The Immigrant’s Daughter

by Howard Fast

  After a few minutes a bearded man in a ragged monk’s robe came out of the ruined church, surveyed the street and then walked over to where they sat in the jeep.

  “Abrahams?”

  “Yes.”

  “And this,” he said in accented but clear English, “is Señora Barbara Lavette, the writer.”

  “Yes,” she replied in Spanish, “a very frightened Barbara Lavette.”

  “Your Spanish is very good. Shall we talk in Spanish?”

  “I would prefer it. Yes.”

  “And you, Señor Abrahams?”

  “Sure. She’ll do most of the talking.”

  “Very good. I am Brother Pancho Campella. If my Spanish sounds strange and somewhat like your own, Señora Lavette, it is because I am Spanish, Madrid, Castilian, and even though I have been here a long time, one retains the accent. About fear, Señora Lavette,” he continued as he climbed into the back seat of the jeep, “it is endemic in El Salvador, so we live with it as well as possible. But today, where we are going, there are no soldiers, no National Guard, so you can rest easy. We will be in our territory from here on. Drive straight ahead, Señor Abrahams.”

  Brother Pancho was a short, stocky man, his feet encased in thonged leather sandals, his arms muscular under the heavy sleeves of his coarsely woven robe, his round face encased in a curly black beard. Looking at him, Barbara was reminded of nothing so much as a figure out of the storybooks she read as a child, a Friar Tuck or a follower of St. Francis — and as if he had read her mind, he said, “Yes, if you are wondering, I am a Franciscan, one alone.”

  “You came here from Spain?”

  “Eleven years ago, to seek for my soul, which indeed I found in this terrible suffering place.”

  She thought of his words: our territory. How was it their territory? They were a few hours’ drive from San Salvador, and the guerrillas called this their territory. But how was it their territory? Again, as if in answer to her unspoken thought, the friar said, “Of course, when the soldiers come, unless we choose to fight them, we leave the land to them. The people mostly are with us, but they can’t admit it. Otherwise, the soldiers would kill them. So some of the people must curse us when the soldiers come. But today, there are no soldiers here.” And then, after a moment, he added, “Sometimes the people betray us. They are only human.”

  “You say, ‘We fight.’ Do you fight?” Barbara asked.

  “No, señora. I am a Franciscan. I don’t fight or carry a weapon. I help when I can.”

  “It’s not that black and white,” Abrahams said without enthusiasm.

  “You take that track to the right,” the friar said. “It’s never black and white. People aren’t made of two colors. It’s always somewhere in between. This woman who risks so much to come here and write about us, what is she? Is she a saint or a devil? Are we the godless ones or do we worship God best? Everything is from a position. I never say, Come to my position.”

  Abrahams drove on, all of them silent for a while. Then Brother Pancho apologized for the road, admitting that it was hardly a road at all. Abrahams drove slowly, but still the jeep lurched and swayed. “Only another few miles,” the friar consoled them.

  It was a village even smaller than Isplán, and if it had a name, Barbara was not informed of it. There were no more than half a dozen mud houses, but there were people in residence, children playing in the muddy street, goats feeding, women who paused to stare at the jeep as it lumbered to a stop; and in front of one of the houses stood three young men in ragged trousers and old T-shirts, each of them with an automatic carbine of some sort, each of them with a bandolier of cartridges over his shoulder. They were very young, small in size; they couldn’t have been more than sixteen or seventeen years old. At the same time, something about them gave Barbara the feeling that they were not new to this and that when the time came, they would handle themselves and their weapons proficiently.

  When she climbed down from the jeep, it took a very conscious effort on her part to straighten up. Every muscle and every bone in her body ached, and as she carefully and gingerly forced her body to an erect position, Abrahams nodded.

  “I know — feels like we’ve been bent into pretzels.”

  “Worse.”

