What You Have Heard Is True
Page 17
“Go now, quickly.”
I was inside the room. It was darker than any other room in the prison and it stank more. I tried to adjust my eyes to the darkness.
Try to see, Leonel had said. It was what he was always asking me to do. Try to see. Look at the world, he’d say, and not at the mirror.
What I saw were wooden boxes, about the size of washing machines, maybe even a little smaller. I counted the boxes. There were six, and they had small openings cut into the fronts, with chicken-wire mesh over the openings. They were padlocked. As I stood there, some of the boxes started to wobble a little, and I realized that there were men inside them. Fingers came through one of the mesh openings. Blood rushed to my ears, and I stood, trying to orient myself so that I could know not only where the room was but also which wall the boxes were against, and then I walked slowly toward the light of the open doorway and into the hall, where Miguel was standing against his crutch. As I came toward him he whispered, “Tie your sweater sleeves around your neck, tiene urticaria.”
I get hives, not as often as I once did, but in childhood frequently. Whenever I was afraid or nervous or sad they bloomed on my neck and face, so I did as he asked, and tied the sweater sleeves.
“That’s la oscura, the darkness, solitary. Sometimes men are held in there for a year and can’t move when they come out because of the atrophy of their muscles. Some of them never recover their minds. Tell them on the outside, tell them,” and then, raising his voice he said, “Carolina, it has been nice to see you again. Give my love to Ana and Carlos.”
He was walking, whispering again, “Mil gracias. It’s time now for you to go. Go!” he said, motioning with his head toward the gate.
“But will you be all right?”
“¿Cómo no?” he said. “Go.”
At the entrance, Leonel was waiting as promised, but beyond him, soldiers had surrounded his Hiace and were looking through the windows. He rested his hand on my shoulder and we began walking side by side.
“Why are they—?”
“I don’t know. I guess we’re going to find out.”
We were between the building and the Hiace, which was parked close to the road. Leonel held the keys in his other hand.
“Don’t turn around, just walk, and assume that everything is fine. We’re just going to our vehicle, that’s all we’re doing.”
Then he stopped. “Why don’t you go up and say hello to them?”
“What?”
“I think it would be a good idea for you to say hello to them.”
“Why don’t you—?”
“It’s better if you do it.”
As I reached the Hiace, several of the soldiers turned toward me. They were smiling. I smiled back and put out my hand. “Buenos días.”
“Buenos días.”
They each shook my hand.
“This vehicle has four-wheel drive?” one of them asked.
“Yes, it has four-wheel drive.”
“So it’s like a jeep, then?”
“Yes, like a jeep.”
“I will someday have a truck like this!” one of the soldiers said.
Leonel had reached us, and began talking with them, answering questions about the Hiace, then they walked off as a group, some waving good-bye. Leonel began driving slowly into the road. It was hot in the Hiace even with the windows rolled down. He was biting on his cold pipe, as he often did when he wanted to think, and ahead of us the road shimmered, and the stink of fire was still in the air and the whirr of blood in my ears and when I put my hands to my face, it felt wet, so that must have been why he kept looking from the road to me and back, but he wasn’t saying anything, not even asking what I had seen, and then, in the next moment, I felt myself lurching forward, and vomited onto the dashboard. At the sight of this, I began to sob and, at the same time, tried to wipe the vomit up with my sweater. Finally, I threw the sweater on the floor and, still crying, turned away from him. Still, he said nothing. He stopped the Hiace and pulled hard on the emergency brake, I remember the sudden grind of it, almost as if he were angry but still nothing.
“Good,” he said finally, “cry, go ahead.” He didn’t reach out to me or offer any comfort, didn’t tell me that I had done well or that I was brave or that he was proud of me. I tried to stop.
“You know, Papu, I didn’t think you would get this far. I didn’t. I want you to pay attention now, and feel what you are feeling, really pay attention because you can learn from this. This is what oppression feels like. Now you have begun to learn something. When you get back to the States, what you do with this is up to you.”
“I want to go back to the city. I need to take a shower.”
“Papu, listen. You are always asking me why the people don’t do something, why they put up with this brutality, why they don’t rise up against it, this and that. Okay. You’re exhausted, you’re shocked, you’re sick to your stomach, and you feel dirty. These things are what people feel every day here—and you expect them to get themselves organized? You expect them to fight back? Could you fight back at this moment?”
He seemed to be talking to himself now, and I didn’t know any longer how I felt. Tired yes, still a little sick yes, but calmer, and I also felt angry with him for his lack of sympathy and for this lecture.
“Can we just go back to the city?”
“Yes, of course we can go. We’ll go now. But we have a meeting tonight with those young poets, remember?”
“I can’t go to any meeting. I want to go somewhere and rest. I need to think.”
“Well, fine, but you promised. What am I going to tell them? We have to stop there and tell them you aren’t coming, and I should be able to give a reason.”
“Tell them the truth, then—that I feel sick, and that I’m tired.”
