The Last Great Road Bum

by Héctor Tobar

  “No one in this army kills prisoners,” Jonás said.

  A short while later, Lucas and Jonás climbed over a barricade of rocks the army soldiers had built, and found the army lieutenant, with a red trickle oozing from the right temple of his clean-shaven head, and four flies feasting on the blood on his face. “Puta, he killed himself,” Jonás whispered with reverence. The comandante kicked at the automatic pistol that was the instrument of the lieutenant’s departure. Although death was common in this guerrilla war, suicide was not, and there was something otherworldly about seeing an enemy destroyed in this way.

  “We weren’t at El Mozote or La Joya. No.” The captured soldiers insisted on their innocence. “It was the Atlacatl locos that did that.” “They killed all those people.” Joe had never seen army soldiers reduced to such a state. Groveling, begging, pleading, insisting. They’re afraid we’re going to execute them, take our revenge on their conscripted bodies. “No way. No, we didn’t kill anyone.” “But we saw all the bodies. Yes. Bodies everywhere.” “The Atlacatl guys did it. They went crazy.” “Please, believe us. I swear on my mother’s grave. I wasn’t there. I didn’t do it.”

  The suicided lieutenant and the pleading prisoners spoke to the truth of the reports of the massacres and the next day the rebels marched with trepidation toward El Mozote, on a winding road through pine trees, toward an orderly village with no more than twenty houses, if Joe remembered correctly. Whitewashed adobe, a church, a store.

  * * *

  BEFORE THEY REACHED El Mozote the smell drifted over them. An assault on the olfactory senses. As if they were approaching a huge heap of rotting flesh. One hundred meters outside the town, the heavy, salty, sticky vapor reached into the gullet of the man next to Lucas, a compa named Rafael. He gagged, two desperate dry heaves, like a dog pleading, dying. “Controlate, hombre,” Lucas said. The wind shifted, mercifully, but then it circled back, and the rot covered them again, poisoning the moisture in Joe’s nose and in his eyes. They entered the town and found it smoldering. Or maybe they just imagined it was still burning, twenty days after the army had set fire to it, and that it would always burn. Joe’s eyes were drawn upward by the muscular flapping of a low-flying vulture. More birds, black wings and red hoods over their heads, gliding in wide circles. Three, four, five, six … Zopilote is how they say vulture here. The white buildings facing the plaza were blackened, half-standing ruins, and on the street a set of ivory-and-purple vestments undulated and fluttered, as if a priest had been buried under the surface of the dirt roadway and was trying to crawl out. The bloodied and torn clothes of peasants nearby, cracked and soiled communal wafers tossed about. Joe approached one of the singed buildings and peered inside, and he saw bones and a burned denim shirt attached to them, and a skull with emptied eye sockets, yellow teeth locked in a grimace.

  Lucas and the members of his unit drifted across the plaza. Remember, remember everything you see. “The church! The convent!” The locals called this building “el convento” but it was just a big room for the priest to change into his robes when he came to El Mozote. The convent vibrated with the loud buzzing of thousands of flies. Stepping closer Joe saw a tangle of blackened bones being squeezed underneath the charred beams of a collapsed roof. Many bodies, all miniatures. Like a small-scale reproduction of a charnel house. “¡Son niños!” a compa shouted. More insects in there feeding on the half-burned limbs of the children. The life span of a fly is four weeks. New generations of flies incubated in coagulating belly fat, and Joe turned away at the image of the machine legs of the flies, shoveling child fat into their clawed mouths. Joe was about to vomit on the red earth at his feet, and he stumbled toward the street facing the convent; he saw a pocket-size toy car. A toddler-size sandal, its toes pointing toward the convent pyre, a girl’s shoe, the march of unseen children toward the flies and their aggressive, electrified buzzing. Something human here. The children and their murderers. Eternity. This will stay with me the rest of my days. The faces of my comrades, a nightmare we are all living together. Santiago in the middle of the plaza, setting up the mobile transmitter. Levelheaded SOB. He’s going to broadcast from here. Of course. Joe drifted away, following the black soles of a compa’s boots, out of the town square, into the surrounding fields, where there were more bodies. A family in a cornfield. Or rather, the leathery remains of a family. A man and a child, dried up, half-mummified skin. Blackish-brown beetles entered the space underneath the dried flesh of a woman’s shoulders. Beetles, my father’s beetles. Carrion beetles colonize a corpse at all four stages of decomposition, son: fresh, bloated, decayed and dried. “Mirá,” Rafael called out to Lucas. He’d found a box of ammunition. “What does this mean?” he asked, pointing to the letters N-A-T-O. You gotta be fucking kidding me. Joe was too enraged to answer Rafael’s question. (Eleven years later, when a group of Argentine forensic anthropologists came through El Mozote, they determined the ammunition used by the Atlacatl Battalion at El Mozote had been fabricated at the Lake City Army Ammunition Plant, in Independence, Missouri.) Boxes emptied of their cartridges and tossed as the soldiers stopped here, at this cornfield, to reload. After the killing, or before? The cornfield began to rustle. Something alive in there, moving. Rafael lifted his weapon and pointed at the stalks, which parted, revealing a half-crazed, living woman who stumbled out with her hands raised, as if surrendering; Rafael lowered his weapon and reached out to her, and as he did so she took his hand and fell to one knee.

