The Last Great Road Bum

by Héctor Tobar

  * * *

  APRIL 24. 9:00. Fascinating and exciting interlude with TNT last night. TNT was Joe’s nickname for the explosive, articulate and self-proclaimed “incorrigible feminist” who had rejoined the guerrillas after a long speaking tour on behalf of the revolution in San Francisco, Amsterdam, Stockholm and other places. Over thirteen months searching in vain for a free woman inside the revolutionary mentality to fulfill my impossible dream of mountainside companionship. She appears too late for me, I suppose, but not too late for the movement. Very strident, outspoken, utterly possessed by the idea of women’s liberation within the revolution. She despises the blatant displays of revolutionary machismo, and she’s the only woman I’ve met in the campo who views the achievements of North American and European women as having any meaning for the struggles of El Salvador. She has fun baiting me. “Gringo viejo, feo.” And she gets back from me, “How ya doin’ honey, brown sugar?” She was in Nicaragua during the revolution. Tells tales of macho belittling and scorn on the firing line and in marches there and here. After a 12-hour march, a woman might flop down to rest, only to have some compa ask her to wash his socks. “It doesn’t matter that I’m a shrimp and half-blind, just because I’m a woman I have to carry double the load.” Has she ever tried writing up such observations, getting something in print? “Are you crazy? There’s no sexism in the revolution. Are you trying to get me shot?” She says she’s clashed with the comandantes and they’re the worst of all. “I talked to one comandante who said he didn’t like seeing women on the firing line, because afterward they don’t want to make tortillas and wash clothes.”

  * * *

  ARMY TROOP MOVEMENTS were reported close to La Guacamaya. April 24, 8:00 a.m. GI Billy and the lads off to keep an eye on the cuilios. Is it possible the enemy is in shape again to mount more invasions? That afternoon Lucas made new inquiries about his manuscript, and finally received word from a compa named Israel. Said he checked all the embutidos and couldn’t locate MSS package. Perhaps my papers got burned along with part of Radio Venceremos archives during the March 27 troop reinforcements in Gotera. Had to get everything buried in two hours and be ready for a retreat. He didn’t look much concerned, and a couple of the radio compas seemed delighted I’d finally gotten fucked over. Saw red and immediately felt destructive in my frustration.

  If his manuscript was lost, almost an entire year of his life was lost: from going underground in La Libertad to the days before the battle in San Francisco Gotera. Names, anecdotes, dialogue he could never recover. A literary catastrophe. He vented into his journal with red ink. Even the possibility that people have been so irresponsible with something so valuable is a moderate final blow. He was a crushed bum again. Reminds me of Biafra. Something could easily snap inside the old skull. Nothing much I can do about the circumstances but wait out this sense of total vulnerability. He still had the 308 pages on his back, plus a tiny notebook from the Gotera operation, and two more volumes hidden in the crawl space in his old house in La Libertad.

  April 25. 11:00. No sign as yet of manuscript, but not feeling last night’s trauma. All the compas were feeling bad about it; they did not hate him or wish him ill. He went back to his radio work, writing an article about the revolution’s recruitment efforts, but soon he began to hear the sounds of gunfire and mortars coming from the south. 11:30. Mortars and machine gunning getting closer, definitely an enemy advance from Osicala area toward Cerro Pando. But no signs of any alert. 13:00: No MSS yet. Yancy says it will be looked into, probably tonight when other material gets burned. Seems like a medium-sized invasion or enemy incursion is underway. But we’re still not on alert and compas appear to be holding the line at Río Torola. That night, word came down from the rebels’ central command that an estimated 2,500 army soldiers were headed toward the town of Meanguera, in an attempt to recapture it, a month after it had been seized by the rebels. Lucas was ordered to roll out toward the battlefield as a combat correspondent. A comandante named Angel was leading the fight, and as Lucas left word came the fighting was already over: the rebels had forced the army to retreat. “There’s a lot of dead cuilios out there, Lucas,” Santiago told him. “Take the camera.” He pointed to a new compa on the radio crew, a college student Joe had met before. “Go with Giovanni.”

