard cries of agony coming from somewhere close, a woman crying out as if she were being beaten, begging someone to stop, crying through the glass louvers all night like that as I lay awake and didn’t move. In the morning, I learn that the cries were those of a parrot in a mango tree, like the parrot saying hello to me from the terrace of the colonel’s house on the night I was called upon to answer for my country’s new policy on human rights, the night the colonel drank, and I learned that what my former husband had told me was true: To prove a kill, or for some other reason, parts of the body were cut off, dried, and kept. I asked Leonel why bodies are mutilated both living and dead and he answered, “To show disrespect or for some other reason. Fingers, breasts, ears, genitals. They don’t wipe the blood from the knife. Read your Eduardo Galeano, Papu. When the Portuguese captain Bartolomeu Bueno do Prado came back from Rio das Mortes in Brazil he had thirty-nine hundred pairs of ears in his saddlebags. And this was 1759. The Scythians collected skulls and drank from them. The Tibetans had a musical instrument made from a human thigh bone. In Vietnam, as your former husband could have told you, soldiers used to string the ears of the dead on their dog-tag chains. Why be sick about this night? It is something for your poetry, as the colonel said. You can write about this.”

  WRITTEN IN PENCIL:

  This was after they assembled the parts on the ground into a man it was the time when there were three choices: leave the country wait for them to come and kill you or go to the hills and fight I was given one choice and that was to write a dead woman cannot write we were sitting in the dark as we did then by that time the guerrillas were training in the hills but they were not killers he said they were farmers how far would they be able to take an armed struggle some had no guns they practiced with sticks they had no choice there was also a revolutionary group within the army yes they would come to think of themselves as guerrillas within the army they were behind the coup you saw what happened with that even Monseñor Romero’s persuasion couldn’t hold the first junta together it was the beginning of the counterinsurgency operation invented by your country wherein the people were seen as the enemy in the beginning they flew small helicopters with glass domes it was the time of flies above the blindfolded dead he said can you describe this? I said I didn’t know he said well you have to describe it their throats were cut their eyes half open half closed the Guardia had practiced their beheading on coconuts their saying was yes and ears open mouth shut.

  WRITTEN IN PENCIL:

  One morning I woke and everything had returned to normal: the door was the size of a door the ceiling where it should be no bottle above the bed a nurse tore the tape from my arm pulled the needle out and left a square of gauze where it had been you are going home she said the fever has broken your friend is coming here are your things get dressed do you need any help she asked everything was too bright.

  When the call came, Margarita answered. I might have been reading or writing in the notebook, probably on the couch, from where I watched her pace as far from the wall as the cord would allow, turning until it was wrapped around her, then cupping the receiver to muffle her voice she said, “Carolina? Can you go to the seminary?”

  Then, without waiting for my answer: “Sí. Sí. Ella puede venir. Bueno. Ciao.” She was already reaching for her keys and her purse.

  “Bring your camera,” she said, “and your notebooks. You don’t have to look nice. They just have to think you are una periodista. What you have on is fine. You have to hurry.”

  On the way to the seminary she told me that several hundred campesinos had fled the army and had been given sanctuary by the church. They needed medical attention, but mostly they needed a safe place.

  “You must go there in this moment and be una periodista. The army might not attack if they see una periodista from the United States. If the army comes, be sure to let them see you.”

  “But I’m not a journalist.”

  “This is not important, Carolina, it is your presence that is needed.”

  * * *

  The people who had crowded into the courtyard were refugees from the combat areas in San Vincente and Cabañas, several hundred of them, many wounded, children with bloody bandages, women whose breasts had been slashed by machetes. There was no food for them yet and there were no medicines. I was giving a woman water when a child told me that someone was at the door and asked me to come. An American stood there, gaunt and exhausted, with two cameras hanging from his shoulders. He had been called here too. His Spanish was fluent, almost natively so. He was with Time magazine, was all he said, but “never mind that.” We had been told that as soon as the people were given refuge, a rumor flew around that the soldiers were coming and they were going to kill everyone. That’s why we had been called, the American photographer and me: to prevent an attack if this could be done by our mere presence. I don’t remember that we exchanged another word. As one by one we heard the trucks pulling up near the entrance, engines thrumming, a seminarian who had been trying to calm someone down told me that it was time.