* * *
—
We didn’t say anything more to each other. The cane fields went by, followed by the cotton. It was dark when we reached San Salvador. The meeting with the young poets, arranged a few days earlier, was to take place in the barrio La Fosa.
“Wait here,” he said, turning off the ignition and taking the keys. “I’ll be back.”
It was dark. There were small lights here and there, and voices of people passing by in the street, lights of cigarettes flaring, the sound of a glass bottle hitting a wall. I had the windows rolled almost all the way up and the doors were locked. I didn’t really know where I was. I should have closed my eyes and rested until he returned but couldn’t.
Even without the repression, Leonel had said, El Salvador is a violent country, with the highest murder rate in the world. I didn’t know if that was true, but I was thinking of this as I sat in the dark waiting for him to come back. I heard radio music grow loud and then fade away. Leonel was often gone longer than he said he would be, but now at least an hour had gone by. I realized of course that I had no idea where he was, and no choice but to stay in the Hiace. As I pressed my head against the window glass, there was a tap, and when I turned, I saw a young man, motioning me to roll down the window.
“Carolina?”
He knew who I was.
“¿Sí?”
He told me his name and then said something about being sorry that I felt ill, and that of course all of them understood and everyone sent their greetings, but something had just happened in the casita. A poet’s wife had just given birth. Would I like to come to see the newborn just for a moment?
I followed him through the darkness into a passage, then through the door lit by a candle and, by the light of it, saw people gathered and one of them, someone, took me by the hand and drew me into the circle surrounding a young woman who was lying on her side on a blanket on the floor, her head propped in her hand. There was a cardboard box beside her, and in the box, a newborn girl with her hair still wet, lying in a towel. Leonel was looking at me from across the room.
We stood there I don’t know how long, listening to the little sounds coming from Alma’s mouth. The mother lifted the baby out of the box and held her to her breast, turning, shyly, toward the wall. The baby’s father crouched beside them and the others moved toward the doorway.
“We’re sorry about what happened to you,” one of them said. “Leonel told us where you were today.”
Happened to me? I thought. Nothing happened to me. But I nodded and smiled.
“We want to give you our revista,” another said, handing me a booklet that smelled of fresh mimeograph ink.
“Not all of us have poems in this issue, but we can’t find the previous one. We’re sorry you got sick. We’d invite you to join us down the street, but we know you’re tired. We’ve changed the meeting place because of this unexpected event.”
Leonel was watching, a little quizzically. I heard myself say, “I’m not tired anymore. Of course, I’ll come with you.”
There was nothing in that casita, really nothing: a candle, a plastic basin, a ladle hanging against the wall, and, in the candlelight, the shadow of a wooden chair dancing on the wall. After touching the new mother’s shoulder, I left with them, and in the next place, there was also very little. The poets, four young men, sat down at a wooden table and gave me a Coke, and then the spokesman, the one who wasn’t shy, told me the history of their group. I persuaded each of them to read a poem. Before I left, the spokesman cleared his throat, looked at the others, and said in a low voice, “Carolina, there is something we would like to say to you. First, we would like to thank you for coming here, not only to this meeting but also to our country. Second, we would like to ask you not to show this issue of our journal to anyone because you might accidentally show it to the wrong person, and that would be dangerous for us. Some of our poems are”—he hesitated—“militant?” and he asked Leonel if that was the word he wanted.
“Political,” Leonel said.
“Yes. So. We were hoping that if you translate and publish them in the United States, you will be careful not to say who gave them to you. These aren’t our real names, but there are other ways of finding out who we are, and we don’t know all of those ways. It’s just that we—we trust you, of course, but . . .”
“I’ll keep your poems safe,” I said.
That night I knew that something had changed for me, and that I wasn’t going to get tired or need a shower or want to call something off so I could rest, and I hoped that if I forgot this I would somehow remember Alma in the cardboard box in the barrio, and the mimeographed poems.
I never saw the young poets again. I don’t know what happened to them, if they survived or are among the dead. Shortly thereafter I wouldn’t want to know who people really were or where they lived, where they were going, or who their friends were. After that night, I kept poetry mostly to myself, although the U.S. officials in the embassy knew that I was a poet, and the military officers I met also knew, or pretended to believe, that I was a poet.
“Yes of course,” one officer said to me one night, “of course you are a poet. And I also write poetry.”
The woman who went into the prison in Ahuachapán left herself behind in a barrio called La Fosa, the grave.
Sometime later, we went again to the region of Ahuachapán, this time as far as the sea, where there was an outdoor café that served the cockleshells that Leonel liked.
“There is something you should know,” Leonel said. “I don’t want this to worry you, but it seems that not everyone thinks you are a nun. Some people in the Salvadoran military think you might actually work for the CIA, or maybe the American embassy, they’re not sure what.”
The wind lifted the red-checkered tablecloth over the bowl of cockleshells, nearly tipping a bottle of Coke. The gray sea heaved upon the black sand beach below the café, one of the beaches where, he had told me, corpses sometimes washed up. We look for bodies regularly here, he’d said.
“I don’t understand. Why would they think this? You told them the truth, didn’t you?”