  * * *

  GIOVANNI GRABBED A TAPE RECORDER. As they left El Zapotal and marched to the battlefield another group of compas asked, “Where are you going?” “To the war!” Giovanni yelled back. Just then, a mortar shell crashed behind us, Joe wrote later in his journal. Easy lope over the mountains to Angel’s camp, blowing out a week’s worth of tobacco on the way. They arrived at Comandante Angel’s field headquarters just after sunset to great excitement. The compas were sorting through booty recovered from the battlefield; several M16s and enemy rucksacks. Clothing, toiletries, cigarettes, the things the enemy carried into battle, even a couple of pages of hard-core porno and a sheet of nine birth-control pills. And the usual pictures of girlfriends. Dressed up and prim and proper, a young woman dressed for Sunday mass. Rosebud mouth, birthmark on her cheek. High collar, top button. Virginal. His querida. And the naked bodies of American women, open legs and pubic forests.

  There were seventeen enemy corpses on the battlefield, Angel said. At first light, Lucas would go out to photograph them.

  Angel’s lads had fought well that day. Compa casualties? Lopez lay dead, tied to a litter and covered with captured uniforms, beside a table where Giovanni was reviewing enemy ID papers. The compas moved around Lopez’s corpse but did not look at him, and Lucas went off to sleep; when he woke up he saw someone had placed a candle next to the dead man, and at 4:30 a.m. someone brought up a coffin. The body lay in state, towel covering his face. He had been the primo of a rebel cook. A young campesina girl appeared in camp, perhaps his sister. The girl stood over the fallen guerrilla and lifted the towel, and traced the sign of the cross on his forehead, and gave him a farewell kiss on the spot of this invisible crucifix, and Joe had the sense it was not the first time she had said goodbye to a relative this way. Joe closed his eyes to see if he could get maybe one more hour of sleep, but the fungus growing on his feet and groin itched, and his stomach ached from diarrhea, and instead his half-open eyes watched as the daylight began to erase the blackish gray from the sky and turn it magenta.

  * * *

  WITH GIOVANNI CARRYING A TAPE RECORDER, and Lucas carrying the camera and his M16, the combat reporters of Radio Venceremos marched through brush and dew toward the battlefield. Thirty minutes and they were there. They found several squads of compas searching the ground and the bushes around the Y intersection of two dirt roads where they had ambushed an army company the night before. The compas had been prowling through the night, looking for soldiers who might be hiding nearby. No luck, but plenty of dead soldiers and captured weapons to satisfy everybody. Half the dead were all in one bunch, nearly side by side, suggesting they’d been executed.

  Lucas talked to several compas who described the strange events that followed the firefight. Several soldiers had played dead, taking cover among corpses until the compas were within a few meters. Then they stood up and started firing; Lopez was cut down by an M16 burst. Compas opened up on them and left them all for dead. Now Lucas walked up to an enemy corpse, arm upraised in rigor mortis, he would write later in his journal. He placed his own M16 next to the dead man, to replace the one the compas had confiscated: he snapped a photograph. Just then the compas started yelling, “¡Cuilio vivo! ¡Cuilio vivo!” Everyone took cover. Turned out that a compa had spotted a wounded soldier, just meters away from us, on the other side of a hedge, still alive. The soldier had been shot in the hip, and was still armed, and the compas quickly disarmed him and Lucas grabbed him under the arms and around the waist to help him stand up. He trembled for nearly five minutes and was yelling, “I didn’t fire my weapon, not a single shot at you people. Check my rifle, look at my ammo belt.”

  The soldier’s bloody pants were s
warming with ants, a crawling mass of exoskeletons and microscopic teeth literally eating him alive, but he was too numb to feel them. As Lucas helped guide the soldier away from the ants, Giovanni conducted an interview with the soldier; and then Giovanni took Lucas’s camera and took a shot of the captured man, while Lucas gave him water and a cigarette. Giovanni returned the camera to Lucas, saying, “I took out the old roll,” and Lucas proceeded to take a series of photographs of the battlefield. The captured soldier, older than most of his dead companions, puffing on the cigarette Lucas gave him, smoke curling from the tip in front of his panicked face. The corpses on the battlefield and the compas standing over and around them. Government-issued olive uniforms, clean-shaven faces stained with blood and tissue, spotted with Musca domestica. Rebels in informal T-shirts, faded maroon and orange, and unshaven chin hairs, their fingers searching the pockets of the dead. A compa found a corvo knife on the body of one of the soldiers, and spat out the oath ¡hijueputa! and he marched toward the captured soldier, and showed it to him. “Is this what you and your buddies used to carve up the little children?”