  A round-faced woman, a mother. Lucas and Rafael raised her to her feet and led her toward the town plaza, insisting, gently, because she seemed reluctant. They were taking her to the plaza, to see the radio people. “Compañeros, we have a witness.” When she saw the faces of Mariposa and the women soldiers of the radio crew, she calmed down, as if she knew the first part of her nightmare had ended. She began to tell the story that she would repeat a half dozen times in the next few days. Rufina Amaya was the sole surviving resident of El Mozote, and her account of what happened there on December 11, and in the days before and after, would find its way first into the broadcasts of Radio Venceremos, and then into newspaper stories and human rights reports.

  * * *

  ONLY TWO HUNDRED PEOPLE lived in the score of houses of El Mozote and its surrounding farms on an ordinary day. But days before the massacre, with word of army troops massing nearby, the town began to fill with a few hundred more refugees. There was a debate outside the town’s only store about whether everyone should leave, but the man who owned the store said he was friends with an army officer who had told him that the people had nothing to fear. So most of the residents and refugees stayed. When the soldiers came, they started banging on doors and ordering people out, and they were brutal and angry with everyone, even the elderly, and they made hundreds of people lie facedown on the ground, in the town’s plaza and the surrounding streets, including Rufina and her husband, Domingo, and their four children. It was late in the afternoon, and it was turning dark, and they could hear shots being fired on the edge of the town, and the crackling of the flames consuming the store, and they were all very, very frightened. For the next several hours, the soldiers herded the men, women and children in and out of buildings, and slapped people and beat them with their rifle butts, and they took Domingo and the rest of the men out into the fields and began to shoot them, and to behead them with machetes, and they ordered the women and children into a small building where they were all squeezed in together, and through it all Rufina hoped Domingo wasn’t suffering, and she resigned herself to the fact that he was dead, or would soon be dead. She described how helicopters landed in the town, bringing officers who gave orders. The soldiers began to separate out the older girls, and the soldiers took them away, and for the next hour the women could hear the girls screaming as the soldiers raped them, and finally the soldiers began to kill the women and children in small groups, and Rufina heard her own children being strangled and hacked to death, and in a moment of desperation she escaped
from the soldiers guarding her and tried to reach her children, but she got lost in the dark. She saw the bright glow of army flashlights, and hid behind a tree as a group of soldiers guided the youngest of the town’s boys and girls into the convent, which was surrounded by other soldiers, who began to argue. One officer grabbed another officer by the collar, and the two men half wrestled with each other, and when the fight was over one of them shouted an order and the men began to fire their weapons into the convent, through its windows and its front door, and Rufina slipped away, and ran into the fields and then into the hills, and she spent many hours alone hearing laughter and shouts from the town that were like those of drunken men. She listened, haunted by the ghosts of Domingo and their four children, the youngest of whom was eight months old, and after two days, when the soldiers were gone, she went back into the town to look for her babies, but found only the corpses and the vultures the compas had seen.