  The friar was shaking hands with the soldiers. One of them said, “Bless me, please.” The young man knelt and Brother Pancho made the sign of the cross over him. Barbara, watching, had the notion that this was for their benefit, and then felt wretched for even countenancing the thought. Nothing here was specific for their benefit. Who was she? They had only Abrahams’ word for that, and he was by no means an uncritical supporter of the guerrillas. Certainly they had never heard of her, and certainly there was no specific position they could ascribe to the Los Angeles World, providing they had ever seen a copy.

  Children were gathering around the jeep. They didn’t come running, as American children would have, but slowly and cautiously, not laughing, not talking, but silent.

  “Wait here — a small moment,” the friar said to them, and he went into the house. A moment later, he returned and motioned for them to follow him. Barbara and Abrahams had to stoop through the low doorway; then they were in the single room of the cottage. The room had a hard dirt floor, for decoration a paper picture of the Virgin pasted or pinned to the wall, and for comfort a table and two benches. There was a bed against one wall and, at the other wall, a simple hearth where a small pile of charcoal burned, filling the room with its evocative scent. Two men, who had been sitting at the table, stood up as Barbara and Abrahams entered. Each had a bowl and a spoon on the table in front of him, and the woman at the hearth was filling two bowls with a sort of soup. She rose, the bowls in her hands, and carried them to the table. Barbara guessed that this was Con-stanza María Gomez.

  She was not a tall woman, probably no more than five feet one or two inches, very thin, with a face cut so clean around the bones of her head that Barbara’s first impression was of something carved from stone, so tightly was the skin stretched, and the resulting image was one of a woman wearing a beautiful but not quite human mask. Her hair, pulled tightly back and knotted in a ball at the back of her neck, increased the force of this first impression; yet when she looked directly at Barbara and smiled, the face instantly became warm, human and deeply sad.

  “I am Constanza,” she said simply. “It is very early, so you must have started without breakfast.”

  “We’re not hungry.”

  “Of course you are. Who is not hungry? The dead are not hungry, and you are not dead.”

  “We are not dead,” Barbara admitted.

  “Then you must eat. And tell me where you learned to speak Spanish.”

  “At home. In California.”

  “Your accent is fine. I envy it. So we will speak in Spanish. Is that all right with you, Señor Abrahams?”

  “Quite. I can follow. I listen better than I speak.”

  The bowls held bean soup flavored with onion, but Barbara was hungry, and she and Abrahams scraped the bottoms of their bowls and refused an additonal helping.

  “It’s very good,” Barbara said, “but you have too little food and we have too much.”

  “We have enough to survive on most of the time,” Constanza said. “Food comes in from your country, but most of it is stolen by the army and the twenty families, and then it is sold in San Salvador and in San Miguel and Santa Ana. Sometimes we are able to intercept food trucks, and that helps. I know that you hear that the people feed us, but we try to give them food whenever we capture it, and we help with the crops and with the harvest. Our soldiers are not something apart from the people.”

  “In our country,” Barbara said, “we read that you are controlled by the Russians.”

  “It would be very remote control, wouldn’t it? I have never seen a Russian.”

  “We are also told that you have a pact with the Communists and that they control the guerrilla movement.”

  “The Communists fight our ene
mies, and they are brave and hard fighters. Shall we disown them because D’Aubuisson and his death squads want us to?”

  “Our government says that if the guerrillas take control, the Communists will discard the FDR. You will be of no consequence.”

  Again, that soft smile stole over her face. “We are not easily discarded. I think we have proved that.”

  “Do you get arms from the Russians?” Barbara asked. “I know you may feel that these are foolish questions. But I must ask them.”

  The two men at the table chuckled at her question, and one of them took out his pistol and placed it on the table in front of her. It was a Colt .45-caliber automatic pistol.

  “Not from the Russians, but from you,” Constanza said. “Look at all the weapons we have here — all of them made in the USA. We take them from the dead National Guard on the battlefield. We pick them up when the soldiers run away and throw down their weapons. We take them from the National Guard soldiers we capture, and weapons are given to us by men who desert from the army. Still we have too few weapons. How could the Russians give us weapons? We have no seaport. We have no communication with Russians. You people think the Russians deal in magic. But we must deal with the facts of real life.”

