What You Have Heard Is True

by Carolyn Forche

  “I don’t know about that,” David said. “I wasn’t involved with the ships.”

  Early in his exile in the United States, when asked about himself, Leonel answered that he was a coffee farmer, and later, when they took his coffee farm away, he would describe himself as a social critic and political exile and, finally, an investigator of crimes against humanity. He would not say that he had also been a champion marksman and motorcycle racer, a painter, an expert on Formula One cars, a historian of military strategy, a part-time inventor, a collector of miniature ship models, and an adviser to politicians, Catholic priests, Carmelite nuns, diplomats, labor leaders, and at least one guerrilla commander. He would never tell anyone that the handmade AK-47 awarded to him in competition, which he kept in a glass display case, was fully loaded and always had been. We were mistaken to think that the sign affixed to the case that read IN CASE OF EMERGENCY BREAK GLASS was a little joke.

  During those winters of exile, he wore an old army jacket but never a hat. He loved dogs and called them all Chucho (Mutt). Once I found him making plastic boots out of sandwich baggies for a small dog put in his charge so as to keep the ice and snow from its paws. For himself, he acquired good hiking boots, camping gear, fine pipe tobacco, and a Swiss Army knife with multiple gadgets. In answer to many people’s questions, he would reply: I’m not an American, but I like Americans; he would also add: except assholes and sons of bitches. To solve problems, he would fall asleep for a little while and often wake up with an answer. He was sensitive to the moods of others except when utterly oblivious. The obliviousness was always deliberate. He would go over and over everything he worked on and thought about, playing the reel of his recall, rewinding, playing again, listening for what he might have missed, asking the same questions over and over, repeating his stories again and again, almost word for word until some detail stopped him, something that seemed right the first twenty times but wasn’t. Let me show you something, he would say, and then take me to a barracks, a village, a maquiladora, and ask me to tell him what I saw and then what else I saw. He would eventually point out what it was that I had missed. You daydream too much, Papu, you don’t pay attention. I once asked him what it would take to make the United States a good country. Well for one thing, you could green the hemisphere, he said. You have the resources and the capacity. You won’t do this, unfortunately, but you could. You believe yourselves to be apart from others and therefore have little awareness of your interdependencies and the needs of the whole. Other times he said that he admired Americans for their philanthropic generosity, not highly developed elsewhere. He also admired German engineering and Swedish aid projects. He was critical of Marxists but not of Karl Marx. One of the times I angered him most, I remembered, was when I disparaged the Soviet Union, and he reminded me of their loss of twenty million souls during the war. You Americans wouldn’t begin to understand, he said, and do you know what happened to Soviet Russia only four years after their revolution? That isn’t in your textbooks, is it? I think not. And Cuba? What about Cuba? They’re Latins. The goddamn Soviets tried to get them to sit down and play chess. When it came to El Salvador, however, he brought everything back to the campesino. What about the campesino? he always asked, no matter what was under discussion. When I first met him, he was trying to prevent a war he knew was coming, that in fact had already begun, and later devoted himself to bringing that war to an end. I don’t have much time, he often said. Or: I’m running out of time. Or we are running out of time, and I wondered to whom this we referred, and felt best when I imagined that he somehow included me in his efforts.

  Cuando me hiciste otro, te dejé conmigo.

  When you made me into another, I left you with me.

  —Antonio Porchia

  November 2009

  We climbed the slope of the Guazapa volcano with the box of his ashes, taking turns as we carried it, having left the vehicles behind on the stony road. His were finer and grayer than the ashes of others, and I wondered why this was, thinking that the fire in which they burned him must have been hotter—but mercifully the vision of him in flames died out, and I returned to the work of making my way over the stones behind the men from La Mora: Luis and Candelario. The mayor of the nearest town was to be next in our convoy, but his jeep gave out when its undercarriage struck a boulder loosened in the rainy season. So now the mayor, too, walked, but only we carried the box, although nothing was ever said about this, that we should be the only ones to carry it: Leonel’s two daughters, their mother, and I.

  Sunlight broke through the canopy of jacaranda, cedar, and bamboo, filtering down to the saplings that had already grown to my height in the deepest crater dug here during the war, when the blast was heard in the surrounding hills and seen as black smoke rising to the clouds from where it came—trees yanked out by their roots, boulders sprayed into the air, and earth blasted away, taken up, never to rain back down. Nothing was ever found of that earth again. It remained in the clouds.

  None of us had expected that he would die in a hospital bed. Even toward the end, when he fell asleep as he talked but no longer slept through the night, we didn’t expect this way of death. We feared that he would be assassinated, or that one night, our telephones would ring and we would be told that he was disappeared, and in the days that followed we would search through the body dumps and along the black sand beaches of the coast for his corpse.

