What You Have Heard Is True

by Carolyn Forche

  But at this moment the pen touched paper and bled as I was neither bored nor abstracted. A poet had once cautioned me not to live a life that was more vibrant and intense than my inner life, that inner and outer must at least be kept in balance, but if one was to gather strength over the other, let it be the life within. Beneath that, I had copied this from the French Resistance poet René Char: the poem rising from its well of mud and stars, will bear witness, almost silently, that it contained nothing which did not truly exist elsewhere, in this rebellious and solitary world of contradictions.

  Later I would find something written in pencil in my notebook:

  walking in a field in the campo: the light, the day, sky, wind, a man drinking from a dried and hollowed gourd, another leaning on a hoe, a woman with an aproned skirt over her trousers, the light, the rattle of sorghum and its flower, a spray of seeds resembling barley, and then we come upon something that begins with flies, the soft drone of a squadron of flies, as if the field were humming to itself.

  In the same notebook, I found this, also written in pencil:

  People from the countryside are coming into the cities some live between road and the fence with no place to relieve themselves houses made from shipping crates stamped This Side Up stamped Maytag Harvest Gold roofs weighted with rubber tires walls lighted by coals set on fire in lard cans punched with holes the light dances on walls and coals give off sparks like the salt of stars in the fields cane smoke blackens the air coffee ripens on the high slopes red coffee cherries in white mist it is the time of bloody stool in the ditch of maggots in wounds of flies in the clinic bodies found by the roadside are covered with lime no one wants to eat the fish from Lake Ilopango anymore the fish have been eating the dead.

  And that is where it ends, words strung together into notes that are not a poem. I don’t remember when I began writing this way in pencil, or why, other than pencil lead is faint on the paper, so the words evanesce, waiting to be erased—however, rather than using the eraser, I usually cross out unwanted words and phrases. Whole sentences crossed out. In the notebooks from El Salvador, entire pages are struck through or left blank, not only at the end of the book but within, as if I couldn’t continue without turning to a new page. I wrote down in pencil what I saw, what I heard, and was careful not to use people’s real names. There are no addresses or telephone numbers, and my birth name is nowhere to be found inside, so any lost notebooks remain lost. The others are here with me. I have heard it said that to write is to dream on paper. In these notebooks from the time of El Salvador there are no dreams.

  WRITTEN IN PENCIL:

  Sometimes in the countryside he said you will come upon a tree that has been decorated with strips of paper rags and garbage this is because the tree failed to bear fruit in its good year the people tie things to the tree to make it feel ashamed to embarrass it in front of other trees so that the next year fruit will come one day in the campo in an area where there had been some killings there was a tree with human skin and hair hanging from its branches it looked like rags and garbage the soldiers who had done this were from the campo they knew what it meant to hang things on a tree.

  On Sunday, Leonel came for me early, saying that there was something important, and yes, everything was important, but this was more so, and I should wear something “appropriate,” but appropriate for what? Church. The man he was taking me to see was the most important person in the country, and more than that: Without this man, standing where he stands, saying what he does, without him there would be no voice for the people whatsoever. There is no one, no one more courageous than this man, he assured me, and you will not ever again in your life encounter anyone like him.

  “Are you coming too?”

  “No. I never enter churches.”

  “Why not?” He was already climbing into the Hiace.

  “I told you, I’m not a religious man.”

  The streets surrounding the cathedral were thronged, as were the steps leading to its doors. The Mass was to be celebrated today by the archbishop, Monseñor Oscar Romero.

  “It will be crowded inside. Try to get close to him. I’ll be here when you come out. Stand on the steps and I will find you. Ciao.”

  This is how I first saw Monseñor Oscar Romero: from a distance, over the heads of the congregation in an unfinished cathedral, in his white vestments before a spray of microphones, giving a homily ending with a litany of the names of those disappeared or found dead that week, some of whom were in coffins lined up at the altar, with windows cut into the lids to reveal their faces, except the mutilated. In shafts of sunlit dust sent from the louvers of the two bell towers we stood, shoulder to shoulder: women in scarves or mantillas, men holding their straw hats, children sitting along the altar rail as the homily was broadcast to thousands of radios throughout the country, to machine shops, bodegas, to pickup trucks, and the battery-operated radios in the villages. When his homily giving guidance and counsel came to an end, Monseñor walked toward the coffins with an aspergillum, sprinkling holy water on the dead, and then he walked through the congregation, and we parted to make a path for him, the water sprinkling down on our bowed heads, as it had on the coffins. Later I would understand that here the dead and the living were together, and those who stood alive before him, he was blessing in advance.