  * * *

  JOE FOUND SANTIAGO and spoke a few words he felt he needed to say to someone, to anyone. “Why would they kill so many children?” And then, “This is a Nazi thing.” He remembered writing in his last letter home how El Salvador was like Vietnam, and that night, by a campfire, in the long silence among his comrades, Joe gazed at the flames and saw the savage impulses at the center of human history. A fever that could sweep through a group of men until they destroyed an entire tribe, a village, a people. How do you write about such a thing and have people believe you? That men could be so rabid as to gather children in a room and murder them, hack them to death and set them on fire with their parents listening. His notes that night were scribbles, incomplete sentences, words that stood for the things he had seen. Flies. Stacked bodies. Convent. Toy horse. Rufina. Son strangled. Sound of it.

  Lucas and his unit entered four more villages and caseríos the following day, and found a few more survivors of other destroyed villages. As at El Mozote, Lucas took his notebooks and joined a few other radio compas in trying to assemble a list and count of the dead, writing down what names they could find, looking for identification cards amid the corpses, reaching into the pockets of dead farmers, asking the survivors for more names, and after the second day Rafael told Lucas, “In these towns they say that when someone dies they enter the body of the first living person they find.” Rafael placed his hand to his chest, as if he felt one or two or more spirits inside him, squirming and suffering. After a third day in the massacre zone, Lucas and Santiago and a few of the radio and intelligence comrades made sums and estimates, and they could say that somewhere between seven hundred thirty-three, and nine hundred twenty-six civilians had been murdered, and when word came that a North American reporter and photographer were on their way to the base at La Guacamaya, it was decided that these would be the numbers that would be reported to them. A few hours before the journalists’ arrival, Jonás gathered the comandantes to tell them that anyone and everyone was to speak to the reporters and share what they had seen, and then Lucas stepped forward and said they should be very precise in what they said to the North Americans. “All these guns we have; they’re all guns we captured. Right? These FALS, these AKs.” Because of course not every weapon they had was captured, especially the new mortars and the big machine guns; firearms and ordnance were starting to arrive from Nicaragua and Cuba. That was all fine with Lucas, but it wouldn’t be so cool with Joe Public back in Chicago and Peoria. “So let’s exercise some discipline in the words we speak,” Lucas said, and the compas looked at Jonás, who said, “Lucas is absolutely correct. Let’s speak intelligently. Our weapons are all captured,” and when the reporter for The New York Times and the photographer named Susan entered after two days of walking from Honduras, the rebels told them all their weapons were captured.

  * * *

  THE NEW YORK TIMES reporter was named Bonner and he regarded the blond rebel fighter named Lucas with curiosity, having heard much about him from the other rebels. “So you can’t tell me your real name?” Bonner asked.

  “No, absolutely not,” Lucas said, and he grinned sardonically, a very American gesture, filled with hidden meanings known only to the individualist behind his blue Yankee eyes.

  “Hometown?”

  “Anytown, U.S.A.”

  “And your age?”

  “That I can tell you. Thirty-nine.”

  “So why are you here?”

  “I’m writing a book. Been here about a year. In the mountains since March. Started off in the city, hanging out with the students, going to the marches. Saw people killed. Horrific shit, really.” Ah, it had been ages since he’d cussed in English to an English speaker who could appreciate it. “Eventually I hooked up with this outfit.”

  “And you’re writing a book.”

  “Yeah. Sorta like John Reed in the Russian Revolution.”

  The photographer Susan Meiselas wandered through the camp as Bonner interviewed the rebels, and when she found Lucas he was leaning back in a hammock, an M16 draped across his lap, about to light a cigarette. She regarded him, an image of sun-kissed revolutionary machismo, his blond hair filled out, wavy, his sideburns robust and his mustache untamed. Must be at least fifteen years older than everyone here. Blue jeans, green socks, khaki shirt. She snapped his picture as he lit said smoke, the child-intelligence officers from the orphanage hovering nearby. What a shot. A grizzled gringo movie star amid the peasants. Something hard about him.

