What You Have Heard Is True

by Carolyn Forche

  “This is not important.”

  She would often declare this, in response to things that I said. Most things were “not important.”

  * * *

  —

  She took me to meet two of the Jesuit priests at the Catholic university, Father Ignacio Ellacuría, and another whose name I didn’t quite catch. This might have been Father Segundo Montes. She also introduced me to her colleague Ricardo Stein, a scholar who was developing a center for documentation at the university and who invited me to come talk with him again.

  Father Ellacuría, in a white guayabera instead of a cassock, motioned for us to sit in the chairs facing his desk. He had pushed his glasses onto his forehead as if he had eyes there. His gaze was fixed and intense and his language clipped and precise. Castillian Spanish. He began to speak in a manner reserved, I was later told, for visiting guests, as he did for students at La UCA, but when he learned that I was in El Salvador on a fellowship, he assumed that I knew much more than I did, and so his efforts fell on less fertile ground than he might have supposed.

  That day he most wanted to talk about a recent law decreed by the government, the Law of Defense and Guaranty of Public Order, or what people seemed to refer to simply as “The Law.” It prohibited rebellion, or the hosting of meetings to discuss rebellion, the encouraging of members of the armed forces to disobey orders, attempts by spoken or written word to oppose the established order, and everything having to do with opposition to the present military regime. There was also a provision having to do with the national University of El Salvador, which had been placed under a special body to assume temporary responsibility for governance, given the “present climate of unrest and violence” on the campus.

  I took notes as best I could, and later Margarita would show me a copy of this law, with its eleven categories of offenses, its punishments, procedures, and articles, the whole of it placed at the disposal of the First Chamber of Criminal Matters and so on.

  “This means,” she said, “that they can arrest anyone at any time for any reason. They have legalized their repression. It is against the law to oppose them in any way. But, Carolina, only the lucky ones are arrested under this law. Only the lucky ones have a trial.”

  We were talking in the dark after the girls went to bed.

  “What happens to the unlucky?”

  “What happens? They are disappeared. They become desaparecidos. We don’t know after that, unless the corpse is found, and even then we don’t know because they are, how do you say it? Beyond recognition.”

  * * *

  All that day we went places together—to the empty gray cathedral without pews, flocks of doves flying in the clerestory; to the human rights office, with its red-and-gray-tiled floor, folding chairs and blue walls, where she showed me photograph albums, one with daisies on the cover, where the photos of the desaparecidos were mounted on sticky pages covered with plastic. Most of the photographs of the desaparecidos had been taken at school or on some occasion, such as completion of nurses’ training, a quinceañera birthday party, a dinner in celebration of a betrothal. Therefore, most of the photographs were of young people, even if, at the time they disappeared, some were no longer so young.

  “This sometimes makes it difficult,” Margarita said, “to match the photographs of these desaparecidos to the dead that are found, but there are other factors making identification difficult as well. Some of them are found mutilated. Some of them have already been partly eaten by animals.”

  In the human rights office, these albums and some other folders were stacked high on a table. There was a telephone, and a fan turning side to side. People came and went, mostly older women. Some appeared desperate and anxious, clutching photos and scraps of paper, while others stared listlessly, waiting for some news. I turned the plastic pages, and it was like looking through a school yearbook of those most likely never to be seen again. I wrote as many names as I could in my notebook, not knowing yet what I would do with them. No one stopped me from copying these names down. A woman even crossed the room to bring me another album from the table, nodding as she pressed it into my hands.

  Before we left, Margarita pointed to a particular photograph and asked me to remember the face. “I will tell you later when we’re alone,” she whispered.

  We crossed town to the other university, the one taken over by a special governance body under the new law. Here the walls had been painted with murals, initials, and slogans, and there were flyers and posters, but much of this had been covered with paint so as to erase it. The walls were palimpsests of meetings and resolutions, marches and calls to action, layer upon layer of campus activism, as Margarita whispered to me. Otherwise everything appeared to be falling into disrepair: broken concrete steps, broken windows here and there, a filing cabinet with open drawers lying in a hallway. Desks left outside in the open. Empty desks. The students stood in small groups or walked arm in arm, moving between buildings and classes with their book bags. There were a few soldiers, with rifles slung over their shoulders, their olive helmets appearing wet in the light. The soldiers were as young as the students. Maybe younger.

  “This campus is occupied,” Margarita said in a low voice, reading my thoughts. “We should go. I’m going to take you to a special place—nothing to do with our situation.”

  “Might we stay a little longer?”

  “No. I will explain later.”

  The fading graffiti appeared even on the walkways. We were walking on a quilt of flyers, some lifting in the wind, and through the cacophony of voices one would usually hear at change of class, there was a strange quiet; the mood of this campus was at once expectant and suffused with fear.

  Back in the van, she lit her cigarette even before rolling down the window.

  “You’re shaking, Margarita.”

  “Everything is fine,” she said. “But there was someone there and I think he saw me.”