  We need to rest,” Leonel said, when he found me at the bottom of the cathedral steps. “We’re going to Guatemala for a few days. There’s someone I want you to meet, and there are certain things that it might be time to show you.”

  “You don’t take rests.”

  “Relatively speaking, then. You’ll see. I think you will be pleasantly surprised.”

  He assured me that he had let Margarita know where I was going.

  The Hiace was packed inside almost to the roof, to which I had contributed only a rucksack and a small duffel bag. I didn’t ask What is all this? I knew not to ask and, moreover, no longer wanted to know such things. It was a beautiful day. That was good enough. Only one strange thing happened. We were driving along, listening to music, and Leonel suddenly braked, backed up, and turned around to drive in the direction we had come, saying he’d seen a green tree branch lying in the road, and branches with green leaves were a sign of something, often a warning sign. When I asked what the sign meant there was the usual silence, and then he finally said: “There is some kind of roadblock again, maybe military. Or something else.”

  “How do you know this?” I asked, to which, of course, he said nothing.

  He pushed in another cassette, this time of Silvio Rodríguez playing the song “¿A Dónde Van?”—a tender song about the transience of all things that asks where everything and everyone is going.

  “We’re going to a beautiful place where you can forget about things for a while. Besides, it’s a good time for us to be out of El Salvador.”

  The next song was “Madre,” a love song for mothers, or at least that’s what I had thought as I’d listened, before Spanish became clearer to me. Taking my bare feet from the glove box I sat up to press REWIND. The song ended with Madre, en tu día,/Tus muchachos barren minas de Haiphong, and then he repeated the line, as he repeated all the others.

  “Haiphong,” I shouted above the wind. “It’s about the mining of the waters of Haiphong.”

  “So you know about that?” Leonel called back, sounding impressed. “The song is not about Mother’s Day. What do you know about Haiphong?”

  We were close to the border now, in Ahuachapán, with here and there a champa with a wisp of cook smoke, but I was elsewhere, one moment standing on the sidewalk in Michigan, for the first time watching rather than marching, wearing the army jacket that my former husband had given me, with the name FORCHE sewn above the breast pocket. It was May but still cold, and one moment the crowd was chanting to stop the mining of the waters of Haiphong, and the next I felt a sharp blow to my head, and then I was in a white tent set up by medi
cal students, and there was blood spatter on the army jacket. When I put my hands to my face, they came away covered with sticky blood.

  Leonel glanced sideways from the road to me. He asked what was wrong and I shook my head Nothing.

  Could I tell him now that I wasn’t quite the person I seemed to be? I was alone in my life for a reason, and it was for this same reason that I preferred long-distance relationships or none at all. It was perhaps the reason why I had agreed to accept his invitation to come here, and to see another Vietnam “from the beginning,” although I no longer believed that what he was showing me was, as he had suggested, “the beginning of another Vietnam.”

  * * *

  —

  It is 1969, summer. I’m nineteen years old and have taken a weekend away from my summer job as a nursing assistant in a convalescent home to visit one of my friends at the college I attended, an hour north of where I grew up. My friend lived in a group house in the Grove Street neighborhood, where antiwar students lived, along with deserters, draft dodgers, and young, would-be revolutionaries. Pot laced the air. Everything was new to me as I had lived only at home before that, and for one year in a college dormitory far across campus, where some of the football players and the students bound for fraternities and sororities were housed.

  Now I was in the midst of people near my age and even somewhat older, living on their own together in large stucco and wood-framed houses and bungalows. My friend Linda had a lover who was visiting her from Harvard then, so she didn’t have much time for me. I understood this. She also knew that I was still a virgin, and therefore a little young to be with her in her present surroundings. With twelve years of Catholic-school indoctrination behind me, I was on the verge of adulthood. Linda felt protective, I think, but she also wanted to find something for me to do while I was there, someone to “be with,” and she knew just the person.