“They believe what they want to believe, and apparently, someone put two and two together in a certain way and came up with this.”
“What two and two? You’re scaring me.”
“Well, you’re a young American woman here on a foundation grant from the United States.”
“For poetry.”
“Yes, for poetry, but I don’t think they believe this is the only reason you are here. They’re paranoid these days and they no longer understand the Americans. For example, before the current ambassador arrived, your president nominated a woman about your age to be the next ambassador to El Salvador. My God, you should have seen the reaction. A woman!”
His pen wandered on the white paper protecting the red-checkered cloth, but the drawing was upside down: stick figures, corn plants, battleships.
“I don’t see what this has to do with me.”
“Well, at the same time, your president announced a new human rights policy. That really confused them. Years and years of keeping order by whatever means necessary, and in exchange, American military and economic aid, bank loans, investment, the works. And now? They have to be certified as respecting human rights in order to get this money. And unfortunately, they don’t know what ‘certified’ means, much less how they are going to keep order while simultaneously respecting so-called human rights.”
“About my mistaken identity. I need to know why they think this and what you’re going to do about it, because . . .”
“I’m getting to that. Wait. Listen to what I’m saying, Papu. Put two and two together. For months after the former ambassador and political officer failed to get action on the Richardson case, and after their resignations were the first to be accepted by your new president, what happened? The embassy had no leadership for a good while. And during that time, the Americans nominated a girl.”
“A woman, Leonel, they nominated a woman.”
“Not according to the Salvadoran military, and right now we’re trying to look at the situation from their point of view, remember? Think like a colonel.”
Another bowl of cockles arrived with two more Cokes. We pulled the creatures with a small fork from their dark shells, and Leonel had a special way of doing this. He also liked to suck the briny liquid from the shells. He paused in his story to do this, so I lit a cigarette to calm my nerves.
“Where was I? Oh yes. After considering the possibility of a girl as ambassador, and trying to figure out if the gringos have lost their minds, you show up, at a time when, as far as they know, there is no new deputy chief of mission or whatever you call it. Maybe that person is you.”
“Well, it’s easy enough to check my fellowship, and that I’m a poet.”
“They probably have checked. But to them, the foundation that gave you your fellowship used to be connected to mining interests in Latin America. And poetry? Many of them write poetry themselves. Ask them. It’s quite bad, but they’d be happy to show it to you. And Yale. Your poetry book was published by Yale, which has educated a fair number of intelligence officers and agents.”
“So what are you saying?”
“I’m saying that they think you might be the new something-or-other at the embassy, the new jefa, or at the very least, you work for intelligence. So this is why they want to talk to you.”
“Who does?”
“More officers have asked me if you would meet with them.”
“And what did you say? You said no, right?”
“What could I say? We’re talking about the Salvadoran military now, remember, in a country that has been under dictatorship for more than fifty years. Say no to them? I don’t think so.”
He finished the cockles and licked his thumbs,
then wiped his smudged glasses on a paper napkin.
“Don’t worry. I think this development might even be useful.”
“What does that mean?”
“Well, for a little while at least, you will be watched closely and your opinions will matter. They will be reading you for signs of what the Americans think. Maybe we can even convince them that this human rights policy is serious.”
“Isn’t it serious?”
“I don’t know, but I have seldom seen the Americans serious about human rights unless it is politically convenient for them. So if this time they are truly interested, it’s something new—to me, at least.”
“I’m just going to tell them the truth—that I’m a poet and that’s it.”
“Precisely. And at that moment, they will know that what they suspected is true. There is a saying we have here that might even have originated in your own State Department. ‘Never believe anything until it is officially denied.’ If I were you, I would let them think whatever they wish to think.”
“Did you have anything to do with this, Leonel? Tell me. Did you lead them to suppose I’m someone I’m not?”
“No, of course not. This fell into my lap, as your people like to say. But I could not have planned it any better. Let’s go now,” he said. “I have time to take you to El Imposible. Would you like that?”
The Impossible, yes, I thought. Whatever that means. Why not?
“Actually, it is no longer quite El Imposible. You will see.”
We drove toward Cara Sucia through a green silence hung with fog, through a nowhere of highland coffee guarded by a blue volcano.
“Izalco,” he said. “Remember? The volcano that erupted on the night of the uprising in ’32? That volcano is sleeping now, but the fire in the earth is close to the surface here, Papu, all through this area there are geysers, fumaroles, and small volcanoes, some with lakes in their craters, some sleeping, some pretending to sleep. Over there is Apaneca, a classic volcano, such as children might draw, with a little puff of smoke coming out of the top. They used to bring the coffee harvest through this forest by mule train to the port of Acajutla, and they had to pass through the Hacienda El Imposible, and then across a gorge. They built rickety, makeshift bridges across this gorge that sometimes didn’t hold. Mules, sacks of coffee, men and boys, all dropped into the gorge to their deaths when these bridges gave way. That is how the gorge came to be called El Imposible. The people would then build another bridge and the same thing would happen. Some of them held for a time, of course, which made matters worse because this made people think there was a chance.”