What You Have Heard Is True

by Carolyn Forche

  Thoughts of Generalissimo Franco marched through my childhood and came to a halt that summer in Spain with Claribel, especially as Franco was newly dead, and Spain was said to be “awakening” from nearly forty years of dictatorship. Posters in the public squares urged the people to Vota for this or Vota for that. These posters were works of art, and many people were seen peeling them from the walls before the election. Poster collectors, I thought at the time, somewhat naïvely.

  * * *

  “Let me tell you about a priest,” Leonel said, “Padre Rutilio Grande—did Claribel happen to mention him?”

  “No, I don’t remember her talking about any priest.”

  “Really? Interesting. Well, he was a Jesuit, and last spring he was murdered in the village of Aguilares along with an old man and a young boy. They were traveling by truck through the cane fields to Mass when they were stopped and machine-gunned to death. Three children in the back of the truck managed to escape. They ran to the village El Paisnal and told the people what had happened. The children said that when Padre Grande saw the soldiers on both sides of the road he said, ‘We must do God’s will.’

  “But this is a God,” Leonel went on, jabbing the air with the pipe, “that Padre Grande taught was not up in the sky lying in some damn cloud hammock. This was a God who expected us to be brothers and sisters, and to make of Earth a just place. What I know, although this is not in many of the reports, is that the soldiers then went to Padre Grande’s church and ransacked it. They even crushed the Communion hosts into the ground. A few months later, a death squad they call Mano Blanca killed another priest, this time in the city, for the crime of saying a Mass in protest against fraud in the elections. A young boy was killed with him too. Just for being there. Leaflets flew around the city: Be a Patriot! Kill a priest! And a short while after that, the army launched a siege on Aguilares. Three Jesuit priests and three campesinos were inside the church, one of them grabbing the rope in the bell tower and ringing the bell hard for the village. He was shot down from the rope, then they shot at the altar, tied up the priests, and the next thing anyone knew these priests were in prison in Guatemala. And that is the situation as it stands now.”

  I imagined the young boy rising and falling in the tower, using all of his weight to rock the bell, ringing its clapper through the clouds as if this were a wedding or a war was over, and then letting go.

  “What are you thinking, Papu? You have a tendency to drift off. You have to learn to pay attention.”

  * * *

  That summer, Maya and I had gone on a journey together through Andalusia, hoping to find the grave of the poet Federico García Lorca, who was said to have been murdered on the 17th or 18th of August 1936, in the first year of the Spanish Civil War. The soldiers of General Franco had taken the poet to “visit” his dead brother-in-law, the former socialist mayor of the city. After beating Lorca with their rifle butts and calling him a faggot, they filled him with bullets. The grave, sought by many, has never been found. Claribel herself had made this search when she was younger, and wrote a poem about failing to find the grave.

  We were young and determined enough to imagine that we might succeed in finding it. After all, Franco had been dead for two years, and surely someone would come forward now and guide us to the poet’s secret resting place. We hiked into the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, following the instructions in Claribel’s poem, looking where she said to look, and what we found was a wooden cross, pounded into a hollow of earth at the side of the road some distance from La Fuente Grande. The grave might have been where the instructions in her poem suggested, but it was a bit farther along the road, and nearly unmarked but for the rough-hewn cross. We walked a short distance from the road and were told by two young men from the Sacromonte that we were standing over the remains of Lorca. Around the cross, near a stone between two olive trees, sardine tins and bottle caps were scattered, little bits of chewing-gum wrapper and broken glass. I cleared these, putting some of the garbage in my purse, and discovered that violets were also growing there beneath the debris. We said a prayer by reciting a few lines from his poems, and then I scooped some of the earth into a 35mm film container. I picked one violet and pressed it between the pages of my notebook. This was or was not Lorca’s grave. But it had been visited in the past, as was apparent from the litter, so someone was buried there. When we told this story to Claribel, I couldn’t tell whether she believed us or not.

  During the journey through Andalusia I wrote in my notebook of a road awash in light, and the Alhambra, a ghost ship in the distance, of starlight salting the night sky, of vigil lamps where there is no Christ and shrines where there is no memory, of Spanish brandy and black tobacco and a dictator dead but yet still awake in the minds of people. I was at the time quite young, with a romantic view of the world, and I was also an American, which made this worse.

  * * *

  —

  After we returned from our Andalusian journey, something began to change within me. I was still translating in the morning and in the evening bringing the English versions of the poems first to Maya, and then to Claribel. Sometimes they seemed pleased with what I’d done, but at other times my versions baffled them as I didn’t seem to understand their political and historical context, or, as Claribel would say, “the conditions from which the poems arose.” I confided to Maya that the dictionary was of little use, the problem seemed to lie with me. I couldn’t distinguish between literal and figurative language: Were the guitar player’s hands, mangled by an ax, a metaphor? What about wingless birds, and the dead waving their arms? I puzzled over phrases having to do with the dead eating their dead, and words written with tears, fingernails, and coal. What, I wondered, was a smoking heart? Why did this poet believe herself to be a cemetery, and why does she imagine herself walking arm in arm with ghosts?

