by Howard Fast
“That’s not because of any such notion as the conscience of the rich,” Barbara protested. “Most of the rich I’ve known don’t have a shred of conscience — and as for Mr. Veblen, he wrote as much nonsense as anyone else who sets out to be a fancy philosopher, and you call me Barbara love and never even paused to give me a peck on the cheek there in the hotel lobby. I suppose you decided that there was no way you could walk into the hotel without half a dozen people saying, There goes Carson Devron, and if you bussed me, you’d be compromised.”
“Exactly. Would you like me to kiss you now?”
“Too late. Tend to your driving. Anyway, if someone saw you kissing me, they’d think I was your mother—”
“You’re nothing like my mother.”
“Or your Aunt Becky from — wherever she comes from. For heaven’s sake, Carson —”
“I love you,” he said quietly. “I always have. I forget what desire is until I’m near you. Goddamn it, don’t lament your age. It’s a damn lie and a fraud you’re using, and I’ve never known you to lie before!”
Barbara made no reply, only thinking about what he said, until they reached the parking area of an Italian restaurant on Washington Boulevard in Culver City. Neither had he spoken. When he got out of the car and opened the door for her, she said, “Thank you, Carson. That was a good thing you said to me.”
“May I kiss you now?”
“If you still want to.”
He took her in his arms and held her to him, his open lips against hers. It was the first time any man had done that since Boyd died.
The restaurant was called the Gondolier, and the proprietor, Vito Lucheno, knew Carson and welcomed him as if he were royalty, which perhaps he was as such things go in Los Angeles. The restaurant was dark, poorly lit, as are most restaurants in Los Angeles, as if each and every one of them recognizes the city as a place of countless assignations. When Barbara was with Carson, she had the feeling that everyone in the city knew him, even though, as he explained, he came to the Gondolier only two or three times a year.
“But why come here at all?” Barbara wondered. “It’s so out of the way.”
“That depends on one’s destination. We’re only a few blocks from the M-G-M Studios, so it’s a good place to eat if you’re seeing someone from Metro, and the food is good.”
“Is that where you’re going tonight — to the studio?”
“Oh, no. Not at all. There’s a little enclave of people, mostly refugees and illegals, from El Salvador, and I promised to see some of them tonight, leading figures in the struggle against the government, and since it’s not far from here, I decided this would be the best place to eat and squeeze out the last minute I can be with you.”
Mr. Lucheno came to the table now to take their order himself, and after he had done so he opened a large bottle of red Italian wine and ceremoniously poured two glasses, to which Carson added, “To Barbara Lavette!”
After they had tasted the wine, Barbara asked, “Is this a deep secret, this thing with El Salvador?”
“Oh, no. Not at all. But as I said, they’re illegals and nervous. They refused to meet at my office. Have you been reading about that poor damn place?”
“More than I want to, Carson. I was a correspondent during World War Two, as you know, but I don’t think I ever encountered anything during those years that shook me as much as the incident of the Catholic nuns and the churchwoman who were murdered down there. It was only a month ago, and still when I think of it, I am cold and sick. I wasn’t in Europe to see the liberation of the death camps where millions of Jews were murdered, but I saw enough of horror. I don’t know why, but this was different.”
“We’re not used to the deliberate murder of nuns by soldiers who are supposed to be our allies. We used to believe that that brand of barbarity existed only in Hitler’s Germany. And I suppose what makes it worse is Mr. Reagan’s brushing it aside.”
“Then they know — the government, the CIA?”
“Of course they know. The women were murdered and raped on orders of a creature called Luis Antonio Aleman. National Guard in El Salvador. Now where does the L.A. World come into it? The New York Times and the Washington Post both have their men in San Salvador. Of course, we have the United Press and the Associated Press and Reuters, but there’s a difference in having your own man, who writes what he sees and who sees it from our point of view. We’ve been talking about it, and we have been pressured by this little group of political refugees, and I agreed to meet with them and let them convince me that Los Angeles needs a correspondent in El Salvador. I must say, I don’t need much convincing — and there it is, on the one night that we have to be together. Anything else I could have ducked. But I have some deep feeling about this.”
“Carson,” Barbara said eagerly, “Carson, if I remember right, your Spanish is lousy.”
“Oh, no, I wouldn’t say that.”
“Rotten.”
“Come on, Barbara, I had eight years of Spanish in school.”
“Carson, take me along. Then we have the whole evening together. The Central American Spanish isn’t Castilian, not by a long shot. It isn’t even Mexican. My Spanish is good. So take me with you tonight, and between us we’ll make out.”
“It’s not a bad idea,” Carson agreed. “I don’t think they’d mind. Introduce you as a writer. They want to talk to writers. But why? I admit I’m enormously flattered, but this morning I had to go down on my knees to get you here.”
“No, don’t say that. Carson, I’m not young. A man comes on to me—”
“I’m not any man!”
“I know, I know, but I can’t handle it anymore. I don’t know how. What woman my age does know how? We’re not supposed to. You know that. Inside, we feel no different. You’re the only one in the world I could talk to like this. You want a man’s arms around you so desperately you could cry out in pain. You want a man in bed next to you, and damn it, you want sex, and I look at you and I feel crazy, I want you so much.”
