What You Have Heard Is True

by Carolyn Forche

  Fine, I thought. Let him see me in another light. Margarita’s dress fit perfectly, as did her shoes. For the first time since arriving in El Salvador, I had put on makeup and had dabbed a bit of cologne on my wrist, the scent of the lady of the house.

  Both men stood up, and Leonel introduced us with the man’s official title. I shook his hand, keeping my purse in the crook of my other arm.

  Lunch was served around a long table covered in linen and set with crystal stemware, china, and silver. The centerpiece was a sprig of white blossoms that smelled of oranges. Lunch was chicken. Two young maids served, rushing to and from the table. Leonel seemed relaxed and happy, and the conversation was light. Only an hour ago, he had been holding forth about guerrilla warfare. I tried to catch his eye but couldn’t. When the small, light clouds of caramel flan served for dessert had been eaten, the gentleman of the house rose from his chair and set his napkin on the seat cushion. Leonel also stood, so I reached for my purse, which I had tucked under my chair.

  “Shall we?”

  We were led into a living room, where a large Persian rug, the pale blue of the volcanoes in the distance, covered the tile floor. Leonel was offered the large, comfortable chair and I was asked to sit beside the high-ranking official on a long white sofa, from where I could see the foyer, walled with mirrors and lit by a chandelier. Two guards in military uniform and white gloves stood on either side of the entrance door, their reflections multiplied in the mirrors.

  When, during the past few weeks, Leonel had taken me to meet other high-ranking members of the government, we usually talked in cramped army offices, where a colonel presided in his dark olive uniform with epaulets, his hands folded upon a dossier he’d been reading, his brow glowing in the close air. In these conversations, I listened to a briefing about the worsening situation, heard praise heaped upon my country and its historically close relationship with the officer corps, along with muted expressions of disappointment at the recent deterioration of that relation. These usually included the conditions under which American aid might again be restored and, one hoped, increased so as to “meet current needs.” I would try to be attentive, but usually said very little, and at the end, the officer in question often expressed confidence that we “understood each other.”

  This was something different. This high-ranking official was an elegant civilian in a well-cut suit and silk tie, gold watch, and cuff links, whose wife, now in another room, was fashionably thin, well coiffed, and gracious. The house was at once airy and opulent. Through a wall of sparkling window glass, the volcanoes rested on the distant horizon.

  One of the maids brought a tray of cups and a silver pot with its handle wrapped in a linen cloth. Leonel, who seemed almost at ease for a change, asked after the man’s extended family, who seemed also to be involved in the cultivation of coffee, if I understood him correctly, and Leonel apparently knew several family members. All was well with all of them. Soon, however, the man changed the subject to matters that concerned the current government: a pending international bank loan and the recent strain in relations with the United States.

  “Tell me, Leonel, what is it that they want?” the man asked. This question seemed not to be rhetorical. “What can we do to improve the situation?”

  Now he was looking directly at me, but Leonel said, “I can help you with that.” And he began to talk about Richardson, and rather than wave the subject away as several of the military officers had done, this man listened intently. Leonel didn’t start at the beginning to tell the story, as he had in the past, so he must have known that the man was well aware of the details. Rather, he began with the futile efforts to solve Richardson’s disappearance, emphasizing how hard the previous ambassador and his political officer had worked, suggesting that Washington remained seriously concerned about the case, and perhaps this accounted for the cooling of relations, and it might be why Washington was sending strange signals to the Salvadoran government, such as nominating a young woman to be ambassador and instituting a policy demanding respect for human rights, whatever that might mean.

  The man leaned forward, resting his arms on his thighs, and clasped his hands together in the empty space between them.

  “This shouldn’t be so difficult,” he said. “We should be able to take care of this.”

  “The problem is Colonel Chacón,” Leonel pressed, as if he were diagnosing a minor repair, “because it seems that Richardson might not have been the petty thief he was pretending to be, and if this is so, and I’m not saying that it is, there is only one course of action. You have to deal with Chacón. You have to send a signal to the Americans that you are serious.”

  The man leaned back and turned toward me.

  “Is this the case? Do you agree?”

  I don’t know what I was thinking in that moment, for it was only that, a moment. The name Chacón had come to mean butcher, with images of thawed human limbs in the mouths of dogs. I nodded, rather than saying yes. I nodded yes and transferred my purse to my lap to signal that the conversation had come to an end.

  “You are very young to be doing what you are doing,” he said, and smiled.

  Somehow, I knew not to smile back.

  “Please wait here, I have something I would like to give to you—a gift, as a token of our friendship.”

  As he disappeared down the hall, Leonel walked over to the wall of glass, as if he wanted to take in the view. The official’s wife slid in beside him, laughing and touching his arm while pointing to something in the distance. When he turned to rejoin me with his back to her, he was no longer smiling and his eyes were grave.

  The man returned, holding a small wooden plaque with El Salvador’s coat of arms: a triangle and, within it, five volcanoes, a sun falling upon them, a rainbow, and a cobalt sea, the whole of it surrounded by flags raised on warrior spears and hung with feathers, encircled by a laurel wreath.