  The photographer turned her camera to capture some of the young brown-skinned rebels lining up with bowls to eat lunch, and Rafael, who had been hovering nearby, sat on the ground next to Lucas and handed him a cigarette and Lucas lit it with the burning tip of his own.

  “I know what it’s like to have the dead inside you,” Rafael said. He had small eyes that lit up when he heard funny stories and made ironic observations, and on an ordinary day he had the tragicomic look of an actor from the silent film era. “All those corpses we saw, Lucas. I feel them inside me all day. At night, they take over.” The souls inside him wept, they pleaded, they laughed, Rafael said. They sang. They ate, they defecated when he did. “They’re always in there. I am afraid. I think I’m losing my mind.”

  “Sorry, I am not an exorcist,” Lucas said, and he blew a column of smoke from his mouth skyward, and looked into Rafael’s eyes. And Rafael thought: Yes, Lucas is right. Smoke some tobacco, and the souls will get the idea and follow the smoke into heaven, and when he finished his cigarette, quickly, he asked Lucas if he could have another.

  Joe did not feel the dead grappling inside him. Instead, their suffering circled in his thoughts. The toy plastic horse he’d seen in the grip of one of the skeletal hands inside the convent. Hard orange plastic, size of Joe’s thumb, hooves rising in a gallop. He could feel the girl gripping the horse, as the pushing soldiers squeezed her into the convent. Toy, childhood. Separated from her mother, a toy with her as the soldiers open fire. Her grip on to it as the bullets pass through her. What a bullet does to flesh. If people knew. Orange plastic horse in her hand. They push her in. She grips it. Squeezes it. The soldiers push her into the convent and she holds on to her toy. They open fire, and a bullet cuts through her. Several. She squeezes, a reflex, she grips, she dies. The plastic horse melts in the fire just enough to stick to her fingers. The soldiers pushed her into the convent and she gripped her toy. Beloved toy, comforting toy. Joe’s thoughts looped with the girl’s, and maybe this was what Rafael was feeling. Looping thoughts, girl’s final act. The orange horse. Flies probing her forearm, its carbonized skin. Lucas looked down at Rafael who had finished his second cigarette; he was working his jaw weirdly, like he had something stuck in his gums. Later, Joe went to the kitchen and chewed a tortilla with an odd, steely taste, and he wondered if the dead had taken control of his tongue, or was it just the smell of death from all the villages? He smoked another cigarette and the tobacco filled his mouth with a pleasant sting and the dead lost their grip on his tastebuds, and his thoughts returned to the hand of the girl and the orange plast
ic horse.

  * * *

  THE PHOTOGRAPHS SUSAN MEISELAS took of the rebel called Lucas did not circulate in the American media until some years later. Instead, it was her shots of withering corpses that illustrated Bonner’s story on the El Mozote massacre in The New York Times, a report that appeared on the same day as the story written by another correspondent for an American newspaper, Alma Guillermoprieto of The Washington Post. Bonner also wrote a second Times article that described life in the rebel-controlled territories of El Salvador. This story mentioned the North American fighter “Lucas” in two sentences and included his age, thirty-nine, and his mission: to write a book.

  If she had come upon Bonner’s full story during her daily reading of El Salvador news reports, Virginia Colman might have recognized her son in “Lucas.” But the wire-service version of Bonner’s report that reached downstate Illinois was condensed, and redacted of any mention of an American guerrilla fighter. Instead, Virginia clipped out several stories about the massacre that had taken place in the mountain village of El Mozote, and she lingered over the disturbing details. In the absence of any new letters from Joe, she placed her son there, amid the smoldering ruins the stories had conjured in her imagination. Battlefield atrocities. War crimes, Joe would say. She could hear him saying it clearly, right there in her living room. War crimes, Mother. And it occurred to her that maybe Joe was right about El Salvador, and maybe he was right to be there, as dangerous as it was. To witness it all, to come home and tell her what he’d seen, to show her true things she would not have known otherwise.