What You Have Heard Is True

by Carolyn Forche

  “The ambassador to El Salvador?”

  “That’s right, my dear, you are correct.”

  He closed the box, took the chamois away, and shut the hood, pushing down to make sure the latch caught.

  “Out of all the goddamn embassies in the world! And I’m not blaming Carter himself, mind you. I have no idea whose bright idea it was to pull the rug out from under the Richardson investigation.”

  He put the toolbox in the back of the Hiace, then poked a bit among his things, rearranging the lockers, duffels, and rolls of topographical maps and, as my father would say, “neatening” his provisions, and then he headed again toward my front door with me trailing behind.

  “I can’t stay here too much longer. We have to leave tomorrow. But let’s take this a little further. What message do you suppose is sent when the ambassador who has been asking questions about Richardson’s disappearance is suddenly no longer the ambassador? Let’s say you are Chacón. What is Washington telling you?”

  “I’m sorry—message? What do you mean?”

  “How will Chacón interpret the ambassador’s departure?”

  “I suppose he would be relieved.”

  “Close, but he would not merely be relieved, my dear, he would be reassured that nothing has changed, that he is free to kill people with impunity, even American citizens, and if you can kill American citizens, so they reason, you can kill anyone. Do you understand what it means for a man like Chacón to receive such a message?”

  We had reached the door, had gone through it, and were back in the empty living room with the papier-mâché horse.

  “It means the butchery will continue and many more people will die. It means that the military will believe that they are safe, and that they have nothing to fear from this new human rights policy. It’s a show intended only for the Soviets.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Never mind. We can talk about it later. Right now, we have to have a serious conversation. We have run out of time. Sit down. I’m going to ask you some questions. Think about your answers carefully. Think about all that I have told you.”

  He moved the salt and pepper shakers into position on the table, and also the toothpick holder. He pushed a miniature metal ship into the Pacific. The card deck was in place where he said the garrison would be. “Okay,” he kept saying as each object took its place. “Okay.”

  I noticed that his glasses were smudged again. How could he possibly see through them? I had never met anyone so focused, obsessed really, or anyone whose children were this compliant and well behaved. At their age, I wouldn’t have played with rabbits for three days, as they did, or lie on the kitchen floor making drawings, which were, come to think of it, not unlike those their father made, but these girls did so happily, and seemed accustomed to waiting for him.

  Leonel then asked me what I remembered about the confiscation of the common lands, first for the planting of indigo crops, then the cultivation of sugarcane and cotton, and then, on the volcano’s slopes that were all that were left to the Pipil and Nahua people, the planting of coffee, the most lucrative export crop of them all. He asked me questions about wages, plots of land, milpas, labor unions, life expectancy, and malnutrition. The last questions concerned the uprising of 1932 and its aftermath, about the volcano’s erupting as the uprising began, the mysterious appearance of U.S. and Canadian gunships in the harbor. Thirty thousand or eighty thousand people were massacred in the following days, no one knows how many, but it was always given as a round number.

  “Allow me to present a scenario. You are a colonel in the generation about to take power.”

  He moved the toothpick holder into place. “You are disillusioned. Your superiors have engaged in unprecedented levels of corruption. Papu? Are you listening to me? Okay. Several other younger officers share your concerns. What do you do?”

  “A coup d’état?”

  “No, not yet, but you are thinking along the right lines. You would assess the conditions and determine whether the time was right. Let’s try another. You hear that the embassy—always the U.S. embassy in cases such as this—isn’t happy with the general your tanda has chosen to be president.”

  He moved the pepper shaker into place near the pack of cigarettes he called the Other Garrison.

  “There is a possibility that the U.S. will back a different tanda.”

  He pushed the saltshaker toward this garrison like a chess piece.

  “What do you do? Think,” he said, “like a colonel.”

  I gave an answer, many answers, all of them guesses: I would maneuver within the tanda to push the leader aside. I’d go behind their backs to the Americans and make some sort of deal, promising them influence and intelligence. That is, if I was a colonel. Or—I’d do nothing.

  I had no idea how to think like a colonel.

  After a long silence, he leaned back in his chair. The sun shone on the paper over the house the girls had drawn. The doves were on their perch outside, leaning into one another. The sea was bright through the window.

  “Forché, I award you a Ph.D. in Salvadoran studies.”

  I hadn’t slept well and had smoked too much, judging from the bowl of stubs and the rawness in my throat. I had to know then why he was telling me all of this. It was interesting, yes, but why? No one had ever, in truth, spent so much time talking to me about important things, and with such patient urgency, certainly no man, and never had I met anyone who took poetry this seriously who was not himself a poet.

  “Thank you. Now why don’t you tell me what you want.” There was an edge in my voice that surprised me.

  He leaned forward again, put his hands together making a church steeple with his forefingers, and he shrugged.

  “What are you going to do, Papu? Write poetry about yourself for the rest of your life? And if you’re going to translate our poets, don’t you think you should know something about Central America?”

  There was a flapping of doves taking flight, and children running outside and closing the door behind them.

