The Last Great Road Bum

by Héctor Tobar

  I’m doing fine but figure I best be getting on my way to Nicaragua, where things have quieted down. Nobody can figure out what I’m doing here. Just like always, they figure I’m a commie or CIA, and that gets old. Hence, time to head on down the line.

  He spent a week in revolutionary Nicaragua, where the mood was one of joyful exhaustion, of rebuilding and renewal. The new government had announced an ambitious plan to teach the entire country to read and write, and to cure other ills of the recently ended dictatorial era, and Joe thought he might find a way to stay there and help, perhaps with the anti-malaria program. But his thoughts returned to the bodies on the plaza, the dead girl and the woman, especially, and after two weeks in Managua he got back on the bus and returned to San Salvador. I’m realizing now, he wrote home, that I don’t really know the people of these Central American countries well enough.1

  * * *

  JOE RETURNED TO the University of El Salvador, which continued to function as a liberated zone in the heart of the city, and he introduced himself to the people he met, who were huddled in groups in the narrow lawns between the buildings, debating the political situation, or in classrooms emptied of desks, making banners and printing leaflets. His presence elicited curiosity, suspicious looks and the basic question, What are you doing here? Or, in the local dialect: ¿Y vos, qué hacés aquí? I’m just here to show my solidarity, he’d say. He told them the story of his travels, his visits to Vietnam and Africa, and his work in Bolivia, and then more about Vietnam, because of all the things he had to say, this seemed to hold their attention the most.

  “You were in Vietnam?” a student named Byron asked him, because he’d heard about Joe from a friend.

  Joe described how the United States military, the most powerful fighting force in history, had been surrounded by an army of children in Saigon, and how he’d seen the city shelled by this rebel army. Byron was so enthralled with Joe’s account, imagining how the Salvadoran revolution might become as powerful a force as Vietnam’s, that he began to tell his friends: There is a Vietnam veteran, an American soldier, here among us, on the campus.

  In his jeans and T-shirt, and with his now-bushy hair, and with his gonzo demeanor and a pack of smokes at the ready to share with anyone, Joe was the picture of a disaffected North American GI. As if he’d stepped out of the jungles they’d seen on the television news, or from those American peace protests that featured ex-soldiers in loose-fitting, carefree army fatigues, with cigarettes dangling from their lips. As word spread on the university grounds that the tall, blond man roaming about the campus had fought in Vietnam, the stories about him grew more elaborate. The gringo had been forced to shoot at the peasants over there, in the rice fields. He’s wracked with guilt. That’s why he’s come here. He wants to fight with us.

  To others, Joe was an object of suspicion. As veterans of labor strikes and marches and the takeovers of government buildings, they had seen friends and comrades shot in the street, or kidnapped in public and murdered. They were members of mobilization committees and rural cooperatives deemed subversive by the forces of order, and they were used to being monitored and surveilled, and when they met Joe they were not convinced he could be trusted, even if he was a repentant soldier of the American empire. Joe was becoming a fixture at the daily events of the revolution, at the rallies and the occupation of the Panamanian Embassy, at the impromptu barricades in the popular barrios, at the press conferences across San Salvador. A hippie mascot to their revolution. His ubiquitousness and his fluency in Spanish, with its odd Illinois-Peruvian-Bolivian mongrel accent, caused them to worry. It was one thing to encounter an American on the sidelines at the rallies—but quite another when that American understood everything they were saying and could mimic their speech. Joe had quickly learned that cuilios was local slang for police or soldiers, and that cipote meant child, and he peppered his sentences with the syllable va, which was a vocalized pause equivalent to you know in English. Joe had pierced the linguistic shield that protected them from gringo power, and when he said, in fluent Spanish, “I want to help you, I can help the revolution,” it fed their paranoia.

