I tried to imagine a wooden bridge letting go of a gorge wall and tipping the mule carts: mules running in the air, wild eyed, straw hats falling just above the men’s heads, coffee sacks breaking open, and beans ticking into the sharp rocks at the bottom and forming hills of coffee.
“The government built a solid bridge in 1968 and announced that El Imposible was now ‘possible.’ I don’t know about that. It’s getting dark.”
By then no one wanted to be out on the roads at night. Leonel opened a trunk in the back and retrieved a .357 Magnum and its clip. He leaned into the jeep, slid the clip into the weapon, and laid it beside a 9mm Smith and Wesson. Night fell to the volcanic peaks, and spilled into the valleys like ink.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” I whispered. “Even in the desert, even in Deià.”
I was closer here to the equator than I had ever been, on a night gauzed with starlight.
“Leonel? Can we just stay here for a little while? I’ve just never seen . . .”
“I know, but the answer is no. Maybe I can show you the stars another time, in a place just as dark but safer than this. Let’s go.”
We drove slowly and without headlights as the moon rose so as not, he said, to draw attention. We were going to Santa Ana, or near there, to stay the night, in the town where Leonel was born and where Claribel Alegría had spent her childhood. What I knew about Santa Ana, I knew from her poems, a city whose poor children grew carnations in the crater of Ilamatepec, carrying bright sheaves of them down the mountain during harvest. This procession, seen from a distance, resembled lava flowing into the mountain’s folds. I knew things like this, and that a man called Don Raimundo had magical powers to turn the electric lights throughout the town on and off, and that faces in the photo albums smelled of camphor. The Santa Ana of her poems was a city of neglected gardens, a closed-down pharmacy, abandoned houses, and dead birds.
* * *
—
“You wanted to know where I live. This is one place.”
We had pulled in front of a wall. He turned the engine off and checked the side mirrors and the rearview.
It wasn’t late, but it was dark, not as dark as the road from El Imposible, because here a few windows glowed among the palms. This was not an elegant colonia, nor quite a barrio. There were no armed guards near the gates on the one hand, and no champas hanging on to the ravines on the other—neither rich nor poor. I hadn’t seen many such neighborhoods.
“Don’t move. I’ll be right back.”
He left the weapons in the vehicle with me and disappeared down a narrow walkway. I picked up the smaller of the two guns, just to see how it felt in the hand, but when I saw him returning I quickly put it back. He opened the door and told me to gather my things and follow him, pushing the guns into his waistband. We went down a walk lined with banana palms. He unlocked the front door with a key he took as if by sleight of hand from a trellis of bougainvillea. Before holding the door open, he turned and said, “Be careful. And don’t touch anything.”
“What are these?”
There were objects wrapped in newsprint secured with tape standing upright on the floor in rows.
“Especially don’t touch these. Come this way and step carefully.”
He led me into the kitchen and began opening and closing cupboards.
“I’m trying to find some coffee for you for the morning. I’m sure we have some. Here, here it is, and here is the pot, and what else? Drink the water from this bottle but not from that spigot. We’ll go out for breakfast.”
He opened the refrigerator door to reveal empty, lit shelves.
“Yes, well, that makes sense,” he said.
“What does?”
“Come this way.”
He held back a curtain, clicked on another lamp beside a bed neatly made up with plumped pillows. There was a stack of extra blankets folded at the foot, and a poster of Che Guevara mounted over the headboard. Leonel pulled the bedcover back on one side, revealing beneath it an AK-47, which he placed high on top of the armoire, out of reach.
“Someone else also lives here,” he said.
It would not have been the moment to ask him about this.
When I asked him about the Che Guevara poster, he said: “Yes, well, I have posters of Mussolini too, if the need arises. You can sleep here.” He patted the bed. “I’ll be back in the morning to pick you up. The bathroom is down that hall.”
“Where are you going?”
“I have to meet with some people. I’ll probably sleep at my brother’s house.”
He saw that I was looking at the top of the armoire.
“You won’t need that,” he said, adding, “don’t put too many lights on, just try to sleep. This isn’t my first choice for you, but we had to get off the road. Don’t poke around, Papu.”
“Why the telescope?”
A telescope was mounted on a tripod in front of a window.
“Yes, well, with that I can watch a fly crawling on the neighbor’s roof tiles.”
As soon as it was light I climbed from the bed. I went to the kitchen and filled the kettle. Someone had been taking good care of this place, I thought: Dishes and bowls had been piled up and nested by size on the open shelves, and there were watered plants and a basket of unripe mangoes. Books were everywhere, stacked and shelved, mostly in Spanish: Cien años de soledad, the poetry of Rubén Darío, and A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies. The magazines were organized by volume and number, and covered Leonel’s subjects: weaponry, motorcycles, and Formula One racing cars. Books on warfare and military strategy were also here: his Sun Tzu, his Carl von Clausewitz, and the diary of Ho Chi Minh. As expected, I also found a Machiavelli, held together with a rubber band. Leonel had written in the frontispiece: There is no avoiding war; it can only be postponed to the advantage of others.
