What You Have Heard Is True

by Carolyn Forche

  Although I hadn’t noticed before, the fluorescent lights were humming overhead, flickering on and off.

  “My Spanish is bad. The great-grandmother told me a story that I didn’t understand.”

  “How do you know, then, that she told you a story?”

  “I don’t know. The rhythm of her voice, I guess. It sounded like a story. I made out a few words. It was something about a mountain and someone dead, a son or a husband . . .”

  “Then you did understand. Good.”

  “What are you talking about? I don’t think I understood much of anything.”

  The buzzing from the fluorescent lights grew louder, like the distant sound of a drill.

  “Are you tired, Papu? Do you want to sleep? This has been a long day and tomorrow we have work to do.”

  “Sleep, yes, I would.”

  And that is how I found myself in a small back room of a house with walls the pink of stomach medicine, the house of a woman I didn’t know, with Leonel’s promising to pick me up early in the morning, and then, having slept in my clothes, I was already dressed when he came cheerily to the doorway, rucksack over one shoulder, hair slicked back from a fresh shower, singing out in a fake German accent, “Jawohl, mein General!”

  The unknown owner of the house, a woman I had met briefly the night before, seemed already to have left, so I hadn’t been able to ask if it was all right to brush my teeth with the tap water. The bathroom shower appeared to be disconnected, and I went to the toilet before discovering that the flusher wasn’t attached to anything in the tank, so I put the lid down, thought to leave a note, and then realized that she must already know that it’s broken. I saw the plastic bucket near the toilet but didn’t yet know what it was for and hadn’t yet learned to flush by pouring water from the bucket into the bowl.

  After splashing my face and drying off with her towel, I joined Leonel, who was standing in the middle of the only other room, impatient to get going because “we have work to do.”

  “Who is she?” I asked as we left, meaning the woman whose house it was.

  * * *

  It was late in the day when we arrived at the hospital, a low concrete building tucked among ragged banana palms. There was no parking lot, as no one who came to this hospital, patient or visitor, arrived in automobiles then. We parked on the road, half on the shoulder, the jeep tilting a little, and that was when Leonel told me we would be meeting Dr. Vicky, and that I was to stay with her for a few days because it was important for me to see this and he had something he had to do alone.

  “This woman is a saint,” he said. “The best we have. She stops only to sleep. She went to medical school in Mexico, and she could have done what the rest of them do—set up a nice practice in the city—but she came here to care for the poorest of the poor. Wait till you see the so-called hospital. Don’t get your hopes up.”

  A campesina too young to be a nurse recognized Leonel and ran to get Dr. Vicky, his friend of many years, the only doctor here, the only doctor for the hundred thousand or so people who lived within walking distance, which was considered to be a day’s walk. It took a while for Dr. Vicky to come, so we waited in the entrance, standing in a smear of light across the tiles, listening to various sounds in this otherwise quiet place, Leonel as usual walking around with his hands in his pockets. There was a voice or two, water being spilled out, a door swinging on a hinge. She arrived in a white lab coat, with another lab coat in her hand and a stethoscope slung over her shoulders. They kissed on the cheek and she turned to me.

  “Gusto en conorcerle,” then she kissed me too, and handed me the lab coat to put on.

  “How much medical experience do you have?” she asked.

  “A little. I was a nurse’s aide.”

  “Well, while you are here you are a medical doctor visiting from the United States.”

  “But what if—?”

  “It’s better,” Leonel said again. “She’s right. I’ll see you in a few days, and if for some reason I don’t come, stay with Vicky.”

  * * *

  As a teenager, I had worked after school and summers as a nurse’s aide in two hospitals, a nursing home, and a clinic, where a doctor taught me to give injections and draw blood, take an EKG, assist with suturing, and even take and develop simple X-rays of the chest, limbs, and spine. For X-rays, I wore a heavy rubber apron lined with lead and hid behind a leaden door to set the X-ray controls, all the while calling out “Hold still” or “Hold your breath,” then “Breathe,” feeling that I was doing something important, helping people, and believing that I was competent even though I was nothing of the kind. I pushed only the buttons I had been taught to push, then locked myself in the darkroom to clip the films into metal frames and set them into bins of developer and fixative, then hang them to dry until they could be fastened to a box of light, where the bones would appear white in the shadowy flesh and the lungs looked like clouds.

  The darkroom was my refuge, with its dim orange safelight and ticking timer. I cherished my time there, daydreaming and composing poems in my mind until the timer rang and I had to see to other matters.

  While the nurses sat smoking cigarettes at their station, I would go from room to room and bed to bed, checking on the patients, many of them strangely awake while others slept with their mouths open. If I thought one of them looked dead, I would feel for a pulse. Only once did I find a dead person, and having touched her stiff and cooling wrist, I stood rigid beside her in disbelief for a few moments, then pressed the call button. It took a good while before the nurse came and pushed me aside.