He reached across the table and took her hands in his. “That’s enough,” he said softly. “I love you. I’ve always loved you. I am not going to apologize for that, and I don’t want you to apologize for one damn thing. You don’t have to go with me tonight or try to convince me that your Spanish is better than mine — which I am sure it is — or to give us another hour. I’ll take you back to your hotel after dinner, and I’ll meet you later.”
“But I want to go with you,” Barbara said.
“Why?”
“Carson, when I was campaigning for Congress up north in the Forty-eighth C.D., I found a corner of the place where a wretched barrio existed — Salvadoran illegals. I spoke to some of them, and something about the whole incident dug into my guts and stayed there. Then, when I read what happened to the nuns, I had my own hour of sickness and despair. I don’t know why I haven’t been able to live like other women, but I haven’t, and all my life I’ve had this umbilical cord tying me to the horrors of this poor cursed planet. It’s too late for me to alter my character and become content. Can you see me as a contented old lady, sitting by the fireplace and waiting for eternity?”
“No, I’m afraid not.”
“Then let’s eat, and bless you for listening to my rambling.”
It was less than half a mile to the house where Carson’s meeting had been scheduled, the type of house that had once been the face of Los Angeles and that had been called, in another era, a California bungalow. It was an oblong frame house, tile roof and a porch across the front. This particular bungalow sat in a weed-grown yard and cried out for paint and patching. The door was opened for them by a slight, brown-skinned, dark-eyed woman of about twenty years. Her English was hardly understandable as she asked what they wanted, and Carson hastened to assure her in Spanish that he was Carson Devron of the Los Angeles Morning World, and that he was there at the invitation of Professor Dante García and that the lady with him was Barbara Lavette, a writer and associate. He
spoke in Spanish, and he was answered in Spanish.
“Yes, of course. We are expecting you. I am Lucía, Professor García’s daughter.” She led them through a small hallway into a living room, where three men stood up to greet them. The furniture in the room was old and decrepit, a broken-down couch, four kitchen chairs and a kitchen table. But the place was clean and neat, and to Barbara there was something woeful at the sight of a bottle of red wine, six plastic cups and a plate of packaged cookies on the table, the necessary hospitality of great poverty. One of the men, bearded and older than the others, at least in his mid sixties, wearing glasses over deep-set, pain-filled eyes, introduced himself as Professor Dante Garcia. A man of about thirty, wiry, nervous, his hands locked in front of him, clenching and unclenching, a fierce mustache drooping down over his chin, was introduced as José Santiago, and the third man, slender, scholarly, a great scar, chin to ear, marring a pleasant face, was introduced as Brother Jesús Domingo; he was a Franciscan monk. He, like Santiago, wore blue jeans and a blue work shirt. Only the professor was carefully attired in a threadbare three-piece suit.
They all shook hands with Carson and Barbara; and Professor García, speaking in English, and apparently knowledgeable of American literature, recalled her novel Driftwood, and remarked that he had read it with interest and enlightenment.
Thanking him, Barbara explained that they both spoke Spanish and that it might be easier for everyone if they used that language. The professor thanked her, admitting that his two colleagues spoke almost no English.
“We are very anxious to talk to you,” Professor García said, “very anxious, believe me, because people say you will help us.”
“Help you, no,” Carson said firmly. “Write about you — well, that’s another matter. We come here to listen, to hear your side of this business in El Salvador. If it’s a story, we will write it and print it as truthfully as we can, and if it merits someone on the scene, we’ll send a correspondent down to El Salvador. I think my paper is open-minded and fair, as fair as any newspaper on this continent.”
“That is all we ask,” Garcia said. “But before you hear our testimony, I would like to say a few words about my country, since until a few years ago, no one in the United States even knew we existed. A very small country, El Salvador, hardly as large as your state called Massachusetts, with a population of almost five million people — imagine, a country not much larger than Los Angeles County, and still half of it wild scrub and jungle and mountains. We are, I think, the most densely populated country in the world and possibly the poorest people in the world. My people are almost all mestizo, which means a mixture of Spanish and Indian blood, and maybe a few hundred thousand of Indian blood alone —”
“You say half the land is arable,” Barbara broke in. “How do you live? How do you survive?”
“Very poorly, señora, very poorly indeed, because, you must understand, my people do not own the half of the land that is arable. Eighty percent of the land that can grow anything better than mesquite is in the hands of ten percent of my country’s population. They operate great plantations, true latifundia, where they grow coffee and sugar cane and cotton. The men who labor in these plantations earn perhaps ten dollars a week, the women eight dollars, and the children — a dollar, two dollars. Seventy percent of the people cannot read or write, and perhaps ninety percent are functionally illiterate. For them, tiny plots of land, which they must work with love and care to grow their beans and melons — if they are lucky enough to have a plot of land. And a few dozen families live like princes, with great houses and servants. I read that you have here a large and powerful movement against abortion, but if they only came to Salvador, they would see that our children begin to die the moment they leave the womb. But the few families who own the plantations, the banks, and of course, the government, which means the country itself, their children are strong and healthy and they are sent here to the States to go to private schools and then to Stanford and Yale and Harvard. But the ordinary people, Señor Devron, I don’t know whether in all the world there are people who suffer so.”