  From the peak of the volcano, city and sea are visible, and the whole of the country as it shrinks to its place on the maps, small and poor beneath us—a country that had for a time grown large under the gaze of the world. Before the war, tapirs lived in the mountain’s folds, monkeys and iguanas, coyotes and even jaguars, the wildcat of his prescient dreams. Hundreds of species of birds alighted here, a thousand of butterflies, and the streams ran clear through Guazapa’s ridges to the river. No longer. Thousands of pounds of bombs rained into this forest during the war. White phosphorus and napalm also rained. So that might have been the reason he had brought me here just before the war began, and why he was silent all afternoon more than thirty-five years ago. He had said that he wanted to show me a beautiful place, to take a rest from the work we were doing, to climb, to see as far as we could. But I now know that we were here for a different reason: here so that he could steady the far hills in his field glasses and read the terrain of a future free-fire zone, here to commit the mountain to paper and then to say good-bye. I still have the paper on which he drew the mountain.

  Ahuachapán prison, too, remains with me. When I hear the word “Ahuachapán” there is a wind rising out of a smoking village, and processions of campesinos on the roadside, my husband is holding Olivier in his arms, and along the banks of the Río Sumpul, vultures rise and fall over the dead, and so thick is this flock that the banks seem to be rippling like the river. Ahuachapán gives me the last time I saw the labor leader José Rodolfo Viera alive, and he is waving to me from the back of a truck before it rolls into a white cloud of road toward his future assassin. Margarita and I are walking along the beach, trying to find the corpse of a missing Danish woman, and we don’t find her but someone else does—she had been shot through the forehead after watching her young husband be tortured to death. I can show you their photographs and give the details; there are reports on everything. Ahuachapán.

  In this country named for the savior, its cities and villages for the saints, people throw flowers into the lakes to calm the volcanoes and prevent the disappearance of fish. They paint their lives on copinol seeds they call the seeds of God. The children follow behind the coffins of the dead and sing, tossing little gifts into the graves.

  This morning, we’re expected to leave Leonel here in the skirt of the sleeping volcano. Luis and Candelario have a place in mind and we follow them toward it as though we were in a guinda, walking single file up the volcano, but there is no army pursuing us. The men know what they’re looking for: a spot high on the slope with a view of the hills,
not for him but for those who will come here in the future to pay their respects. And they will come. Light soaks through the bamboo stands and palm fronds, a whirring light, and moments of the past arrive, hovering like the dragonflies above us. Our photographs are taken in the bomb crater among the saplings that have grown almost to our shoulders since the war, and beside the truck that will now be given to Padre Walter Guerra. Despite the solemnity of the occasion we laugh over the decision to divide his ashes between the volcano and the jocote tree that grew behind the clinic in La Mora so that he will always have jocote to eat and the people will have a place to bring flowers and questions to him. The girls who had once played with rabbits on my floor are now grown, and they concur with the decision. From the jocote, he will have a view of the mango tree that gave shelter to the first peace talks, which wouldn’t have happened so soon or perhaps at all without him. There are plenty of his ashes to go around.

  Over the years, I have been asked why, as a twenty-seven-year-old American poet who spoke Spanish brokenly and knew nothing about the isthmus of the Americas, I would accept the invitation of a man I barely knew to spend time in a country on the verge of war. And why would this stranger, said to be a lone wolf, a Communist, a CIA operative, a world-class marksman, and a small-time coffee farmer, take any interest in a naïve North American poet? As one man put it, what does poetry have to do with anything?

  We reach the chosen place and open the box, and before digging my hand into his remains, I ask him quietly within myself if I might tell the story now. Everything. Or almost everything. Of course! he bellows. Write! Write and do not waste time! Why do you think I brought you to Salvador in the first place? So you could eat papayas? You’re a goddamn poet, Papu. You must write.

  People ask me now what it was like to work with him in the early days before the war. Some still want to know who he really was, of course, but that is now becoming apparent to friends and also to enemies, as he knew it might one day. This is what I tell people now:

  It was as if he had stood me squarely before the world, removed the blindfold, and ordered me to open my eyes.

  Acknowledgments

  This book was written from memory over a period of fifteen years, with help from notebooks and photographs, reminiscences with those who shared in these lived moments, and research to confirm the facts inlaid in the recollections. I am not a historian or journalist but a poet, and although this might be called a memoir, it is not about myself but about others living and dead to whom I owe a debt of immense gratitude, especially to the mentor who guided this journey, Leonel Gómez Vides. He died before I could finish this book, but I hope I have at last fulfilled his only request: that I write about what happened. This story includes some events in my earlier life, a summer in Mallorca, and seven extended stays in El Salvador between early January 1978 and March 1980. There are passages about the war and its aftermath, and several return visits ending in 2009. Many men, women, and children in El Salvador helped me toward awareness, receiving and educating me with immense patience and generosity, most especially St. Oscar Romero of the Americas, who was then our Monseñor Romero. I’m deeply grateful to my friend and sister Margarita Herrera, and also to Padre Walter Guerra, Dr. Vicky Guzmán, the late José Rodolfo Viera, Ricardo Stein (Guatemala), Padre Ignacio Ellacuría (Spain), Monseñor Ricardo Urioste, and Madre Luz and her religious community of the Congregation of the Carmelite Missionary Sisters of St. Therese. My gratitude also to those who were not known by their birth names then or have wished to retain their pseudonyms now for reasons of privacy: “Luisa,” “V,” “Fina,” “Ana,” “Ricardo,” “Alfredo,” “Porfirio,” “Chencho,” “Bartolomé,” and, for his testimony, “Alex.” Thank you, Bruce Forché, for so generously sharing war memories, and Katharine Anderson for giving permission to quote extensively from a letter written by her late father, Tom Anderson. I also thank Teresa Gómez Koudjeti, Gene Palumbo, Joselito Acosta Alvarez, Salvador Sanabria, and Alexander Renderos; the people of the Empalizada and Conchagua fincas and the communities of Santa Marta and La Mora. For that first inspiring summer in Deià, I thank Maya Flakoll Gross and her mother, the late Claribel Alegría; her late husband, Bud Flakoll; and their other daughters, Patricia Alegría and Karen Fauché. For patient guidance and friendship during my earlier years, I thank the late Teles Reyna and Ya-kwana Goodmorning of Taos Pueblo, and John Chaske Rouillard, Santee Dakota Sioux.