  “What do you mean?”

  “What I just said. Are you going to write poetry about yourself for the rest of your life?” And then he sighed and acknowledged that this might not have been fair.

  “I’m sorry. Let me put this a different way. What are you going to do with the poetry fellowship you recently received?”

  “Fellowship? Oh yes. I don’t know yet. I didn’t think I would get one, so I don’t have a plan. I’ll think of something.”

  “Well, I have a proposition for you. Not that kind of proposition, a more interesting one. I assure you, my intentions are honorable.”

  “Wait. How did you know about the fellowship?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “No, really, how did you know?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t remember how I found out.”

  Then, changing the subject, he asked if I knew how my benefactors had made their money.

  “Lead, copper, and silver mines,” he said. “They once controlled all mining and smelting in the United States, but they also operated in Mexico. They owned a smelter in Monterrey, where they employed thugs to force workers at gunpoint into the blazing heat. I just thought this might interest you as some of this money will soon be yours.”

  “My grandfather worked at a blast furnace, in a coke oven . . .”

  “Then maybe you are collecting his just wages. Here is my proposal: Why not come to El Salvador? You’ve already spent a summer with Claribel. You’ve translated her poetry. Now write your own. It might be interesting, and you could improve your Spanish. I can make arrangements for you to work with some good women—doctors and social workers. You could call this my reverse Peace Corps. You would be coming to our country not to help us, but so that we can help you. I want to give you a bit of the education that you missed in your U.S. sc
hools. And to be honest, war is coming, and the United States is going to play a pivotal role, as it always does in our region, and what the United States decides will determine how long the war will have to be fought. You will be, by the way, my second reverse Peace Corps volunteer, not the first.”

  “I don’t think Americans are interested in getting involved in any more wars, Leonel. We just left Vietnam.”

  “Yes, you just left Vietnam. Did you, by the way, understand why your country was at war there?”

  He was sucking on that cold tobacco pipe again.

  “Let me guess not. Would you like to see one from the beginning?”

  “One what?”

  “Vietnam, from the beginning.”

  He has no idea what he’s saying to me, I thought. Yes, I would like to see—for myself, from the beginning, but I wouldn’t tell him anything about my personal history having to do with the war in Vietnam. This was all none of his business, I thought at the time.

  I went down to walk on the beach alone, the sanderlings running, my tracks filling with water behind me. For a moment, I worried that when I returned to the house I would find him gone. He might leave his drawings taped to the table, but otherwise it would be as if he hadn’t been there and I had imagined this whole thing. I decided not to stay long at the water, but I wanted to think. I was twenty-seven years old, too young to have thought very much about the whole of my life, its shape and purpose. The only consistencies were menial labor and poetry and, more recently, translating and teaching. There was always a book on the bedside table. That November it was the poetry of Nâzim Hikmet, a Turkish poet translated into English. His poem titled “Autobiography” was dated the 11th of September 1961, East Berlin. I would have been eleven years old. The poem begins with the year of the poet’s birth and goes on to list all that the poet had seen and done until then in the course of his life. It was at once a list of autobiographical facts but also an inventory and a confession. I tried several times to write a poem like it, but failed, and decided that I hadn’t lived long enough or interestingly enough, but this didn’t entirely account for the failure. When I wrote about the places I had been and the things I’d done, there was no thread of purpose or commitment, as there was in the life of Hikmet. Maybe Leonel was right to say that my poems were about myself, even if they were also about others, even such important others as Grandpa Goodmorning and Ya-Kwana. Still, there were lines and images that surprised me to have come from my hand: phrases such as the hollow crackle of hatching snakes and if the whisper was in your mouth.

  Why did it seem that, during these past few days, time had slowed, even the ocean was taking longer to heave itself onto the beach, longer to withdraw, and what should I do? What did this man want? There was a word for it, wasn’t there? The music the stones make as the water passes over them? Like the sound that dried beans make when they strike against the thorns in a rain stick? I wanted one word for that. Murmur. I wanted to know what to do.

  Leonel did not seem then to be a dangerous person and, in fact, no one in Deià had described him that way. What they said was that he was “playing a very dangerous game.” What game that was they wouldn’t say, and otherwise they had great admiration for him. The El Salvador he described was not at war, although he did say its peace was “the silence of misery endured.” Those were his words. The war, then, was next door, against the dictator Somoza in Nicaragua. But war was coming, he had said, in three to five years. So it was still far off. There was nothing keeping me here, in this empty house by the water. And yes, I wanted, for personal reasons, to know something more about Vietnam, “from the beginning,” as Leonel said.

  * * *

  —

  When I reached the house, he was still there, and as I’d imagined, all but his drawings had been packed into the Hiace. The mural was still taped to the table. Later I would understand why he drew diagrams and stick figures as he talked, but at the time I just thought he was a bit like me, needing a pen in his hand all the time, unable to think without it.

  “Well?”

  The girls were saying good-bye to the rabbits, holding them up to their cheeks.

  “I’m not sure. What would I do there?”

