What You Have Heard Is True

by Carolyn Forche

  “How many opinions have you gotten so far? You’re going to ask people whether to do this or not until someone tells you to go,” he said. “It is what you seem to want to do, so let me be that person. Go.”

  From childhood, I had experienced bouts of depression, and my mother had also suffered this during her child-raising years. I would find her in her room sometimes, crying and staring at nothing. She told me that I would understand when I was older, something she said about many things. In my own life, this darkness descended always unexpectedly. That is, it did not seem caused by particular events. The sadness arrived, stayed for a while, and just as unexpectedly lifted.

  Something could, at times, push against it. Work did, and also the urge to do something in the face of some wrongdoing or injustice inflicted against another, and this urge swelled during the conversations on the terrace in Mallorca that summer, as I sat on the edge of the circle taking things in, until, toward the end, I also worked at being invisible, because it seemed, from what I understood from these conversations, that injustices of a political nature were not historical accidents, and that most injustices in Latin America were supported or made possible by the United States, or that was my impression. One of the visiting writers had even responded to my plaintive question regarding ways I might get involved with something like: There is nothing you can do, my dear. Change your government. Enjoy your summer.

  When I finally decided to go to El Salvador, I wrote to Professor Tom Anderson, as Leonel had suggested I do, asking about the invitation to come to El Salvador, and received the following reply, which was somewhat encouraging:

  October 20, 1977

  Dear Ms. Forché,

  I’m delighted to do anything I can for a friend of Leonel, but I don’t imagine there is much I can tell you about the country that Leonel hasn’t. I take it you are interested in the politics and the people rather than the scenery. What everyone thinks of, of course, is the political terrorism which has been going on for some time. . . . There is a school of thought which holds that it is all (even the left-wing violence) a product of the National Police. I don’t buy that, though there may be some truth in it. . . . There is also, as I’m sure you know, an Unión Guerrera Blanca operating on the right. They are indeed linked to retired, and perhaps active, officers of the Policía and the Guardia. There is an extraordinary document that surfaced two months ago in Miami, apparently leaked by the CIA, which links right-wing terrorism and pseudo-left-wing terrorism to Col. José Francisco René Chacón, former counter-intelligence chief. Chacón, in turn, is linked to Guatemalan gangsters of Lebanese origins . . . if one can believe any of this! Chacón, at any rate, is a well-known psychopath who was responsible for the murder in prison of the black North American soldier of fortune and petty thief James Ronald Richardson. I am sure you know of this incident. This is by no means Chacón’s only murder. He is out of government, but there are plenty left of his stripe.

  The letter went on to describe the persecution of Jesuits and the deaths of the priests, and then:

  Leonel can tell you more about the peasant movement than I can, as he is closely involved. How he escapes assassination is a perpetual mystery to me and I think of him as an endangered species. I am afraid I have made it all sound very cloak and daggerish, but it isn’t, unless you want to get involved. The streets are peaceful. The Guardia Nacional is less evident now than it was in the high-handed days of Chele Medrano. The press is not censored (why should it be? It is owned by people the government can trust) and you can talk to the opposition leaders at the Catholic university, where most of them work. The Rector there, by the way, Román Mayorga, is well worth meeting. In all, you should enjoy it in El Salvador. The seafood is terrific!

  Sincerely,

  Tom Anderson

  The ticket arrived in the mail some weeks later, booked for January 4, 1978. As Leonel had suggested, I went to a tropical disease specialist for a gamma globulin shot and quinine pills, but they didn’t think I needed a vaccination against yellow fever. Later that day, an older woman friend, who had enrolled in one of my writing classes at the university, and who had lived in Latin America for fourteen years, asked me if I knew what I was doing.

  “We’ll talk when you get back,” she said. “You’re going to need to talk then.”

  Qué te he dado, lo sé. Qué has recibido, no lo sé.

  I know what I have given you. I do not know what you have received.

  —Antonio Porchia

  When I arrived at Ilopango International Airport on a still night in the dry season, Leonel Gómez Vides was nowhere to be seen. The darkened clamshell terminal was crowded with soldiers, and as there were only a few passengers on the flight, and no other foreigners, I was alone as I retrieved my bag from the broken conveyor and carried it through customs. Two armed guards asked me to open the bag. They went through my clothes, opened the toiletry case, sniffed the talcum powder, and when I was at last cleared and my passport stamped, I stood in a small parking lot, surrounded by men who casually shouldered automatic weapons. After too long, a tall young man walked toward me, asking if I was Carolyn.

  “I’m John Taylor. I’m with the Peace Corps,” he said, extending his hand, then swinging my bag into the back of his truck. “I’ll bring you to Leonel. He’s sorry that he couldn’t be here himself, but something came up, as something always does. You know him.”

  We drove the unlit streets of the barrios, past clusters of shacks built at the roadsides, mud shacks roofed by sheets of corrugated steel weighted by rubber tires. Truck lights washed the shacks white.