“But you resist. You fight back.”
“Even a mouse fights back when it is being destroyed.”
“Tell him a little of our history,” the man with the mustache said, the man whose name was Santiago. He had been watching the professor intently as he spoke, nodding his head, his hands never still. He fascinated Barbara; she felt him as a warped bundle of pain and anger, pain endured and anger controlled.
“A hundred years ago, the plain people, the peasants, owned most of the land. Much of it was held in common. Indians, mestizos — they cannot truly comprehend private ownership of the land. It is not in their culture to have a man say, I own the land. God creates the land. God gives it to the people. So when a few rich and powerful families banded together to take the land from the people, the people resisted.”
“But tell them!” the man with the mustache interrupted. “No, I’ll tell them. You say, fight back? In nineteen thirty-two, we fought back. My grandfather, Raoul Santiago, was one of the leaders. Thirty-two thousand of our. people were killed by the soldiers of the rich. Among all of us, we had perhaps two hundred old guns, knives, clubs, sickles. They killed us until they could kill no more, until their fingers were too tired to pull a trigger, until the hand was too tired to slit a throat. My father was a little boy. He hid in a basket in the house, but through the basket he saw them come into the house. They murdered his mother. The new baby they killed by smashing his head against the doorpost. My father’s two sisters, one nine and one twelve, they raped. A nine-year-old raped, and then they chopped off their heads with machetes. That’s what happens when we fight them, and still we fight them. Last year alone, the death squads murdered fourteen thousand people.”
“José, enough!” the professor cried.
“Enough? Why is it enough? I’m a revolutionary,” he said to Barbara and Carson. “The professor here is not entirely sure that he approves of fighters. He feels there is a peaceful way. He still hopes for something from Duarte. Did I say before how many in nineteen thirty-two? No one counted. There is a ravine called Poco Colorado a few miles from San Salvador, maybe twenty feet deep, maybe ten feet wide. It was filled with bodies, women and children mostly — but who was to count?”
“José, enough!” García shouted.
“It touches him. He’s a distant relative of the other García. No, I must go on —”
“Let him go on,” Barbara said. “I want to hear it.”
“I’ll tell you something about Duarte,” Santiago said. “He is a good, brave man whom I would trust if I did not know what happens to a man who falls into the hands of the rich and their death squads. First they stole the election of nineteen seventy-two from Duarte, and then the army officers arrested him, tortured him, beat him unmercifully, smashed his nose, his cheekbones — well, what happens to a man after that? I understand such things. They smashed my own nose, knocked out most of my teeth, put three bullets into me and then left me to die. Oh, Jesus Christ, you ask did we fight back?”
The third man, Brother Jesús Domingo, who had not spoken until now, put his arm around Santiago. “You must forgive José. He has suffered too much. I know how he has suffered. I know how we all suffer.” He touched the scar on his face. “They did that with a branding iron. They like to play with a hot iron. I gave the last rites to a peasant they had shot. He wasn’t a fighter. He wasn’t part of the resistance. He was only a poor householder, whom they shot because, when the resistance leaves a village, it is their pleasure to shoot the villagers. Do you think we are Communists? I was called a Communist because I heard the confession of a dying man. He was called a Communist because he lived in the village. His wife, whom they raped and shot, was called by them a Marxist. Do you think anyone, any peasant, knows what Marxist means?”
“You’re denying there are any Communists among the guerrillas? Is that what you’re telling us?” Carson wanted to know.
/>
“Oh, no,” the professor said. “No. Santiago here is a Communist. He doesn’t deny it. I am not. Brother Jesús is not. Santiago is a good Catholic; I am not. You North Americans never try to understand such things. You want everything black or white. If you had helped Castro to throw the Mafia and the dope kings and the pimps and the assorted bloodsuckers out of Cuba, he would have been your friend and ally. But always you are against us, against the people who want to live like human beings. So you create the Communists and you drove Castro into the arms of Russia. Duarte won in nineteen seventy-two. That is the truth, and your people knew it, but the landowners and the bankers in my country were against Duarte, and the army stole the election and you would not help him. You keep saying democracy, but you will not support real democracy, and so we did the only thing that was left to do — we listened to the Communists and the other radicals and we went into the mountains to fight. But what is my word? What is Santiago’s word? What is Brother Jesús’ word? Only if you send your own person down there will we be validated.”
“How do you know he will write the truth?” Barbara asked.
“If he is not a politician, if he is not part of your government, he will look around him and see. Then he will write the truth, be assured. So with the people from the New York Times and the Washington Post. They are writing the truth.”
They drove to Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica, where they parked and then walked on the footpath high above the beach and the glistening Pacific. The moon was full, and the cold current of air, flowing in from the sea, was sweet and clean and untainted with smog. They had spoken little in the car. Only now, Barbara wondered how Carson responded to what they had heard.