  “Well, you could see quite a bit of the country, I think, and you could learn about the situation, and then you could come back here, and when the war begins, you would be in a position to explain it to the Americans. I could make you an expert, and that is something the Americans can never have enough of—experts.”

  “Leonel? I think you want someone else, a journalist maybe, someone with the credibility to do this—whatever it is you have in mind.”

  “I’ve thought about that, and I don’t want a journalist. I want a poet. Why do you think I came all this way?”

  “So, this wasn’t a family camping trip?”

  “Yes, it is also that. But I came here so that I could talk to you. And this might be my last chance.”

  “Last chance? You know, Leonel, your relatives in Deià are a little puzzled by you. They aren’t sure who you are.”

  “They don’t know who I am? I see. What difference does it make who I am? I’m not important.”

  “It doesn’t, then. Make a difference. I guess.”

  “Good. You can tell them to come back to El Salvador. Tell Bud and Claribel to come back.”

  “But they’d be in danger there, wouldn’t they? Especially Claribel.”

  “Come on, everyone is in danger there. Tell them to come back. We could use some help, and what are they going to do, spend the rest of their lives in Mallorca drinking cognac? I think not. You can’t make a difference in the world by going to parties.” He went back to sit in front of his drawings, and when I challenged his attitude toward Claribel and Bud, he admitted that he wasn’t being fair to them.

  “I don’t think you understand, Leonel. I’m a poet. Do you know how poets are viewed here? We’re seen as bohemian, or romantics, or crazy. Among the poets I admire, there is one who waved good-bye before jumping from a bridge, another who put on a fur coat and gassed herself in her garage. Great American poets die broke in bad hotels. We have no credibility. Although this isn’t true of every poet, and I’m giving you the dramatic examples, when poetry is mentioned in the American press, if it is mentioned, the story begins with ‘Poetry doesn’t matter,’ or ‘No one reads poetry.’ No matter what else is said. It doesn’t matter.”

  He appeared surprised. “Well, you’ll have to change that. In my country, and in the rest of Latin America, poets are taken seriously. They’re appointed to diplomatic posts, or they’re assassinated, or put into prison but, one way or the other, taken seriously.”

  The entire table was covered now with garrisons, volcanoes, milpas and crosshatched villages, coffee trees, and cotton bolls, and in the paper sky, a squadron of American gunships hovering, and from the ground, bursts of fire inked from the barrels of antiaircraft guns. The soldiers were drawn as stick figures with helmets, but the campesinos wore straw hats and trousers, had water gourds slung over their shoulders, and carried machetes—the whole of it a mural of the country at that time, and I knew that if I didn’t accept his invitation, I could never live as if I would have been willing to do something, should an opportunity have presented itself. I could never say to myself: If only I’d had the chance. This was, I knew, my chance.

  “Here’s an address,” he said, jotting something on a slip of paper torn from a corner of the mural. “I want you to write to this man, my first reverse Peace Corps volunteer. He’s a historian. His name is Tom Anderson, and he wrote a book about that massacre in El Salvador in 1932. Ask him to tell you about me, and also about the situation. He can help you. Think of this as checking my references, as you people say.”

  He was now gathering his books and pamphlets from the table, his special pens and pouch of pipe tobacco, all of it back into the woven bag.

  �
��Come in early January, right after the holidays. I’ll send you a ticket for a flight on our national airline. It will be cheaper than anything you could buy here. And by the way, you don’t need much. Bring a toothbrush. Get a gamma globulin shot and maybe something for yellow fever and oh, malaria pills, don’t forget those. I’ll take care of everything else.”

  “I won’t be able to stay more than a month then.”

  “That will get us started.” He gave me a quick tap on the shoulder. “Ciao.”

  The girls got into the washed Hiace after dutifully kissing me on both cheeks, as someone had taught them, their mother I guessed, who was from one of the wealthy families, and from whom he was separated, saying something about how impossible domestic life had become under his circumstances.

  Everything was loaded into the van.

  “Ciao!” he called through the window as he backed out of the driveway.

  I waved to the back of the Hiace as he drove downhill toward the glittering water, Andean flute music fluttering into the air. He put his head out the window and called back, “See you in January!” And as the van disappeared behind the hill I shouted back, “I didn’t say yet I was coming!”

  * * *

  You don’t know this man, my friends will say. This isn’t a good idea. You’re going to get malaria or even worse. So what if he’s a relative of Claribel Alegría’s? According to you, even she claims not to know who he really is.

  No one thought I should accept the invitation to go to El Salvador, and of course I didn’t talk about it with my parents, who in any case lived thousands of miles away, because I knew what they would say. But I kept talking about the visit and invitation, and everyone dissuaded me until an old friend from Michigan, passing through on his way to Mexico, stopped for coffee and listened to the story. We were at the table, the same table, the finches all in their cage, quiet beneath the kitchen towel that allowed them to sleep, and I told him everything because why not? What did it matter? I asked myself. He would say no like everyone else, and I would stay here for what seemed the rest of my life.