  “So,” he asked cheerfully, “how long have you known Leonel?”

  It sounded strange even as I said it. “Three days.”

  “He gave me the impression that you two were old friends. So—you don’t know him very well, either, eh?”

  Either. We were now in a business district.

  “He’s a pretty strange guy,” John said, downshifting and glancing at me.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, I guess you’ll see. We’re friends, but I can’t say I know him well. We’ve been in some interesting situations together. Sometimes too interesting.”

  He was pulling into the parking lot of Benihana of Tokyo, San Salvador.

  “Leonel chose this place, so don’t blame me. He’s inside with a group of people. I’m a vegetarian myself, but I’ll be joining you. There’s always rice.”

  Leonel rose as I walked toward the square of tables surrounding a hot steel grill, where a Salvadoran chef, dressed in a Japanese yukata, was tossing sprouts, shrimp, and shredded vegetables into spitting oil, juggling knives and pepper grinders, expertly sending a splash of soy sauce skittering across the grill’s surface.

  Motioning for me to sit on the stool beside him, Leonel introduced the others, all of them men: two campesino union leaders, some kind of businessman, someone from a “nongovernmental organization,” a nervous university student, and John, the Peace Corps volunteer. Japanese koto music played above the chef as he performed, and Salvadoran women floated past wearing kimonos, their coiled hair held in place by ornate chopsticks. After smiling and nodding at me, the men resumed their conversations and Leonel whispered in my ear: “Where do you suppose you are?”

  “Benihana of Tokyo?”

  For some reason, he thought this was amusing.

  “Let’s say this is Vietnam,” he said, and after a pause, “it is 1959.”

  I remember thinking that there was a good chance I had made a mistake, and if so, it could be rectified quite easily by taking a cab back to the airport in the morning. I didn’t, however, rectify it. I had just arrived, and no matter how surreal my welcoming was, it was possible that, for once, first impressions weren’t entirely reliable. Leonel talked to me at dinner, I don’t remember about what—something having to do with the calm before the storm, or standing at the edge
of a precipice. After dinner, he took me to his friend Blanca’s house, where the former dictator had once lived: General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, ruler during the violent 1930s.

  “This was his very house,” Leonel called out, hoisting my suitcase up the stairs. “I thought it would be interesting for you to stay here first, to begin in 1932, because you will find your way in El Salvador by the light of the volcano Izalco erupting on the night of the massacre. Who knows? Maybe Martínez saw it through these very windows.”

  The house was dark and spacious but not especially grand, a colonial house with shuttered windows and mahogany wainscoting, a house for a dictator, Leonel said. Blanca, who lived here now, was the sister of a Catholic priest, and I would meet this priest later. This is where I would stay for the time being, he said, and then: “I have to leave now but first let me tell you a little about the man in whose bedroom you will be sleeping. He was president from 1931 until 1944.”

  I reminded him that Claribel and Bud had written a novel about this period, Ashes from Izalco, and that I had read it.

  “Yes. Well, your bed belonged to the man responsible for those thirty thousand dead. Or eighty thousand, depending on your source.”

  He walked around the room, opening and closing the doors of the armoire, then pulling the drape across the window.

  “By the way, Martínez used to hold séances in this house, probably not in this room but in the parlor. He was a recluse who didn’t drink or smoke, but for some reason he was always trying to talk to the dead, not those he had butchered, mind you, but those he thought might guide him from the beyond into higher realms. He believed in reincarnation, and even claimed that if some of the peasants he killed were innocent of being subversives, nevertheless he had done them the favor of sending them to their next, possibly better, life. Martínez also said, and I quote, ‘It is a greater crime to kill an ant than a man, for when a man dies he becomes reincarnated, while an ant dies forever.’ He once tried to cure smallpox by having Christmas lights strung throughout the city. He wrote his speeches while sitting in the bathtub. So. Maybe you can write a poem about sleeping in the dictator’s bed? That would make a good poem, don’t you think?”

  “Leonel, that isn’t how I write poems.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll see you tomorrow. Sleep well. And by the way, he was a vegetarian. I thought you might like that.”

  * * *

  I seemed to be alone in the dictator’s house when I woke that first morning. I saw myself unexpectedly reflected in a mirror as I entered the hallway, but then I heard dishes clattering in a far room and found Blanca downstairs, setting the table for a Salvadoran breakfast of beans with cream, white cheese and tortillas, and if there were eggs, there would be eggs, and also papayas with limes. She came to greet me in a flutter of Spanish and then put her hands on my shoulders, looked into my eyes, and warmly said, Bienvenida, Carolina, y mil gracias.

  A thousand thanks? I had only just arrived. For what was I being thanked?

  We talked simply then in Spanglish as my conversation skills were still limited, and her English had been learned from American television shows. From what I could gather, she was worried about her brother the priest. Two other priests had already been killed, but I knew that, yes? More than forty foreign nuns had been deported.