  After meeting Joe at a university rally, a leader in one of the many “popular fronts” in San Salvador assigned a woman from the organization’s ranks to talk to Joe and find out if he was a spy. Her movement name was “Mariposa,” a common nom de guerre among the proto-rebels, and later Joe would meet another “Mariposa,” and so he would remember this one as “the First Butterfly.” Mariposa was twenty-five years old, the recipient of an interrupted university education in sociology, and the daughter of an attorney who had been assassinated for the crime of representing a Catholic peasant group. She was raccoon-eyed from too many sleepless nights, and carried with her a copy of a novel by the Salvadoran writer Manlio Argueta that was considered subversive propaganda by the authorities, and she was also among the growing number of women in San Salvador who were familiar with the workings of an M16. She knew the zigzagging paths that led out of the urban sprawl, past shacks clinging to dry riverbeds, and up into the mountains, to the camps where a rebel army was being formed amid the birdsong and the rural compost heaps.

  Mariposa found Joe on the University of El Salvador campus and invited him to lunch, and they proceeded to a nearby Chinese restaurant. After an hour of chow mein, conversation and gentle questioning, Mariposa arrived at an understanding of who Joe Sanderson was. He was moderately educated and had spent most of his adult life traveling, allowing himself the luxury of visiting war zones and impoverished communities around the world. Joe was not a Vietnam veteran, though he had been in the United States Army, as a medic. He was genuinely sympathetic to the Salvadoran people, and especially to the plight of its children, and he had worked to bring health care to the poor in Nigeria, Ecuador and Bolivia. He was also a “novelist” who had never published a book. In the end Mariposa felt a sympathy for Joe she had not expected when first meeting him. He was a man who worked hard to retain his boyish belief in a world without borders, where he could go wherever he pleased, living unencumbered by responsibilities, even as one nation-state after another fell apart in his footsteps. I can only dream of living the way he does, floating from country to country. Imagine that. Just drifting across the Caribbean and South America on trains and ships. India, elephants, Nepal, snowcapped peaks. I did not know this species of human existed in the world, men who wander and wander until they turn old, and don’t stop. He was tall, sandy-blond, and handsome, and also vulnerable and lonely.

  “I’d like to help, however I can,” he said.

  “Veremos,” she answered. We’ll see. But then she added, “I think it would probably be better for you if you went home.” Joe did not know, and never knew, that his life hung in the balance in that conversation with First Butterfly. If she had reported back to the front’s leaders that Joe was unequivocally an American agent, he would have been lured to a remote corner of San Salvador and murdered. His death would have been viewed as one more mystery with a patina of political conspiracy, his body dumped at a trash-strewn crossroads or highway. An American corpse, added to the aggregate of Salvadoran corpses and to the oppressive swirl of randomness and cruelty that was tormenting the country’s five million residents.

  Instead, Mariposa reported back to the front’s leaders that Joe Sanderson was definitely not an American agent, but simply a well-meaning gringo vagabond, an eccentric. Joe continued to float around the university and the city, but in the wake of his conversation with First Butterfly he realized how conspicuous he was, because she was able to list some of the many places the “militantes” of her movement had spotted him. Probably he was already in many photographs taken by the Salvadoran intelligence services too. He tried to be more careful in what he wrote home to his mother, and he started telling her he was taking Spanish classes at the university, and he referred to the activists there as schoolteachers. He read four or five newspapers a day and used what he learned in their pages to find his way
to the street battles that inevitably took place whenever the popular organizations (of which he counted at least thirty) declared a mobilization or a general strike. Joe watched students burn tires and schoolteachers throw stones, and more masked young men exchanging shots with soldiers, and sometimes he wondered if there were a point to his voyeurism: what he was seeing was still too complex and chaotic to fit in a novel, and who would he be in said book besides the gringo wandering from one life-and-death event to the next. The only other Americans who crossed his path were the photojournalists, but their cameras had the odd effect, he noticed, of keeping them from being fully immersed in the events they were documenting. Joe believed he was the only American with unencumbered eyes upon the drama, the one pure representative of more than two hundred million people in the most powerful country on earth.