  I left the water and stepped outside, as did the photographer, until we were visible to the open trucks where the soldiers rode standing, pointing their rifles at the clouds, the engines idling. I heard a whir and click, whir and click. Click click click. The American was taking photographs, so I opened my notebook and started to write nonsense, looking at the soldiers as if I were taking down names. You could hear the din of the courtyard from the street: crying, shouting. The soldiers seemed all to have mastered a certain demeanor: set mouths, hard eyes, helmet straps over their chins. The photographer was still photographing. I didn’t want to go any closer, but they could plainly see me writing in the notebook. And then, just like that, one after another, the trucks wheezed into the road and drove away.

  “Well, that was close,” I heard the photographer say under his breath. He removed a film cartridge and pressed another into place, then gave me a look that said what couldn’t be said. We went back inside the courtyard and by then more help had come: some food and also first aid supplies, basins and towels, carried by several nuns and women I thought might be nurses. The chaos had become more orderly. I thought I was going to be sick but there was no place to do that, so I was not sick. This was only from a nervousness that I would later outgrow. I was given something to do, I don’t remember what, and when I looked for t
he photographer again he was gone.

  We moved to a place I will call Hotel X, as by then no one wanted to give any information about themselves or their whereabouts. Hotel X was under guard by government forces, who stood at its entrance, shouldering G3 assault rifles. They wore heavy black boots and olive uniforms, and often also flak jackets. Inside the lobby, private security guards in short-sleeved guayaberas, without flak jackets, would station themselves, their .357 Magnums holstered or tucked into belts. Two-way radios could be heard crackling before these men were seen, hissing in the potted palms. “Businessmen” in suits came to Hotel X, came and went from noon until late night, and they were more subtly armed, clustering in small groups before going into the restaurant or ordering something from the bar to be brought to the low tables in the lobby. Some ventured onto the patio to sit under rattling palapas, guns beside their drinks on the tables. Some appeared to have just stepped from a shower, slick haired and damp, barely concealing their nerves. If a woman was with them, she was most often not the wife but the mistress—younger and dressed for an evening, whose work was to smile, flirt, toss her hair from shoulder to shoulder. If one woman saw another she knew, they would take hands, kiss the air, and almost sing their greetings and, after breathless talk, would return to the men for the keys to the rooms rented for the next hours. The lobby was empty and at peace only in the morning: the hours of maids and busboys.

  I had never wanted to stay in Hotel X, preferring almost anywhere else, but that was why, Leonel assured me, Hotel X was the best and safest place. Just try not to stand out, he’d say. Don’t wear blue jeans. Fix your hair. Wear the dress Margarita gave you. If you hear something, pay attention, but don’t get caught listening in on conversations. Be distant, he’d said—American.

  * * *

  On this night, Luisa and I were sharing a room in Hotel X. We were on the fourth floor overlooking a ramp for delivery of hotel supplies. It was a beautiful night, as I remember, and so we were lying on the floor of our balcony, smoking and talking. From here we could see the full delivery zone through an opening below the concrete balcony wall. Luisa was still working for one of the militant groups, gathering information by various means, as she had done that night when we stayed at V’s house. But since that night, Luisa had fallen in love, and so she wanted to talk about that rather than the political situation, rather than her clandestine activities, which she would not, in any case, have said much about. She seemed younger this night than I had perceived her to be in the past. Her love was leaving soon. He would go into exile as a member of the political wing of his organization and he would be assigned to represent the group somewhere else in the world. Any day now he would be quietly taken out of the country and Luisa would continue to watch, to listen, to whisper in the dark. I hadn’t told Leonel about this work of hers. I don’t think he knew that Luisa was operating clandestinely when he suggested that we room together.

  “When will you see each other again?” I think I asked her.

  “Who knows if we ever will,” she said, tapping her cigarette until the ash fell. “This is not the time for a normal life. And what about you? Is there someone?”