  She began reciting something that sounded almost like litany: Aguilares, Padre Grande, Padre Navarro, aquí en San Salvador y en Aguilares y campesinos, “hundreds, three hundreds, all dead, even niños dead.”

  She folded and refolded her napkin. Her eyes searched mine and held my gaze. She shook her head, then poured more coffee for us both.

  “Some whole villages—Leonel will take you.”

  She drew a sharp breath.

  “Blanca, gracias, yes. No, no más café, gracias. Blanca, when is Leonel coming?”

  “Who knows? We never know when he will come.”

  * * *

  The following day, or the day after, he arrived in time for breakfast. I came down to the kitchen still half asleep, and tried to hide my irritation at being left on my own with nothing to do except make notes about the dictator’s house, and as the house now belonged to Blanca, the taking of an inventory of objects in the house might not serve to illuminate anything about him. I had paced and fretted while Leonel was away, and again made plans to go home.

  “Good morning!” he sang out, apparently having arrived before I woke up, as he was already well into breakfast.

  “Go and get dressed, we have work to do—and wear something nice and bring a bag with you in case we don’t come back here tonight.”

  Blanca had been talking with Leonel, but she stood and poured coffee for me, then sat back down with her head in her hands.

  “Blanca, your brother knows what he’s doing, he knows how to watch out for himself,” then to me: “I’m sorry I’m late, but I had to take care of a few things. Go get ready.”

  This is what he would often say, not always, but often, and in the beginning, he let these so-called things he was taking care of remain vague.

  A whole day and night late, I thought.

  “Where have you been?” I asked as lightly as I could as I climbed into the Hiace, smoothing my skirt beneath me, my “something nice.” Maybe he would tell me where he had been, I thought, if I didn’t seem too interested in the answer.

  “Something has come up.”

  We were weaving through traffic in San Salvador on a cloudless day with the radio blaring “Domingo, Domingo, Domingo,” passing buses painted blue with bright flowers, black smoke belching from their pipes, bundles strapped to the roof, arms hanging from the windows, and as I would discover, Leonel was driving just as Salvadorans did in those days—glancing often in the rearview mirror. There was an international issue of Time magazine between us and as I reached for it, Leonel stopped my hand.

  “Don’t touch that.”

  Something bulky had been tucked into the magazine. He lifted half the pages to reveal a handgun.

  “It’s dangerous here right now,” he said, “very dangerous. A lot has happened in the last few months.”

  I had never been around weapons, although I competed as a girl in archery tournaments and once, in the hay-stubbled snow of a friend’s farm, had shot at tin cans with a .22 caliber rifle, mostly to please the boy who reached from behind to hold my arms in the correct position.

  “Mirá,” Leonel was saying, a word that began many of his sentences, look. “As I said, something has come up.”

  I reached to turn off the radio so I could hear him better and he stopped me again.

  “Leave it on. It’s better if you leave it on.”

  The jingle on the radio gave way to a Swedish pop song that seemed to be the song of the season.

  “Mirá, it seems there is a delegation coming here in a few days from the United States, a human rights delegation, and it’s going to be headed by a U.S. congressman. And that congressman, who is from Massachusetts by the way, is also a Catholic priest. A Jesuit. And this Jesuit is going to be asking questions, and we have to make sure that our question is among the ones he asks.”

  “And what is our question?”

  “That’s what I’m about to tell you, but first we have to find some place where we can talk. And eat. I’m hungry.”

  “But we just had breakfast.”

  “Well, I have to have breakfast number two.”

  We were in traffic, but the street was also crowded with people on foot, including many children, women balancing basins, urns, and baskets on their heads. A boy whizzed past on a bicycle, striking our vehicle twice with his fist, and Leonel said something like He’s just letting me know he’s there, and then we stopped in front of a shop with a CLOSED sign, and after sliding the gun into his rucksack, he went up to the door anyway and knocked a few times.

  “I think they’re close
d, Leonel.”

  “Yes, they’re closed. That’s why we’re here. A friend of mine owns this place.”

  Over his breakfast number two of eggs, beans, and crema, brought to him after coffee was brought to me, in a café opened especially for him, he would, he said, explain everything having to do with our question.

  “Our question,” he said, “concerns the Richardson case. You remember? The dead American? If they won’t take up the case of the dead American, then we’ll know who they are.”

  He broke the yolk with his fork and pushed it onto a tortilla.

  “The congressman? But you know who . . .”

  “No, not the congressman.”

  He appeared somewhat irritated, pushing himself away from the table, and seeming to ponder what, or how much, to say next.

  “The congressman’s handlers, and the new people in the embassy—we’ll know who this new ambassador is, and the new political officer. Are they going to push the Richardson case as hard as their predecessors did? I don’t think so, but that’s just a guess.”

  “What if they’re just not interested in Richardson?” I asked. It seemed a reasonable question.

  “Not interested? Okay. That would mean they’re only interested in human rights when it suits them.”