  Among those from the United Sates, I wish to acknowledge John Taylor, Peace Corps volunteer; the late congressman Joe Moakley of Massachusetts; Congressman James McGovern of Massachusetts; Tim Rieser, senior foreign policy aide to Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont; and also Richard McCall, Tim Phillips, Leslie Bumstead, and her husband, Doug Farah, then of The Washington Post. For support from the beginning, I thank Laurel Blossom, John Teeter, the late Josephine Crum; Rose Styron and Robert Maurer of Amnesty International; for certain confirmations of fact, the late Robert Parry of Consortium News; for background on the disappearance of James Ronald Richardson, former ambassador William Walker; for courage and tenacity in the cause of justice, Carolyn Patty Blum, clinical professor of law emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, and senior legal adviser of the Center for Justice and Accountability.

  For the gift of peace, solitude, and time, thank you, Hedgebrook, where much of this was written, and especially its founder, Nancy Nordhoff; the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Umbria and its director, Dana Prescott; the Atlantic Center for the Arts; and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. I’m grateful to the Benedictine monks of Glenstal Abbey, and to Fanny Howe for sharing contemplative time with me there; Honor Moore for many readings of this work during those autumns at Otterbrook; and my dear extended family, Ashley and Maryam Ashford-Brown of Le Bois Valet in Normandy and Scott Cairns and Marcia Vanderlip of Tacoma. For much needed encouragement and support, I thank J. Patrick Lannan and the Lannan Foundation; Fr. David Ungerleider, S.J.; Robert and Peg Boyers and Patricia Rubio of Skidmore College; Daniele Struppa, Anna Leahy, and Richard Bausch of Chapman University; the faculty of Newcastle University in Newcastle upon Tyne; the Sierra Nevada College MFA program; and President John J. DeGioia and my colleagues at Georgetown University. Thank you to James Silk of Yale University’s Law School, to the Divinity School, and to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library for the Windham-Campbell Prize. I’m grateful to those who honor the work of St. Oscar Romero, most especially the Rothko Chapel and the Romero Center Ministries of Camden, New Jersey, particularly the late Lawrence DiPaul.

  Many writers, poets, and friends have discussed this work with me along the way and helped me toward clarity, among them Linda Anderson, Connie Braun, Barbara Cully, Chard deNiord, Joanna Eleftheriou, Nick Flynn, Aminatta Forna, Andrea Gilats, Lise Goett, Garth Greenwell, Patricia Guzmán, Kaaren Kitchell, Elee Kraljii Gardiner, Susan Landgraf, Jen Marlowe, Glen Retief, Suzanne Roberts, Kaia Sand, Mona Sfeir, Gloria Steinem, Penn Szittya, and Duncan Wu; and for helping me to the finish, Lars Gustaf Andersson of Lund University, Sweden; Robin Flicker of New York City; and Francisco Larios of Nicaragua, living in the United States. For encouragement at the beginning, I thank Margaret Atwood and my first agent, the late Virginia Barber. Her successor, Bill Clegg, found the best possible publisher. Thank you, Ann Godoff, and everyone else at Penguin Press. My editor, Christopher Richards, has been exemplary. Thanks also to Sarah Hutson and to Juliana Kiyan for publicity and to Bruce Giffords for editorial production.

  Fifteen years ago, this book began at the behest of poet Ilya Kaminsky, who said it was time. Over the years, young people from El Salvador who were brought to the United States by their parents because of the war and its aftermath have come to me wanting to know more about their birth country. This is for them. It is also for my son, Sean Christophe, so he will know this part of his parents’ past, and for my father, Michael Joseph Sidlosky, and in memory of my mother, Louise Blackford Sidlosky. Finally, I thank my husband, Harry Mattison
, my first and always reader, for sharing this with me, his memories, his photographs, the life and its testimony, always with love.

  About the Author

  Carolyn Forché is an American poet, editor, translator, and activist. Her books of poetry are Blue Hour, The Angel of History, The Country Between Us, and Gathering the Tribes. In 2013, Forché received the Academy of American Poets Fellowship given for distinguished poetic achievement. In 2017, she became one of the first two poets to receive the Windham-Campbell Prize. She is a University Professor at Georgetown University. Forché lives in Maryland with her husband, the photographer Harry Mattison.

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