  After dark, I read by flashlight, as I had under the blankets as a child, its light brushing across the poetry as if along a path leading into a forest at night or another unknown place. The olive and lemon groves had by now grown familiar, as had the light on the ocher walls at certain hours. The widows in black walking down the roads were now nodding in an almost friendly way when they passed me. I no longer heard the goat bells clanking on the slopes, or the waters of the torrente rushing beside the walls, or the Libyan winds unless I listened especially for them. Deià was becoming a place I knew and where, for that summer, I lived.

  One afternoon in August, a young woman arrived for Claribel’s late-afternoon salon. She was about my age. No, she was exactly my age, and was accompanying the poet Cristina Peri Rossi from Uruguay, who had come for a visit. This younger woman was very thin, and didn’t look directly at anyone. It’s strange to me now, but I can’t remember her first name. Her face is clear. She was on the edge of the circle where I usually sat, so she was next to me. Cristina began to speak. By this time, I understood most of what was said in Spanish, but this Spanish, hurried, hushed, ruptured, and coded, was more difficult. Cristina was urging the younger woman to share her story with the group. Staring down at the cold stone floor, she began to speak in broken phrases: My name is—I’m from—. Her eyes darted around the circle to see how well this was going. I wanted to reach out to touch her arm but somehow couldn’t. She told us that she had been held in a clandestine prison in Uruguay, where she was tortured for seventeen days, and forced to stand naked and barefoot on a block of ice. She was beaten intermittently throughout that time. When one ice block melted beneath her, they brought another.

  With trembling fingers, she kept touching her face, and then tucked her hands under her thighs to hold them still. She didn’t know why they had let her go, she said. No one else was let go. Her interrogators told her to shut up about everything, and one of the guards said that if she stayed in the country she would soon be arrested again, and this time there would be no getting out.

  “The feet aren’t right anymore,” she whispered.


  * * *

  It was late afternoon, and the harvesters were boarding their trucks to go home. After they left, I sometimes went out to gather broken flowers from the side of the road, especially if they were carnations. There were always some lying there with bent stems or crushed heads. These I put into water glasses around the house. They seemed still alive.

  Leonel was at the table, looking through his papers for something that he said was important. But everything was important. The girls were coloring on the floor, where he had spread white butcher paper torn from the roll. At that time of day, I watered and fed the finches and put carrots and lettuce in the hutch. Still he didn’t seem to find this important thing for which he searched, and so I sat down across from him to wait. He licked his thumb to leaf through the onion-skin pages of a congressional committee report, muttering something in Spanish under his breath. I saw that he had highlighted whole blocks of type in neon yellow and, also written in the margins, mostly question marks and exclamation points, sometimes both.

  “I highlight what is important,” he would tell me one day. “I question-mark the lies, and I exclaim at the stupidity. Don’t you ever read these things, Papu? You should. They’re from your own goddamn government.”

  But he wasn’t talking to me this way yet. Instead, he lit his pipe, drew a little smoke into his mouth, and prepared to hold forth or, as he would say, continue his days-long “briefing.” I sometimes wonder why I let this go on when I had so much else to do. Student papers. Correspondence. Laundry. For some reason, I dropped everything to listen to him. I thought it might have had to do with those months of feeling ignorant in Spain, and also with the realization that, although I had a college education, I knew very little about the rest of the world.

  “These death squads,” I said, “I’d like to know more about them. What you call Mano Blanca. White Hand?”

  “Who told you about this?”

  “You did. Also Claribel and Bud, last summer. Escuadrón de la muerte. I heard it at first as death squadron. I thought they were airplanes, but then . . .”

  “No, my dear, they are not airplanes, but we’ll get to that. First, you must understand something about the military.” To illustrate, he drew what looked like a family tree. The girls had left the door open, and one of the finches flew outside and disappeared into the eucalyptus. I got up to close the door, and when I returned to the table, he had filled his tree with names.

  “You know how, when you are in school, there’s a certain group of kids who sort of take over? Not bullies exactly, but you know, the kids who try to dominate everyone else.” He laughed. “Maybe some of them really are bullies.”

  “We called them the in-crowd. Or the clique. We had a group like that, yes.”

  “Clique, okay, so this will be useful to you as a way of understanding what I’m about to tell you. In a military academy, for example in El Salvador, there are also cliques, but the stakes are much higher because the rewards are greater. It might work the same way with every military. I’m not sure. But let’s just say.”

  And then he stopped, just like that, lost in thought or searching the air for the words, or as if he didn’t know how much to tell me and how much to withhold. At the time, I didn’t think about the fact that he wasn’t a native speaker of English. I didn’t yet know to take into account that he might be translating, not only between languages, but also from one constellation of understanding and perception to another.

  I was impatient with this from the beginning. I wish now that I had not been.

  Just as suddenly, he resumed.