  He said something about my purse, almost jokingly, that I “certainly kept it close.”

  We all shook hands. The wife returned to walk me through the mirrors to the front entrance. Our Hiace had been pulled into the circular drive for us, and the guards were opening the doors. Our host stood with his hands behind his back and his feet slightly apart, as a uniformed officer would stand, rather than a man in a finely tailored suit.

  Leonel started the engine and when his back was to the house, he turned to me and put his finger to his lips. We drove in silence for several kilometers. Leonel checked the rearview mirror frequently. He turned the volume high for the pop song whose lyrics bounced in the air on a refrain having to do with taking chances. Take a chance on me, the group sang over and over. We stopped at a machinist’s shop with its security gate open to the street, and he got out to talk to a man bending over an engine, and then we went to a small house I hadn’t seen before, and he emerged with a satchel. We drove again.

  When Leonel was lost in thought, he often pinched his mustache between thumb and forefinger, or else he dug under his nails with a tiny screwdriver used for repairing eyeglasses. If we were alone in a room and he was truly deep in thought, he would take his weapons apart and put them back together. But it was unlike him not to talk for such a long stretch of time.

  “Leonel, what is it?”

  “We just did something.”

  “What? What did we do?”

  “You were there. Now, either he believed us or he didn’t. Or he was pretending to believe us. We are either going to see some results or we’ll be lucky to be alive at this time tomorrow. You can’t stay at Margarita’s tonight, and I can’t go where I was going. We have to do something else.”

  “What? What else?”

  “We have to stay someplace where we’ll be safe, at least for a little while. By the way, you did very well back there. I couldn’t have asked for better.”

  “Did what well?”

  He looked at me. “Come on, y
ou know what you did. That took guts. Now let’s get out of here.”

  We reached the edge of the city, or what felt to be the edge, and he pulled in beneath a sign that read EL EMPERADOR. Behind the building, there was a row of garages with some of their doors wide open. We pulled into one of them and the door closed behind us.

  “We’re staying here tonight,” he said. “Welcome to El Emperador, flophouse of the colonels. There is another one across the street just like it, El Conquistador, but I prefer this one.”

  He opened the door as if he were at home, to a clean room with a large bed and two pillows propped against the headboard. There was a night table, but little else. A window near the ceiling on one side framed a walled garden of palm fronds darkening in the twilight. Leonel picked up the phone on the night table and asked for two more pillows, a blanket, and two Cokes with ice.

  “Do you want anything else?” he asked, cupping the phone’s receiver.

  As I wasn’t sure what sort of things I could want, I said no.

  After a few minutes, there was a knock, and Leonel opened a small cupboard door in the wall. Behind the door, a young woman’s arm passed pillows through to him, along with a folded blanket. After another knock, two opened Coke bottles and two glasses of ice swiveled into view. Leonel took them, left a stack of bills in their place, and closed the door. As soon as he did this, music filled the room. I remember the song playing over and over that night: “Feelings” by Morris Albert, set to the tune of “Pour toi,” an older French melody by Louis Gasté. This version had Spanish lyrics.

  Díme. Solamente díme. Tell me. Just tell me. Over and over.

  “Now you understand why we have extra pillows—so you can put one over your head to drown this out.”

  “Can’t we just ask for it to be turned off?”

  “No, my dear, we cannot, because we aren’t actually supposed to sleep here. This is not a hotel for sleeping, and for that very reason, it suits our purposes perfectly.”

  Leonel sat on the edge of the bed and loaded the .357 Magnum, and then spilled the rounds of the 9mm onto the night table.

  “I call this place the Chicken House,” he said, reloading those same rounds. “If you’ve ever been in the sort of building where hens roost.”

  “I have, yes, when I was young my mother would take us to visit a woman we called the egg lady. They’re called coops in English, not houses.”

  “Well, then you know that if someone makes a loud noise in a chicken house, there’s quite a racket, with feathers flying and hens scattering in every direction. And, for example, if someone was to fire a weapon in a place like this, every colonel and lieutenant colonel in here would be running to the parking lot, pulling up their boxer shorts, with their mistresses right behind them.”

  He poured Coke into the glasses.

  “This place has a certain, shall we say, specialized clientele. No one knows who might be sleeping in the next room, if we can use the word ‘sleeping’ loosely. Therefore, no one is going to fire a weapon in this place and be responsible for having a military officer caught with his pants down, so to speak. It’s all very discreet. Once the garage doors are closed, the cars are hidden from view. Not even the girl who took our money knows who we are. We’re safe. I think. However.”

  “However, what?”

  “If something should happen I want you to put your back against that wall over there and keep as flat against the wall as you possibly can. Don’t make a sound. I’ll take care of the rest. Or you could slide under the bed if there’s room.”

  I reached over the side of the bed and felt the distance between the frame and the floor.

  “There isn’t.”

  “I didn’t think so.”

  He handed me one of the Cokes and touched it to his own. “Salud. Remember your Machiavelli, Papu. Never was anything great achieved without danger.”

  We lay side by side on the stiff bed in the dark.

  “Leonel? Before you put the pillow over your head . . .”