  * * *

  —

  One summer, I worked at a clinic, and the physician, knowing that I wanted to go to medical school, let me assist him with procedures such as dilation and curettage. One day, we were removing beer-bottle glass from a young man’s forearm. The doctor turned to me midway through a suture and told me to finish closing up, and he winked. The patient, I remember, winced and looked fearfully about the room. My hand shook. I was okay with tying the knot, but I didn’t want to push the curved needle into flesh. The doctor then covered my hand with his thin glove, took the needle from me, and finished the work himself, later saying that my hesitancy was a bad sign if I intended to become a physician. I had seen him suture hundreds of times and surely knew how by now. He added that he had also noticed that I couldn’t stand the sight of a scalpel’s cutting into flesh, that I always looked away—another bad sign. He did not approve of women entering medicine.

  * * *

  After waiting an hour more or so for Dr. Vicky to finish what she had been doing, Leonel dropped us at her apartment, where we spent the night. We might have eaten something, and talked a little, but what I remember is lying in the dark, the lab coat slung over a nearby chair, lit by the moon.

  In the morning, Dr. Vicky pulled curlers from her hair and dropped them into a plastic bucket, ran a comb through the curls, asked if I would like to take a shower or drink some coffee.

  “Yes, both if possible. If there is time.”

  “I’ll get us some breakfast. You like eggs?”

  I held cold water to my face and listened to the clink of silver and cups. The bathroom was draped with damp towels, and there were American cosmetics on the back of the toilet, little pots of blush and shadow, almost-empty bottles of cologne. She lived in two rooms. There was a double mattress on the floor beside two smaller ones, a sofa, and a table.

  We ate sausage, fried platanos, and tortillas. She joked a bit. Her Spanish was rapid, so she repeated her words slowly, and talked about maybe dyeing her hair red. There were blue pouches under her eyes. Later she would confess that she suffered from a bit of insomnia.

  “I don’t know how to prepare you for this,” she said, and I assured her that I had worked in hospitals many summers as a teenager and after school.

  She looked at me, and after a time
said, “Well, let’s go, then.”

  An hour later we stood at the edge of a dry potted road, waiting for the first bus, which was hot and crowded but we found a seat together. She talked about Mexico and her work among the street prostitutes: curing their syphilis, delivering their babies, the thirteen-year-olds who came to her when they were too far along to work, wanting to know where the baby would come out, thinking maybe their navels would open, but not really sure. Many girls, she said, were pregnant before their organs were fully mature.

  The campesinas on the bus had lowered their baskets and cántaros (urns) of water from their heads into their arms, and the women sitting offered to hold them for the women who stood in the aisles. I made a gesture and a relieved young girl placed a basket of zapotes in my lap. It must have weighed fifty pounds.

  That day we worked in the government-run rural hospital for nine hours, walking through swarms of flies over floors swabbed with a bucket of gray water, tracking through it, ward after ward. Dr. Vicky talked about how the campesina in El Salvador lives, waking before dawn, husking and grinding the maize on the metate, setting the mash to boil over the fire, and this before anyone else is up. Then she’ll wake her husband if she has one, and the children she almost always has, before working through the morning, slapping wet clothes on rocks, hauling water, taking fruit or grain to market, bringing her husband’s food to the fields. She’ll bend over his hoe to continue the work while he eats, and then, when she returns to the champa, she eats if there is anything left. She works until after dark, sleeps a few hours, and begins again.

  Dr. Vicky ran her hands along the body of a naked little girl whose chest and back were bruised, but she seemed more interested in the rash on the girl’s inner thighs.

  “When I worked in another village, I found quite a few vaginal infections in very young girls,” she said. “I thought their fathers were violating them. Then a campesina finally told me that when the girls are little, the mothers in that village take a razor blade and make the sign of the cross on the clitoris. They say it makes them better workers. They don’t get ideas.”

  She lifted the girl to the scale. “She is nine,” she said. “She has the weight of a healthy six-year-old.”

  We sat in the hospital kitchen: an open-pit fire with a pot of coffee balanced on the coals, the walls blackened by wood smoke. Dr. Vicky sipped her coffee, then rubbed her face with her hands and looked at me.

  “So you see how it is? I have no lab, no X-ray machine, no supplies of whole blood, plasma, or antibiotics, no anesthesia or medicines, no autoclave for sterilizing instruments. I have to boil them. The forceps are rusted. I have had to perform emergency caesarean sections without anesthesia. Come with me, I will show you.”

  We went into the operating room: a table with stirrups, another with a bright lamp, glass louvered windows without screens. Flies studded the walls, and there was a whirring in the room as they rose and fell.