  “First, you must understand how the Salvadoran military is structured, how it works, and why. There are reasons for everything. You see, Salvadoran military officers, during their training, form these groups called tandas, and by the time of graduation from the military academy, the most powerful tanda is in line for the highest offices of the government. These are, shall we say, like the cool kids in a high school. The other groups fall in line behind this tanda, and its leader eventually becomes president of the country, and all wealth and power follow from that fact. Every four years elections are held, but the military candidate wins every time, regardless of how the ballots are cast. The ballot boxes are stuffed with illegal votes. They call this sugaring the ballot boxes. Sweetening them up. If you rise in the military, the sky is the limit, financially speaking. Or rather, I suppose you could say the generosity of the U.S. government is the limit, along with how much money can be stolen from international bank loans and things like that.”

  “What do you mean ‘generosity of the U.S. government’?”

  “A little attempt at irony, my dear. Where are you going?”

  “The bathroom? I have to go to the bathroom.”

  At least he didn’t say again “Hurry up, we have work to do!” Instead, he asked how I trained the little birds to live in their cage, even though the door was open.

  “I didn’t have to train them,” I said, shaking my hands dry. “That’s where the food is. Speaking of that, do you think the girls are hungry? I know I am.”

  “You want to eat something? Me, I always want to eat something. Do you know a place where we might get some grilled shrimp?”

  “You want grilled shrimp?”

  “If it’s possible.”

  “Of course it’s possible.”

  So that is how we wound up in a fancy restaurant on the water, where, at high tide, the ocean waves spray the windows. The girls sipped Shirley Temples and picked at their salads, while their father worked his way through a specially ordered platter of shrimp. I don’t remember what I had, but I remember watching him eat with gusto, licking his fingers and thumbs as he told a strange story having to do with weapons, undercover detectives, a car dealership, and a sting operation in Mount Kisco, New York.

  “Do you know where is Mount Kisco?” he asked.

  What, I thought, does this have to do with milpa cultivation, dead priests, infant mortality rates, and everything else he’s been telling me? I shook my head no.

  The restaurant was very nice, but I noticed that the waiters began slowing down during service to our table as Leonel talked excitedly, occasionally waving his hands, about undercover policemen pretending to be mafiosos in Mount Kisco.

  “I mean, goddamn it,” he said, as he started the story again.

  Apparently, there had been an arrest in Mount Kisco that exposed a plot by Salvadoran military officers to sell ten thousand machine guns and more than a million rounds of ammunition to men he thought were members of the Mafia.

  “And where do you think this hardware came from, my dear? Take a guess.”

  Without stopping to let me guess, he bellowed: “The United States! Thirty million dollars in U.S. military aid provided by U.S. American taxpayers. And what do you suppose these officers were going to do with the proceeds from the sale? Put it in their pockets, of course! The offer included missiles and aircraft equipped with heavy armament. So what happened? The undercover detectives created a sting operation. Did you see that movie with Paul Newman and Robert Redford? The Sting? You should see it. Anyway, they posed as gangsters and rented Cadillac sedans from the local Cadillac dealership. Then they set up a meeting in some goddamn motel or something and those sons of bitches walked right into it.”

  By now, it seemed to me, the diners nearest us were also listening. Ocean water crashed against the windows but Leonel seemed not to appreciate this very experience for which the restaurant was famous.

  “So,” he said with some satisfaction, taking his napkin out of his collar where he’d tucked it, “who do you think was trying to sell these weapons? None other than the chief of staff of the Salvadoran armed forces, Colonel Manuel Alfonso Rodríguez. The son of a bitch was arrested and held until he could raise and post bail of three million dollars. This happened just a year ago. And it’s very unusual, you know, th
at a high-ranking officer would actually be arrested for something like this, which is why it interests me. I expect,” he went on, studying the dessert menu, “Colonel Rodríguez won’t stay in prison very long.”

  “I’ll have the sorbet, please.” I always order sorbet, and the girls joined me in this.

  “And I’ll have, let me see, is there any way to have ice cream with whipped cream and hot fudge sauce?”

  “We’ll see what we can do, sir.”

  * * *

  When we were back at the house, he talked for a few more hours about corruption, and the ways in which the highest ministers of the military government, and especially the president, made money through kickbacks and theft of American aid, and through various concessions they controlled at the airport, the post office, and other places. He didn’t have a better word than “concession” and I wasn’t sure what this meant, but he said that they also controlled customs and immigration, and the corruption was such that these ministers, who were not themselves from rich families, were able to retire with millions on deposit in U.S. banks, even though the salary of a colonel was, in colones, then about two hundred U.S. dollars a month.

  “Doesn’t the U.S. government know about this?”

  “What do you think? Of course they do!” he shouted almost gleefully, then lowered his voice and said as if to himself: “They know.”

  Searching his papers again, he found the document he had wanted to show me. Case File No. S-124, the Mount Kisco detectives’ report and, clipped to it, a short local newspaper article about the arrest, not more than three column inches.