  “I am a woman,” Barbara said, “not a young woman, and I’ve seen so much war and suffering. Does it solve anything? I don’t know. I see the way your people suffer, and I must tell myself that, in your place, what else could I do but.what you do? But until when? Can you win militarily?”

  “I’m glad to talk to a woman,” Constanza said. “I talk to the men who are correspondents, even Señor Abrahams here. They are footloose. They don’t understand what it is to have no home, no hearth, no growing things, no roof over a child’s head, no school, no doctor, to be pregnant and watch the National Guard burn your home, to see your priest tortured and have to watch while his testicles are cut off. Yes, with my own eyes I have seen that. We are a deeply Catholic people, señora, perhaps the most Catholic in all of North America, and our priests and nuns are our own flesh and blood, father and mother — and they call us Communists! You ask me, can we win with guns? No, no, no — it would be such killing, and in truth we are fighting your whole giant country. Without your help, the death squads would not last a month. If your government would only leave us alone, we could finally build something good here; but as long as you arm these crazy monsters who kill us as if we were animals, as long as you support them, we must fight you. We can’t win, but at least we live. If we lay down our arms, there will be such a slaughter as the continent has never seen, so we will fight until Duarte and his people destroy the death squads and join us to make a free country.”

  The friar guided them back to Isplán, and all three of them sat in silence in the jeep with never a word spoken. The sun was round and ruddy behind a slow gathering of clouds, the clouds becoming darker as they drove on. The endless chattering and chirping of birds died away, and the silence became as heavy as a blanket. After they dropped off the friar at the ruined hamlet of Isplán, Barbara could no longer control her tears. She didn’t weep violently, but her eyes filled and the tears wet her cheeks — to which Abrahams said, with some irritation, “What in God’s name are you crying about? You got your bloody interview.”

  “Did you see the children? They were starving. They were skin and bones.”

  “Christ, you Yanks give me a bloody pain! You shit on the whole world and then you weep your fucken tears over a hungry kid!”

  The stinging slap she delivered across Abrahams’ face came without thought or intent — and afterward she could not understand how or why she had struck him; but at the moment, all her frustration and anger and hopelessness boiled over, and she shouted, “Don’t you dare! Don’t you ever dare talk to me like that again! We are the best, the kindest, the most compassionate people! Is it our fault that we are ruled by lunatics? Will you show me a country that isn’t ruled by lunatics? Is your country ruled by decent or sane people?”

  Abrahams shook his head mutely, rubbed his cheek, and drove on without speaking.

  Three, four minutes passed, and then Barbara said softly, “Sorry I hit you, Cliff. Please forgive me.”

  “You have a punch like a steam hammer.”

  “I only slapped you. I’m sorry. I don’t know how I could do such a thing to a good person.”

  “You have a slap like a steam hammer.”

  “Oh, come on. You’ll never forgive me. I think I should be forgiven.”

  “In any case, you stopped crying.”

  “I don’t cry when I’m angry.”

  Again silence for a mile or so, and then he said, “You’re a damn strange old girl.”

  “I suppose so. I’m no good for this kind of thing, Cliff, no good at all. I’m a tired old lady who doesn’t have enough sense to know when to sit down by the fireplace and tend to her knitting.”

  “Can you knit?”

  “No. No, I never learned. I tried once or twice, but I’m no good at it.” He was rubbing his face, and Barbara said plaintively, “Come on. It can’t still hurt.”

  “Why not?”

  “Cliff, what should I do? If you’ll stop the car, I’ll get out and go down on my knees.”

  “That might help.”

  “Do you know, I’m less sorry. Until you apologize for what you said, there are no more apologies from me.”

  “I don’t believe this. Here’s a grown man and a grown woman snapping away like two silly kids. Maybe we should both of us shut up for a while.”

  “Thank you. The suggestion is well taken.”