The kettle startled me with a high whistle. I took the Clausewitz to the kitchen, where I poured the boiling water over coffee grounds and sat down to leaf through this book that Leonel had recommended back in San Diego.
This passage was underlined: “Many intelligence reports in war are contradictory; even more are false, and most are uncertain.” Also this: “All action takes place, so to speak, in a kind of twilight, which, like a fog or moonlight, often tends to make things seem grotesque and larger than they really are.” I would ask if I could borrow this from him.
For an hour or so, I wandered barefoot on the cold clay tiles, carrying the coffee from one place to another. The armoire held women’s clothes and several pairs of shoes. There was a perfume bottle and one earring on the chest of drawers. The wooden soap dish in the bathroom smelled of jasmine. On a shelf of photographs beneath the bookcase I found framed pictures of Leonel with his daughters, of his daughters alone, of Leonel with a group of campesinos standing in front of a pickup truck, and the portrait of a beautiful young woman, not the one who had joined us the night of the accident, I didn’t think, but a different one, and last, a black-and-white photograph that seemed fairly recent but also oddly historic: a slightly younger Leonel sitting beside an Asian man with a receding hairline. There were flags behind them and an electric fan off to the side. Leonel and this man were shaking hands while looking at the camera rather than at each other. I resolved to ask him about this man rather than about the woman, and then I heard footsteps.
“I see you didn’t follow orders!” he boomed in his joking voice.
I quickly replaced the photograph and spun around.
“I was just—”
“You were poking around, Papu. But it’s okay. Is there more coffee?”
“I can make more.”
As I turned to the sink, he pulled out one of two chairs.
“Where is your—roommate?” I asked, as lightly as I could. I was still turned away from him.
“Papu, you know not t
o ask about people,” but then he added: “She’s been away.”
He tipped three heaping spoons of sugar into his cup.
“We have something important to do today.”
“Should I change?” I asked, hoping he’d say yes. I had, after all, slept in clothes that had already been to the sea and to El Imposible, and I felt stale in them, and disheveled.
“No, not yet. Wait until we get where we are going.”
He took a sip and said something that didn’t seem all that significant at the time, something about how the Salvadoran military had passed on the baton of power more or less peacefully for fifty years, that there hadn’t been the bloody coups d’état that occurred in other countries, that the system here was set up in such a way that the military always closed ranks and protected its own. He also said that even if there were reformists among the officers, and even if they were inclined to support social change, unless there was an apertura in their ranks—
I must have looked at him strangely.
“An opening, like you have in a camera. Or you could think of it as a space, or a crack. Something that, how shall I say it, weakens the structure.”
He turned to unlock a trunk on the floor. When he opened it slightly and closed it again, there was a whiff of petroleum in the air.
“What’s that? I smell gas.”
“That’s Cosmoline. It’s an anticorrosive for storing metal.” Then he added, for no apparent reason: “Everything’s fine.”
Before we left the house, which he would now begin calling his, he took the AK-47 from atop the armoire and set it down again on the bed beneath the coverlet, smoothing it briskly and plumping the pillows. He then washed the coffee pot, dried the cups, and pushed the chairs back beneath the table, leaving everything just as it was.
“What are these?”
I was following him between the rows of objects wrapped in newspapers, on our way to the door.
“Be careful not to knock anything over.”
Some of the objects were larger, leaning against the wall. By their shape, I guessed they were rifles.
“Sports trophies,” he said, “some of them anyway.”
“What sorts of sports trophies?”
“Don’t ask so many questions.”
“I thought I was supposed to pay attention to things.”
“Just not my things, okay? Okay. Some are trophies for marksmanship. Others are weapons.”
As we drove toward San Salvador, he expressed his disdain for the new American ambassador, predicted that war was coming, and condemned the oligarchs for their inhumanity. He also marveled that there were still ocelots roaming wild in El Imposible. Then, out of nowhere, he surprised me by mentioning the leadership of the guerrilla groups.
“Some are well meaning but lack knowledge of military strategy,” he said quietly. “There are others I respect. A few might turn out no better than Pol Pot. Still, it is one thing to be—”
“I thought you said there were no guerrillas to speak of.”
“I didn’t say that. I said the Salvadoran military was exaggerating their number and strength to get more money from the U.S. government.”
He downshifted behind a bright blue bus with a load tied to its roof that included a cage of hens. Two men stood on the narrow bumper in the back and held on as the bus swayed in its black smoke. Leonel looked over at me, seeming to have decided that it was safer not to pass.