  “Who did you see?”

  “Someone.”

  As we drove and the city fell below us, here and there pastures grazed by cattle, and in the distance, a blue volcano rose into the clouds. We stopped at a scenic overlook. We were here because she wanted to show me something.

  As we stood at the railing, she said: “I have come to this place for years, but I think it will not be possible much longer. Do you see that tree with the red flowers? They call it the marriage tree. Do you know why? It has beautiful blooms in the spring, but the flowers fall away and the tree becomes not so beautiful. Speaking of this, my husband is coming home tomorrow. You will see. We are not really together anymore. We do not have—relations.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Why? I prefer this. It would be impossible to share my life with him now.”

  She turned to look over the railing again. “He is not of the extreme right, Carolina. He has the politics of an ordinary businessman. Do you understand? We stay together because of our daughters, but I do not know how long this will be possible. I think there will be a war. I agree now with the people who believe this. We do not see—”

  She caught the error before I registered what it was. This “we” didn’t refer to herself and her husband.

  “Are you organized, Margarita?” It was a term I had picked up, and she was surprised to hear it from me.

  “You should not be asking me that. But no, I am not a militant. And if I was, I would not be telling you.”

  In the distance, volcanoes without smoke appeared. Sleeping volcanoes.

  * * *

  —

  “The photograph of the woman I asked you to remember? That woman was my friend. The last time I saw her we were in a bank, standing in line at a teller’s window. This was some time ago. She was dressed to go somewhere, or maybe she was on a break from work, I am not sure. But she seemed nervous—alert, like a perico, one of the small birds you see in flocks at dusk. She would barely
look at me, and we were once close. She was looking all around, over my shoulder, out toward the bank entrance, and then she said in a quiet voice, I almost couldn’t understand: You must get away. You must pretend not to know me. Please. And then she said, I love you, and I will see you again someday. I said I loved her too. The next week, I think it was, she disappeared somewhere near the market. I didn’t sleep well after that, and I kept imagining where she might be, and what might they be doing to her. Then . . .”

  Someone else had come beside us to look at the city or to meet there in that place above everything, two men who were joined by a third. They had come in two separate vehicles. Margarita stiffened in their presence. One of them had a pistol tucked into his belt and it’s possible the others had them too. They were talking and laughing among themselves but not lightheartedly. One or the other glanced at us from time to time. Margarita turned toward me and looked into my eyes. She wasn’t smiling. She opened her purse and withdrew a lipstick and a pocket mirror, holding the mirror at some distance from her face, then raised her voice to suggest that we do some shopping.

  One of the men had been showing the others some black objects. At that moment, they all got into one of the cars and drove off, leaving one of their vehicles parked at the overlook.

  “Two-way radios,” Margarita said, then: “Well—I was telling you about my friend. Someone else, another woman, was put into one of the clandestine prisons but was released later, I’m not sure why, but this one who was released said she had seen Lil Ramirez, and said that “her hair had grown to the floor of her cell,” that she was like a ghost. We should go now,” and then she added, “before those men come back.”

  “You weren’t afraid, Carolina?” Margarita asked as we descended toward the city.

  “Should I have been?”

  She looked over at me and then, downshifting with her hands white on the steering wheel, she answered, “Yes.”

  * * *

  That night, or the next, we stayed up late talking after the girls had gotten into their pajamas and kissed their mother good night, after the newly arrived husband had finished his scotch on the rocks, shaken my hand and nodded to his wife, and the two maids in their white uniforms had sailed through the doorway for the last time. As the moonlight splashed the rhododendron in the garden, we sat in the dark, the wall of glass doors open. It seemed we were both inside and outside the house. As with other houses, this one had walls surrounding it, with broken bottles embedded along them, and strings of razor wire that also caught the light. Margarita wanted to know how much I knew—how much Leonel had told me about what she called “this moment.”

  I went back to Leonel’s history lessons: the conquistadores, Alvarado of the burning hair, the tortures inflicted on the Nahua, Pipil, and Lenca, the confiscation of their lands, all the way to the volcano Izalco’s erupting on the eve of the uprising in 1932 and the ships in the harbor.

  “Pero, en este momento—in this moment, Carolina.”

  “Well, he talks about corruption in the military quite a bit, and about the dead American Ronald Richardson—he’s obsessed with that—and about Colonel Chacón, whom he thinks is responsible for Richardson’s death. He talks about the labor union he is advising and complains that this union is being manipulated, as I understand it, by the Americans, but mostly he talks about poverty. He took me to one village to show me—I think mostly—the trench people use as a latrine. But now we’ve gone to many caseríos and villages, and talked to many people. Over and over he shows me the conditions in which people live, the majority of people. He says that if he could change the lives of campesinos even in the smallest way, he would be willing to dig ditches for the rest of his life. I would dig them for two hundred years is what he said.”

  “Does he ever talk about the guerrilleros?”