  They drove on in silence. It was hot, wet, and uncomfortable, and Barbara had the damp, crawling feeling that her skin was raw, bitten, breaking out with nameless tropical abrasions. Her arms were covered with the sleeves of her blouse, protection against mosquitoes, her jeans down to her shoes. It gave her a sense of herself as a shapeless lump, peering out of a tangle of clothes from under a shapeless cloth hat. She had no good feelings about herself. Her slapping Abrahams was totally out of character; never before in her life had she done anything of the sort, and the subsequent quarrel was senseless.

  Could it be that out of today they had both come to a point where civilization had to be viewed as a mockery, where the embrace of the murder machine in this tiny country by a presumably modern, civilized government was a swan song for everything either of them had ever believed in? Was it some crazy, doomed passion play that was being enacted here as a prelude to an atomic holocaust that would end life on this planet forever? Or was it simply a nightmare? Was she here at all? Didn’t it make more sense to accept this moment as a dream from which she would awaken safe in her bedroom on Green Street?

  “I am so bloody sorry,” Abrahams said suddenly.

  She didn’t ask why. She was equally sorry, but it was tangled into so many knots that she knew no way to put it into words.

  Whatever else was a dream, the heavy-duty Chevrolet four-wheel-drive wagon blocking the road in front of them was very real. They were about two miles from the slums on the outskirts of San Salvador. It was late in the afternoon. Three soldiers stood next to the wagon, which was painted in camouflage colors and bore the insignia of the National Guard. As they came up to the wagon and stopped, Barbara saw that one of the three was an officer. He was a fat, mustached man, sweating and wiping his face with a wet shirt sleeve.

  “Get out of the car,” the fat man said in Spanish.

  Abrahams, in a deliberately cheery voice, speaking English, said, “Right-o, old chap. We’re a couple of correspondents out for a look-see at the countryside —” Climbing out of the jeep, he whispered to Barbara, “Let me handle this, love.”

  “No English!” the officer said emphatically. “Out of the car!” pointing to Barbara.

  As she got out of the car, Abrahams said, “My Spanish is rotten. Don’t any of you speak English?”

  One of the soldiers said, “She’s an old crow.”

  “You unwrap an ol
d crow, you find a fat chicken.”

  “Maybe.”

  “You two horny bastards shut up,” the officer yelled. And to Abrahams, “You understand some Spanish?”

  “Some.”

  “You come from the Communists? A big story, the Communists. You tell the whole world about them. You know something,” he said, drawing his pistol, a heavy automatic, “I piss all over you filthy Yankee writers.”

  “I’m British.”

  “Worse. I shit on the British.”

  During this, one of the soldiers walked up to Barbara, grinned at her, and then with one quick motion tore open her blouse and brassiere, exposing her breasts. After that, things happened very quickly. As the soldier cried, “How about it? Look at those tits! Am I right, stupid?” Abrahams leaped defensively toward Barbara, and the officer hit Abrahams savagely across the face with his pistol. Abrahams went down on his knees, holding his bleeding face. Barbara shouted at the soldier who had ripped her shirt. “You filthy pig! You son of a sow! Don’t you dare touch me again!”

  “Hey, listen to that fancy Spanish!” the other soldier said. “She has a lisp, like a real, high-class pig.”

  His voice breaking with pain, Abrahams managed to shout, “You damn fools, she’s the Spanish ambassador’s wife!” The sentence was mangled. It came out indicating that the Spanish ambassador was Barbara’s wife, and the two soldiers began to laugh. The officer looked at Barbara, who returned his gaze with utter contempt, so angry at this point that if she had had a gun, all her scruples would have disappeared, and she would have shot him. All the agony, fear and heartsickness at what she had seen during the past weeks took hold of her, and for the second time that day, and this time with all her strength, she struck a man, this time the National Guard officer. So unexpected was her action, so out of tune with anything the officer might have anticipated, that he was taken completely by surprise, both before the blow and after the blow. The slap was hard enough to rock him. The two soldiers froze, not moving, not speaking, and the officer raised his gun and pointed it at Barbara’s breast.