  His visa was set to expire again, so he made his way out of the country, for a brief visit to Mérida, where he picked up money Steve had forwarded to him. He was in that Mexican city when he read in the newspaper that Monsignor Óscar Romero, the Archbishop of San Salvador, had been assassinated while conducting Mass. On the day Joe left Mérida to return to San Salvador, he read about the massacre at the archbishop’s funeral, and more about the archbishop’s activities during his final days, including his exhortations to the troops of the Salvadoran Army and National Guard not to fire on civilians. “No soldier is obliged to obey a law contrary to the law of God.” From Mexico, free to speak his mind, Joe wrote to Calhoun and his mother: The massacre at the archbishop’s funeral sounds worse than the one I saw on Jan. 22. Concerned about my friends in San Salvador, but won’t know how they made out until my return next weekend. And it’s gonna get worse. At least several hundred people are murdered every week.

  When he returned to El Salvador, he wrote home and once again used the silly, perfunctory code that disguised his activities. So it’s back to the books for me, at least for a couple more months. All’s well, feels good to be back here, and the family (schoolteachers) send their regards. He fell in with a group of activists who allowed him to paint banners; then they appointed him a lookout and decoy when they performed actions in a working-class section of El Salvador called Mejicanos, a neighborhood of narrow streets covered with webs of utility wires. If the police arrived while the militants were painting slogans on the walls, or building a barricade, Joe could simply walk up to the officers and pretend to be a lost gringo, and slow down the forces of order long enough for the militants to get away. They called themselves “compas,” which was short for compañeros, which was a less-Marxist Latin American synonym for “comrades.” The compas were accounting students, high schoolers, middle schoolers, and part-time street vendors, and sometimes they would bring him along in a car, and have him be a passenger while they delivered ammunition or pamphlets, so that the driver could say, This gringo tourist hired me to take him to the beach, and Joe could wave at the officer or soldier and say, Hola!

  You’d love my schoolteachers, Joe wrote home. Hardworking, fun-loving and full of jokes, and sometimes a bit on the noisy side. Living here and getting fat and working my tail off kind of reminds me of being on the farm! Even got folks pestering me about smoking. And I don’t dare partake of a beer in their presence. He watched them make homemade bombs from milk bottles, and gave some basic instructions on the use and cleaning of their old revolvers. When he wasn’t helping out the compañeros, he attended more press conferences. On the stage of the university’s law school auditorium he saw members of various popular organizations, and the Minister of Education, proclaim themselves a government-in-waiting calling itself the Democratic Revolutionary Front. (Several weeks later, nearly all of the members of this alternate government were rounded up by the army and murdered.) At this same press conference Joe met a woman who said she was writing for The Nation: she was from Champaign-Urbana, the niece of a professor at the Agriculture Department. On May Day, he joined up with her in the center of San Salvador for the traditional workers’ march, which was sparsely attended, given the recent public massacres. The next day, looking through his newspapers, he saw a photograph of a line of protesters standing near the central market: on the far right, walking toward the photographer, was a tall, thin figure with bushy, light hair, the only person looking directly at the camera. Himself, the wandering son of Urbana, bum extraordinaire, unpublished novelist, and now a getaway driver to teenage rebels. He clipped it out and sent it home. Thought y’all might get a kick out of this May Day news photo, he wrote. That’s me with the shades, white T-shirt and pants. At least 90% of the folks you see are armed, semisecretly, with pistols, shotguns (saw-offs), light machine guns, and homemade grenades. Many are wearing masks to prevent identification.

  He moved in with a family of Evangelical Christians who lived in a working-class neighborhood of San Salvador. The rent was very cheap, and had the advantage of being in an area sympathetic to the revolution. Fighting broke out in the streets behind my house yesterday around 5:45 a.m. when a squadron of neighborhood lads erected barricades across the intersections. But pistols aren’t much good against machine guns and tanks, so once Nat. Guard arrived they shot it out briefly and withdrew, Joe wrote home. Of course, I didn’t dare go into the streets. Spent most of the day studying algebra, writing letters to my old high school teachers, and practicing tap dancing (please tell Calhoun to stop snorting!). Anyway, if you want to know what a military invasion is like, it’s similar to preparing for a hurricane or tornado. You figure on no power, communications or outside food and water for a few days. Get together candles + flashlights + medicine, and be ready to evacuate if bombing and strafing start.