“We have no Sierra Madre here,” he said, in the voice of a father about to tell a story to a child. “We have no jungle. There is no place to hide. If the people take up arms, those arms must come from somewhere, and the ammunition from somewhere, and the fighters must be fed, and have continual access to potable water. Equipment and supplies must be moved from place to place without interruption and without detection. Fighters who are killed must be replaced. They must also be transported back to their homes or buried. Wounded fighters must receive medical attention. Doctors and nurses are needed, as well as surgical and medical supplies, and all of this must also be transported, again, continually, again without detection. Do you see how challenging this is, Papu?”
He kept taking his eyes from the road to see if I was paying attention.
“Revolutions do not go according to plan,” he went on. “There must be thinkers among the commanders who understand the tactics of the battlefield, who can think strategically, and whose plans can be executed successfully so that they may command loyalty and respect. There must develop a strong bond among the fighters so that they will risk their lives for one another, not once but every day. And these fighters, who will nevertheless be hungry and thirsty, wounded and in pain, must respect the lives of the people, must not steal from them or harm them. And when the enemy is captured, he must also be respected and not harmed. Those captured must be housed and fed and clothed and treated for their wounds. None of this is easy,” he said. “Armed uprising is one way to attempt to lessen repression and begin building a just society, Papu, but it is not the only way, and it is, without question, the most difficult, and when it is over, and let’s say you have triumphed, you must guard with great vigilance against becoming an oppressor yourself. This is the greatest danger. If you are defeated,” he went on, “that’s another story. Waging a guerrilla war takes something more than waving red flags with hammers and sickles at the bull.”
He wasn’t exactly talking to himself, but he certainly seemed to have said all of this before, and possibly many times, but to whom?
“As Sun Tzu teaches us, ‘the supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.’”
“Leonel, are you a Marxist?” I wanted to know this because it seemed to matter so much here.
“Marx was a great social philosopher.”
“But are you a Marxist?”
“I have told you, I’m not a religious man.”
The bus had pulled to the shoulder to disgorge passengers. The women bent down to hoist the water cántaros back onto their heads, and the men swung large sacks over their backs.
Perhaps to dissociate myself from those he considered ideologues, I might have said something critical about the Soviet Union at that moment. It hadn’t yet been a decade since the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, and that is the lens through which I viewed the Soviets: from the kitchen table where Anna sat, listening to the radio with a handkerchief over her eyes. The Soviets had crushed the Prague Spring. They had sent their writers to the gulag.
“Remember that the USSR lost twenty million people during the Second World War. Twenty million. Leningrad was under siege for nearly nine hundred days. They were pulling wallpaper from the walls to eat the wheat paste. And, remember, they won that war in Europe for you. Without the Soviets, Hitler would have been victorious. What? You look surprised.”
“No, not surprised. Well, maybe a little.”
“Don’t get caught up in the rhetoric. If the Salvadoran campesinos fight, and I think they will, they must win. If they do not win, they will suffer for another two hundred years. But to win, they must defeat the Salvadoran military, and if, in this engagement, they are perceived as so-called Communists, the Salvadoran military will have the backing of the largest military force in the world. So. If you are going to wave a red flag around, you had better know where is the bull.”
We were someplace I had never been. It was near the city, or perhaps it was a colonia within it, but the houses were set farther back from the street, behind gates and walls posted with guards, and through the gates, gardens and fountains flickered as we passed. He drove slowly, perhaps searching for a place he had never been. Finally, he seemed to reach his destination. He rolled down his window to show identification to a guard, then spoke to a second guard, and the gates slid open.
“What is this? Where are we?”
Water swirled from the mouth of a marble fish leaping into the air,
about to be netted. The water veiled the air and rained into a fountain. More guards opened the doors for us. Leonel had put his weapons away somewhere but he asked these guards if I could bring my handbag and rucksack with me. They opened both, but without looking carefully inside nodded yes, I could bring them.
Leonel whispered, “Keep your purse with you at all times no matter what.”
I had no idea what this meant, but I kept it.
“Where are we?” I asked again.
“This is the house of a high-ranking government official, very high. We have been invited to have lunch. Remember what I told you about your mistaken identity? I think that has something to do with this. Just listen, pay attention, and be calm, and oh yes, when you get inside, ask the wife if you might freshen up and change your clothes.”
A maid admitted us, but the lady of the house arrived quickly, dressed in a cream bouclé suit, high-heeled pumps, and tasteful gold jewelry. She smiled, held out her hand, but did take notice of my clothes. Her husband was greeting Leonel.
“Forgive me. May I freshen up and change? We’ve had a long trip and I wasn’t quite expecting—”
“Of course, the maid will show you. Help yourself to anything you need.” She never stopped smiling.
That is how I found myself in the spacious bathroom, with its teak bench, Egyptian towels, a basket of milled soaps, and the shower with its many jets that sprayed water from all directions. Standing in the spray, soaping and rinsing, I realized what a comfort it was to have hot running water, and such was the pleasure that I lost track of time, or thought I had. When I rejoined the group, even Leonel looked surprised.
What You Have Heard Is True Page 18