  Dr. Vicky sent me with Ana through the wards, the young campesina who “had no medical training but whose heart was good,” the girl hired to swish the flies with a newspaper from the newborn’s head as it crowns, to give sitz baths, as I had learned to do at her age, to diaper the babies, swab the sores, strip and refresh the sheets. We moved together from bed to bed, and she combed the patients’ hair while I took pulses and temperatures, startled at how bright and yet blank the patients’ eyes were, how the light fell on their bony faces, these nearly skeletal workers from the campo, who lived on daily tortillas with a lump of beans and drank boiled sorghum instead of coffee. One woman’s feet had swollen to twice their size but the rest of her body seemed made of bones and cloth. A man had suffered a machete wound that had not been closed in time, and the burning gash across his thigh had become infected. Another woman had lain so long on her cot that bedsores had opened on her buttocks, such as I remembered from the convalescent home. There, we would pull the dead flesh away with a large tweezers, then pour a little peroxide over the wound until the bubbling stopped. This woman was lying on her stomach, legs splayed awkwardly under her gown, clutching the bars of the headboard. When Ana lifted the gown, I saw that maggots were feeding on the sore, rising up, falling back, so that the wound itself appeared to be alive. Ana took a teaspoon from her apron pocket.

  “We can take them out now,” she whispered. “They are finished.”

  When Leonel finally came for me, we spent a day like many others, with much driving around, but fewer questions about what I was seeing. We stopped several places for brief conversations with various people, and sometimes I was asked to join, and sometimes he made the sign that I should wait in the open jeep. He had brought that morning’s El Diario de Hoy, and when the sun bore down, I sat with a page tented over my hair until he returned from one of his meetings. He talked to two men leaning on their spades in a field, an old woman in the market, and even a secretary in an auto-body repair shop. She was the only one I met who seemed not to want to talk in front of me. At the end of the day, he told me that it was all right, the boy we had been searching for had “gone up the mountain,” which meant that he would no longer sleep at his house, but he was safer there, sleeping under the stars with others who had also had to leave their homes to keep from being captured. By nightfall we were in the city again, and Leonel was letting me off at the former dictator’s house, where I would once again spend the night in the squealing four-poster with a mattress that sank beneath me like a hammock. In the mirrored armoire not far from the foot of the bed I could see myself when I raised my head from the pillow, even in the dark.

  * * *

  Leonel had promised, as usual, that he would come for me in the morning. Lying in bed, I thought how surprised Claribel and her family would be if they knew where I was at this moment. But they didn’t know. Almost no one knew, not even the man with whom I’d been having a long-distance relationship off and on for a year, and whose letters had slowed in the autumn and had stopped coming just before Christmas. I hadn’t written to him yet about Leonel’s visit, his invitation, or my trip here, and I wondered to myself why not. I suppose that I didn’t think he would approve. I imagined him standing at his open kitchen window in upstate New York, taking a baseball bat to the icicles that hung from his eaves before returning to his desk. He would think this was a dangerous thing for a young woman to be doing, traveling to a country in such turmoil and on the verge of war. He had done his research on the prisons of the Soviet gulag and the Nazi death camps, focusing on the altruism of survivors and on poets who had borne witness to suffering. Later I would tell him something of what I had seen here, and he would argue against my going back. I countered by reminding him of his own writings, quoting him back to himself. This is different, he said, contending that I had a choice while others did not, reminding me that my passport wouldn’t protect me, that I wasn’t old enough or experienced enough, and I could just as well write my poetry from the quiet of my own study, but I had known since childhood that human suffering demanded a response, everywhere and always, and I wondered: What would I do? I also knew that what I wanted most at that moment was to tell someone where I was, just in case. I couldn’t frighten my parents, but someone should know, other than my friend Barbara, who shouldn’t have to shoulder this by herself, in case anything happened. When I told Leonel later about this desire, while he was eating his breakfast, he shook his head and smiled.

  “What are you going to do, send a postcard? I don’t think there’s much of a market here for postcards at this moment, Papu.”

  He was pinching up the last of some black beans with a bit of tortilla, and I was having coffee, followed by a cigarette.

  “It’s a bad habit,” he said and, after a long pause, added, “skipping breakfast.”

  “I’m okay.”

  “Papu, regarding communications with the United States—just know that every piece of mail going out of the country, every phone call, is subject to scrutiny by securi
ty forces. They take note of the numbers you call as well as your number, and if they want to read your mail, they read it, and if they want to listen, they listen.”

  “So what are you saying? That I shouldn’t . . .”

  “No,” he said lightly, “make your own decisions.”

  After breakfast, he said he needed to take a trip back to his coffee farm so he could check on the trees. As I followed him through the coffee, I asked him again where, exactly, he lived.

  “You see, Papu,” he said, ignoring my question, “this is Coffea arabica, so it is susceptible to rust blight. I wish the Peace Corps would send someone here who knows something about rust blight. Instead they send us anthropology majors.”

  “Do you live here?”

  “No,” he answered, seeming preoccupied. “No, I don’t. This is just my farm.”

  He was examining the undersides of the dark, glossy leaves, lifting them, rubbing them, moving among the trees while I followed until, emerging from the low forest of coffee, we came to a long cinder-block building. He held the door open for me to see that inside there were metal cots with mattresses, footlockers, and hooks on the walls, some with towels hanging from them.