  “What?”

  A moon had slipped among the palms in the window.

  “What happens when they realize that the Americans don’t actually care about this?”

  “Well, do you think they don’t?”

  “If they did, I’m sure I wouldn’t be the one making this clear to the Salvadorans.”

  “You’re right. That’s an excellent observation. But don’t worry. No one is going to admit having listened to a poet. That’s your protection. Now try to get some sleep.”

  He put both pillows behind his head, closed his eyes, and folded his hands over his stomach. The moonlight slid onto the grip of the 9mm and silvered the ice in the empty Coke glass. I couldn’t find a way to position the pillows so as to block the music. The “Díme” version of “Feelings” played again, followed by “Tonight’s the Night” by Rod Stewart in English. I must have fallen asleep because the next thing I knew, Leonel was bolt upright with a gun cupped in both hands, pointed at the ceiling.

  “What is it?” I whispered.

  He touched two fingers to his mouth twice.

  The music had stopped. I thought it would go on all night, but there was no music now. A palm leaf ticked against the window in the wind. Leonel motioned for me to go to the wall on the side that would position me behind the door to the garage. I pressed my back against the wall as if it might be possible to disappear into the cinder blocks. There seemed to be a bird trapped in my throat. A hummingbird. There was nothing I would not have done to have been somewhere else in that moment. Leonel turned his head so that one ear was trained on the garage. I thought of my mother and father, at home in Michigan in their bed. They didn’t know where I was. No one did.

  Leonel turned, planted his feet on the tiles, and rose without a sound, all the while holding the muzzle toward the ceiling. He met my eyes and once again raised his finger to his lips. He turned the knob and pushed the door to the garage open, keeping himself against the wall on the other side. I flattened myself to the wall behind the door, but I could see Leonel through the hinges. He reached into the garage with his left arm and flicked the light.

  “It’s nothing, Papu. You can go back to bed.”

  “What happened?”

  “I thought I heard something. Never mind.”

  We lay side by side again, door closed, light off. The wind slapped the palm broadly against the glass.

  “It might have been wind. Whatever it was, it woke me up. You were very calm, by the way. That surprises me. Other times you have seemed easily rattled.”

  “Yes, well, the worse things get, the calmer I am. I must have thought they were pretty bad.”

  “Actually, they might well have been. We’re lucky.”

  “Well, try not to scare me, okay?” We were whispering for some reason.

  “Let’s be clear. I was not trying to scare you.”

  “Well, you did. Scare me.”

  “I’m supposed to say I’m sorry at this moment but I’m not going to say it. You know what the good Christian base communities call the ‘preferential option for the poor’?” His hands were again folded on his stomach and he was drifting off. As if reading my thoughts, he added that if we are to share the fate of the poor, we must be willing to share their justifiable fear of dying.

  * * *

  —

  In the morning, we went to a shuttered ice cream parlor for coffee, and I said I wanted to call Margarita, so Leonel asked the proprietor if I could use the phone.

  Margarita would not yet have left with the girls for school. It rang several times.

  “¡Hola!”

  “¿Diga?”

  “Habla Carolina—”

  “Un momento.”

  After a while, I heard footsteps, and then the sound of a receiver’s being fumbled or dropped and retrieved.

 
“¿De parte de quién?”

  “Margarita, it’s me.”

  “Where are you? Do you want me to come and get you?”

  “No, no. I’m fine. I just called to say . . .”

  “Carolyn?”

  “I’m here. I just—”

  “Un momento, Carolina.”

  She had muffled the mouthpiece and was talking to someone in the background, and then I heard the receiver come back to her. I was trying not to cry, but I wasn’t sure why, and I didn’t want Leonel to see this, but Margarita heard it.

  “Carolyn, what is wrong? Can you talk?”

  “No. I mean, not right at this moment.”

  “Are you coming?”

  I didn’t know if I should answer this over the phone. I had begun to wonder what I should say and not say, to whom and when.

  “Margarita—”

  “It is all right, Carolyn. I understand. You can’t talk. See you soon. Ciao!”

  The line went dead. I blotted my face with my sleeve and went back to the table. In the Hiace, I saw myself in the side mirror and knew that he would have noticed but had not remarked on my swollen eyes.

  “Let’s go to the coffee finca,” he said. “I need to gather my thoughts.”

  * * *

  The harvest was coming to an end, so everyone was off in the coffee. The bicycle-powered water drum idled in the shade, with the metal backpacks arranged in a row beside it. There was a whining sound in the metal swing-set frame that held the drum as the wind passed through it.

  “I have some things to take care of here, so why don’t you write for a while,” he said almost gently, “write some poetry.”

  Write some poetry, I whispered to myself when he had left. Just like that, I thought, pick up the pen and open the notebook to a blank page.

  Draw, Antonio, draw, said Michelangelo to one of his apprentices. Draw and do not waste time. In my mind, I changed this to: Write. Write, and do not waste time. Leonel would have liked this. In the back of this particular notebook I had copied something from Paul Valéry: Provided the pen touches the paper and is full of ink, and I am bored and abstracted . . . I create!