  “No. Never. I never.”

  Lucas approached the prisoner. I asked him if he knew what had happened in these cerros at Christmastime. He said he hadn’t been in the army then; that he’d just been drafted during a recruiting drive that came through his village. He seemed sincere. The compas had no empathy for him; I usually wouldn’t but now I did. There was something different about this soldier. He had landed in a medieval tableau populated by teenage rebels who kicked and prodded the bodies of his dead friends. The soldier told Lucas he wanted to join the guerrillas. Some weeks later, after his gunshot wound had healed, the captured soldier did in fact join the guerrillas, and he fought alongside them for the rest of the war, becoming involved in literacy programs, and having a child with one of the villagers. But he was never able to see the photographs the blond rebel named Lucas had shot of him on the day of his capture.

  As Lucas discovered when he reached the end of the roll, a nervous Giovanni had opened the camera to remove the completed roll, but had neglected to put a new one in. Turns out I was shooting blanks the entire time, Joe wrote later. When he returned to Angel’s camp Lucas asked the comandante if the guerrillas were going to bury the bodies of the dead soldiers. “Maybe. Not sure. We might just let the vultures take care of them.” Maybe the corpses were being left as bait, to see if the cuilios would risk an ambush to retrieve them. Lucas wanted to return to the Y intersection to see if he could get pictures of the fallen soldiers, but Angel said it was too dangerous. Lucas insisted and Angel finally let him go. He saw bodies beginning to bloat beneath the buttoned army shirts that none of the compas wanted. Intestines slipping from open wounds. No creative satisfaction in these photos. It looked like a car wreck.

  Word came that the Atlacatl Battalion was on its way to recover the dead. Joe could see soldiers on a distant hill. But they don’t fire on us, even though we’re in range. Just don’t seem interested in advancing on us. Moments after Joe wrote those words a new mortar and artillery barrage began.

  * * *

  APRIL 27. 6:00. No report yet whether compas held their fire long enough last night for the cuilios to recover their dead. Long discussion about enemy corpses and the demoralizing effect on the army, military honor. Reminds me of the Trojan Wars, whole armies perishing in the attempt to recover some heroic leader’s body, surrenders negotiated on the return of the remains of the dead, bodies drug back and forth in plain view of the enemy, behind chariots, to destroy their fighting morale … Last night we had our own dead to care for. Compañero Mejano was dead almost the moment he was carried in. Shrapnel from a .105 in left thigh. Gaping wound the size of a cantaloupe. Doc J. checking body for heartbeat, breath, pupil dilation, muscle firmness in jaw, as I took flash photos. Nothing. A few minutes later it was medically official. No one in the vicinity of the body wept, Joe noted in his diary. A few compas came to inspect the wound; the platoon led by the compa Crazy Willy was tasked with burial duty.

  Watched the grave digging while nodding off. Could hear compas murmuring. How tranquil for the dead. All their worries are over. Mission completed. Compas empathizing with the dead, yet laughing and joking as they dig. Then literally dumping body in ground by flashlight, searching bloody clothing. (Scarlet, blood-soaked pants.) Billfold with 3 pesos, 35 centavos, a few scraps of cloth, stray buttons, pieces of string, a list of the compas in his squad (he was a squad leader) and a crumpled package of Kool-Aid. Turned over the money to Crazy Willy. Dirt shoveled quickly over the dead. My film was used up, my reserve of energy was used up. I returned to camp to sleep

  Lucas awoke at the radio camp at El Zapotal, and Joe wrote his morning journal entry for April 27 there. He had reached the top of a new page, and wrote the number 332 above these lines and circled it. The notebook was more than three-quarters full. Every ruled line and piece of paper was a precious and limited resource; he did not leave big blank spaces in his war journals and often started new entries on the same lines as old ones, with two short parallel lines, or an asterisk as a marker. He wrote the last two words on the fifth line of page 332, and didn’t bother putting a period at the end of his final sentence. He placed his journal inside his rucksack, and closed the straps.