  I remember wondering why she wanted to know these things about Leonel. She was his friend, wasn’t she? And as his friend, wouldn’t she know the answers herself? But my hesitancy at this time was overcome, I think, by the stronger desire for her friendship.

  “He says the government exaggerates the size and strength of the guerrilla groups to get economic and military aid from the Americans. He says the guerrilla forces are small—militarily speaking, they are almost, he says, insignificant, but that this could change. He keeps saying that the country is going to blow up—that war is coming. But he’s been saying that since I met him. The country is going to blow up. This doesn’t make sense to me. If there are no guerrillas, how is it that war is coming?”

  We sat quietly in the dark for a long while, the tips of our cigarettes making arcs in the air to our mouths. There was a bird singing in the garden despite that night had come.

  Leonel returned the next morning, wet haired and beaming, having arranged my day for me, but first, of course, he wanted to sit down to breakfast, and joke with the girls and with Margarita and even exchange pleasantries with her husband, whom he later described as “a decent man.”

  I packed a few things to take with me just in case I wasn’t coming back that night or the next. Margarita asked if I wanted to borrow a dress. She wore floral wrap dresses, closely fitted with low necklines such as I wasn’t accustomed to wearing, but we were the same size, so she rolled and tucked one into my sack along with a pair of her dressy sandals that also fit me and a lipstick in a shade that would suit my coloring.

  “Leonel would never think of things like this,” she said, “and one never knows.”

  Then she put her hands on my shoulders and turned me toward her: “If you need me, call, and I will come and get you. Do you understand? And be careful and remember, be your own person. Call me if you need me.”

  She didn’t walk us out. She let her maid open the gate. When I turned, I saw her standing in the doorway, watching us and covering her mouth with her hand. When she saw me, she waved.

  I decided not to ask him where he had been. I wouldn’t ask about the beautiful woman. We were here to work, as he said himself, so no more such questions. At this moment, I thought I was beginning to understand. Margarita had insisted that I be my own person. Leonel was also adamant that I think for myself, that I let go of my preconceptions, although I hadn’t, until then, been aware of having any. But all right, I thought. How to do that? Leonel had complained of my daydreaming, that I wasn’t paying proper attention to things around me in my waking life, so from now on, I would pay attention, and try to see as much as I could, not the world as imagined in my continuous waking dream, but as it was, not only the obvious but the hidden, not only the water cántaros but their weight, not only their weight but why it was necessary to carry water such distances. I would try to learn from Leonel how to listen to what was said but also to what was not said, and I would also try to learn how to detect deception in others, which, he assured me, is a skill that can be acquired. I would learn to review my experiences for the missed details, and to keep in mind that while I was observing others, they were also observing me, and I would become less (how did he put it?) readable, and when necessary, I would attempt, in his words, to “manage the perceptions of others” so that, of the “five versions of the truth,” in any given situation, mine might prevail.

  “This place is a symphony of illusion,” Leonel often said, “and an orchestra needs a conductor.”

  * * *

  The jeep bounced over the dry ruts of dirt roads, through the tin light of early morning. I steadied the bundle as Leonel drove from Margarita’s colonia to the poorer barrios, and then to the outskirts, where cook smoke crawled the roofs. There was the white steam of morning piss above the ditches where each man stood, and where the women bunched their skirts to their waists and squatted, not far from their champas, whose windows were carved into packing crates with machetes, crates that had once contained appliances, so the walls read “Maytag,” “White,” or “Harvest Gold.” The crates had been hacked apart and spliced together, bolstered wit
h scrap lumber, straw, and mud; some of the roofs were nothing but drop cloths, others were of lámina. These were everywhere if one began to look for them, wedged between ditch and road, clinging to banana trees or slung between palms, their walls fluttering in the least wind. With the rains, they collapsed into the ravines and had to be built again. The ruins of earlier champas draped the palms like wet bedding.

  We passed women walking along the highway with their children, one hand holding the hand of another child, especially as the heavy buses passed, trailing smoke, arms hanging from the bus windows and men riding on top, or when the open trucks passed with men standing shoulder to shoulder on the flatbed fenced to hold them as they were driven to the fields.

  We were going that day to visit several more caseríos, Leonel said, settlements smaller than villages, clusters of houses inaccessible by road, so that I might continue to see for myself how people lived. We drove off the highway and onto a dirt road, and then bounced along a stony path for what seemed at least an hour. I pressed my palm to the roof to steady myself and took hold of a handle jutting out of the dash. Leonel kept both hands on the steering wheel, except when downshifting to avoid the largest rocks, as if he knew the location of each one.

  “It’s impossible to drive this road in the rainy season, so when it rains I have to walk,” he said over the engine, “but the people who live here walk all the time.”

  On both sides there were champas hidden among the trees, and stands of corn, a dozen or so stalks. Fewer. Then ahead of us on my side a thin white cow, her bones jutting from her rump, loped behind a small barefoot boy who was leading the cow by a rope, her head rocking back and forth as she walked, the boy tapping the ground with a stick.