  Not now, no, I would have said, but just then two black Jeep Cherokees pulled into the delivery zone directly beneath us, and the doors were opening, and men in civilian clothes with military weapons were leaving the vehicles rapidly, decisively, slamming the doors behind them. Luisa pressed her forehead to the floor and whispered, “Escuadrón de la muerte.” She was already moving backward into the room, still on the floor on her stomach. The room was dark. She rose and turned on the lights and began taking off her blue jeans.

  “Carolina,” she said, “we have to get dressed. Hurry.”

  I asked her if we were leaving.

  “No. Get dressed. Good clothes, lipstick, hurry.”

  “Why aren’t we leaving?”

  “Carolina, what do you want? You want to run right into them in the hall? Get dressed.”

  She took the chain lock off the door and removed the deadbolt.

  “Lie down. You lie on this bed, I’ll lie on the other. In your clothes, yes.”

  “Why is the door unlocked?”

  “So we won’t have to wait during the time it takes for them to break it down. If they are coming for us, it will be quick. We will die looking like bourgeois women. Hold my hand.”

  She held hands with me across the space between the beds.

  “Do you think they are coming for us?”

  “It is possible. But it is also possible that they are here for someone else. We are in this situation now together, Carolina. Would it help if I talked to you? You are afraid, and I also,” she said.

  “What are we going to do?” I heard myself ask.

  “We are going to lie here until it is finished or until morning.”

  There was muffled machine-gun fire just then and she pointed at the ceiling to the floors above us. A short time after that, the vehicles below our balcony sped away, and then it was light. I bolted upright in the bed from a deep sleep and saw myself in the mirror as a different woman. Luisa and her things were gone. She had left a note: Que le vaya bien.

  Red and yellow banners unfurled in the streets, and over a hundred thousand people marched. A low-flying crop duster sprayed clouds of insecticide over them, and as the people arrived at the Plaza Libertad, shots were fired upon them from the roof of the National Palace. Security forces attacked and left 67 dead and 250 wounded. The following month, a bomb destroyed the transmitter for YSAX, the Church radio station that broadcast Monseñor Romero’s Sunday homilies, the radio station that also carried Margarita’s voice—the “nun” for whom the death squads mistakenly searched. On the same night, another bomb exploded in the library at the Catholic university, blowing the books from their shelves all at once and opening them in the air to land facedown among the scattered papers having to do with the mysterious ways God works among us on Earth.

  Two months later, it was toward the end for me, but I didn’t know it. I attended Mass in the basilica on Sunday, hoping once again to receive Communion from Monseñor, to feel the raindrops from his aspergillum land on me, even though I hadn’t confessed the years I had been away from the sacraments, and even though I wasn’t convinced that I would remain among the faithful. I took photographs of him at the altar, speaking into what appeared to be a telephone held by an altar boy whom I would meet decades later as a grown man attending school in the United States. Seated to the left of the altar is Father Ignacio Ellacuría, arms folded, not wearing his glasses, his eyes appearing to focus on Monseñor’s raised hand.

  After Mass, some young people from a popular organization asked to meet with me in one of the basilica’s bell towers. They knelt, bandannas around their necks ready to be pulled over their faces, and whispered that their compañeros were among those in the coffins lined up along the Communion rail to be blessed, their faces visible through the windows cut into the coffin lids. I had gone close enough to look at the faces and they resembled photographs of children asleep. Strands of incense smoke still crawled through the gray air, and rock doves flapped their wings in the stone clerestory. As I left, I noticed a man wearing sunglasses who was, inexplicably, carrying an attaché case, which is maybe why I took note of him. He paused near one of the side altars as if offering a special prayer. The following day, a priest found an attaché case containing seventy-two sticks of dynamite behind that side altar. It had been set to detonate during a funeral Mass for a civilian member of the junta, scheduled for that afternoon, but the detonator had apparently failed. Later, I saw the man in the sunglasses standing in the lobby of Hotel X. I went up to him, said hello, introduced myself, and told him that I had seen him at Mass.