  * * *

  VIRGINIA HAD RECENTLY RETIRED, and Joe’s letters from El Salvador entered the flow of her retiree life, days that revolved around time spent with Calhoun and her granddaughter, Kathy, and visits with Annabel Ebert and other friends. Once a week, she watched Annabel’s son, Roger, on her new color TV, talking about movies. Breakfast at the Union with Steve, the occasional wedding. She made strawberry shortcakes and pork roasts. Reading her younger son’s missives, and his descriptions of massacres, murders and battles caused her moments of unsettledness; she studied the clipping he had sent, and briefly examined it with the magnifying glass Calhoun used to study his atlas. In the tiny pixels she imagined she saw a smirk. Self-satisfied. Here I am again, in the middle of trouble. Very funny, son. Finally she set his letter down and numbered it and put it in a shoebox. The very large number of letters in these boxes was reassuring, because they were a reminder that Joe had been to many dangerous places and always survived to return home. She numbered the letters when she opened them, and then she numbered her replies. Here goes number fifteen.

  Have a happy birthday and all of us will be thinking about you on your day, she wrote. He was going to turn thirty-eight. The string of years that went back to Fayetteville and that bassinet. A time when he was small enough for me to carry. I can remember, will always remember. Candles on the cake, pin the tail on the donkey. We are planning on depositing twenty-five dollars in your Urbana Home Loan account as a present. You should buy swim shorts with it. Here we live the rhythms of the seasons and of our granddaughter’s childhood. Kathy makes up and folds down her own bed when she stays here. At night we watch the television news, wondering if we might catch a glimpse of you in El Salvador. In his next letter home, Joe joked about being out and about with his friends the algebra and Spanish teachers, at the scene of a barricade, and being wounded while running away from the National Guard: he had jumped over said barricade and tripped, scraping his knee, thus meriting a Purple Heart.

  Now that you have been awarded a Purple Heart, she wrote back, we hope that you receive the proper treatment. And will you please stop studying so hard. I can’t remember that you were that great at algebra and you must drive your Spanish teachers crazy. All I can do is joke with him. Nothing else. Virginia waded through three newspapers every day and clipped out stories about El Salvador to s
end to him once a month. She watched the television news and saw corpses in El Salvador and flaming vehicles. Our new peanut-farmer president says he’ll stop sending money to El Salvador, but he can’t fix that country, just like he can’t fix this one. I am making two of Kathy’s sweaters larger for her, she wrote to Joe. On a typewriter now, keeping a carbon. I knitted them so I know just what to do. Grandpa Calhoun measured her on her place on the wall and she has grown at least 3 inches in the last 6 months.

  * * *

  JOE HAD NOT YET RECEIVED his mother’s birthday letter before he got around to writing and sending his next one. A grim and gloomy day, he began. A kid I worked with at the university got shot and killed by the military during the last strike. Friends were burying him right on university grounds beside other graves. Joe did not know Manuel as well as he knew other comrades in the Liga Popular. Manuel was the memory of a face at the edge of the gatherings. Feeding ink into the mimeograph machine in the league’s office in a university classroom. One conversation with him about a Creedence Clearwater Revival song, of all things. “What is he saying, Joe?” “Earthquakes and lightning. Terremotos y relámpagos.” They buried him after a eulogy delivered by a comrade whose tears flowed down from amber eyes into the red bandanna covering his face, after digging a grave in a patch of lawn near the Department of Odontology. In the days that followed Joe watched as future dentists walked to their classrooms passing Manuel’s resting place, and he listened to Manuel’s friends tell stories of his commitment to the cause and his love for the Rolling Stones and the way his hand trembled when he first held and fired a revolver. In moments of quiet Joe sensed that their memories of Manuel were taking corporeal form in the skin and muscle around their temples and behind their eyes. Death was transforming their cause into a journey toward the afterlife. Manuel was canonized in their remembrances of him, and a few compas wrote about him in the private journals they kept, in notebooks with printed covers depicting cartoons of horses and daisies, and they penned poems to him peppered with the joyful salutation ¡Compañero!