  Just before noon the sound of artillery fire to the south moved the Radio Venceremos crew to action again. Lucas marched to the south, this time with Santiago, to cover the battle between the Atlacatl Battalion and several units of the rebel army.

  * * *

  THEY REACHED A REBEL POSITION on a hill above the same road intersection the rebels and the army had fought over the day before. The idea was to force the enemy to attack the guerrillas on this high ground, a pattern that had been and was repeated again and again in Morazán, in this battle and battles before and after. Lucas looked down and saw the vultures gliding over the unburied enemy dead, and as he looked at their circling paths, which were roughly at his eye level, a sound was born from that patch of sky. “Artillery!” a voice yelled, and Lucas and Santiago dove for cover into a nearby trench, and a shell exploded higher up the hill. Santiago had fallen on his face jumping into the trench, and now he crouched up, with feces smeared over his cheek. “¡Puta!” Some nervous rebel had used this trench as a bathroom just minutes earlier. Lucas saw he was covered in shit too. “Puta, Santiago, esto es una mierda,” Lucas said, the figurative and the literal meanings being exactly equal, because war was always shitty, no matter how you looked at it.

  Two other compas joined them in the trench. “They’re firing on us from Osicala,” one of them said. About three kilometers away. To soften up the ground before an army advance. Firing shells at their own corpses, and maybe their own wounded too, because the army had tried to advance through there earlier, again. To recover their dead and to capture the field of battle. There were compas down there too, taking cover from the shelling, which now stopped. A pause before the army advance, surely. Word came that the compas on the front line had suffered some wounded, and that they had also captured a 90-mm anti-tank gun. A real prize.

  “I’m going to take some pictures,” Lucas said, and before Santiago could stop him, Joe was up and out of the trench with his rifle and his camera, running downhill, toward the crossroads where the compas had ambushed the army soldiers, again, because there was a wounded comrade and an enemy gun down there. He felt the drug of combat coursing through his aging body. His comrades were down there, bleeding, and there was a war prize down there too, and at this moment he was not Joe anymore, or even Lucas, but instead he was a compañero; he was the entire unit, a single body made up of himself and all his Salvadoran brothers and sisters, and as he squat-ran from the sloping hill into the flat battlefield he felt he was doing some small thing, or maybe a big thing to save his friends, or to win a great victory for their cause; they would live and fight again, with that 90-mm in their hands, that ferocious weapon that was like a cannon. Lucas found the wounded comp
a, who had been hit with shrapnel in the foot, and he helped him stand, and carried him away from the crossroads, and having done this, Lucas turned around and went back, because he had seen the precious 90-mm weapon, and he ran toward it, its barrel pointed up at the hill where Joe had sought protection, and where the rebels were waiting in ambush. Only an army corpse was nearby, and Lucas approached this corpse, and reached into the dead man’s pocket and retrieved his identification; he was a member of the Atlacatl Battalion, and with that card and name Santiago could announce on the radio that the rebels had beaten back the hated murderers of that unit. Next Lucas moved toward the priceless weapon, and he was about five yards away when he felt an explosion, and he had time to think that he hadn’t heard the fall of the shell, the whistle announcing its arrival. A mortar shell, fired from not too far away, maybe by the army troops on the next ridge, looking down at him. Joe felt the hot metal cut through his insides, and he fell, and his numbed eardrums heard faint voices calling to him. “Lucas! Lucas!” Saying something in Spanish. “¡Cayó Lucas¡ ¡Ayúdenlo¡” and in his wounded state, Joe’s Spanish momentarily left him, it was all gibberish, and he tried to rise to his feet, but could not. He felt two compas lifting him up, and carrying him away from this deadly crossroads, up to higher ground. To safety.