  One afternoon, I’m holding a box of kitchen matches. One by one they don’t strike. I’m trying to light a gas burner on the stove in Linda’s communal kitchen. The gas is hissing out below a black cast-iron grate. Behind me, a man is walking into the kitchen to be introduced to me.

  The box of kitchen matches explodes in my left hand, the matches catching all at once in a burst of fire over the stove. The man entering grabs a kitchen towel and tosses it over this fire, then leaps to turn the gas knob off. He spins me around and thrusts my palm under cold running water in the sink, then makes me hold ice cubes wrapped in a napkin. His long blond hair falls to the shoulders of his army shirt. It is olive colored but faded, and over the breast pocket is the name FORCHE. Later I would ask him why there is no accent over the e on his pocket.

  “The army doesn’t do that,” he’d said. “The army doesn’t do a lot of things.”

  I was still in high school when this man, whom I would soon marry, crossed the South China Sea to Cú Chi, and made his way along the trails of the Filhol rubber plantation and the Ho Bo Woods; when he killed his first man, whose body was thrown into a small trailer hooked to the back of a jeep and taken to base camp, where people put lit cigarettes in the dead man’s hand and placed a beer can in the huge hole in his skull and then laughed and took pictures. A man in his company cut off ears and kept an ear garden with little crosses, and the man I would marry climbed down into tunnels with a flashlight, a bayonet, and a pistol, and was never so afraid in his life. There is more, of course, but I wanted to stop thinking.

  My own moment had nothing to do with Cú Chi or Pleiku, where he later helped build a base camp for the 4th Infantry, or with other events that were important to my fellow university students, such as the Christmas bombing of Hanoi and the carpet bombing of Cambodia. Those were important, but for me the moment came after everything else had happened and I was no longer living with him in the firebase he had constructed in our attic apartment by stringing blue Christmas lights along the walls and taping playing cards to the blades of a rotating fan to mimic the sound of a chopper muffled by clouds.

  My moment was the mining of Haiphong Harbor in May 1972, when I was neither marching toward the police phalanx nor chanting anything at all, but merely standing on the sidewalk upwind from the tear gas, a month from my college graduation, watching what might seem to be a holiday parade if viewed from a distance.

  “I can’t talk,” I said, waving my hand near my ear. “It’s too loud.”

  By the time he might ask me again about Haiphong, I will have thought of something to say.

  * * *

  We crossed at Las Chinamas on the Salvador-Guatemala border, which involved going into an office and showing identification, then waiting while several uniformed border guards considered whether to give us entry visas, or whatever the documents were that we were given, including permission for the Hiace to enter Guatemala. Leonel had obviously been through this process many times, not with these guards, but with others, who were all, he said, more or less the same. A zebra is a zebra, he would say. Zebras have stripes. A guard is a guard. You just have to know how to talk to them.

  Once across, he asked me to notice how the campesinos walking along the roads were dressed, which I thought odd, until I saw that from the border onward, there were no more campesinos. The people walking the roadside, mostly women, bearing cántaros filled with water, were Mayans dressed in many-colored huipiles and head wraps, the men in purple-and-white-striped trousers and bright woven shirts.

  “But they aren’t campesinos,” I said, “they’re Mayans.”

  “K’ichi’ Maya, but yes, and the campesinos on the Salvadoran side are Indians too, Nahuat and Pipil—Lenca in the east. Some few still wear their native dress and speak their native languages, but most do not—1932 changed many things, Papu. In the aftermath of the massacre, the people burned or buried their native clothes and adopted Western dress. They stopped speaking their native languages and began to use Spanish. And why? Because to be Nahuat or Pipil or Lenca was to be Communist, complete with Carlos Marx and orders from Moscow. It is difficult to imagine now, but 1932 drew the border between Guatemala and El Salvador as indelibly as it is drawn on most maps. We’re talking about cultural death. Forced assimilation. Now you will see something of what El Salvador once was, at least in that respect. There are other views of this history, of course, but this is mine.”

  Leonel had chosen a small, old hotel in Antigua, an hour away, with a fireplace in every room. He would be right next door, he assured me, and if I needed anything, I could pick up the old-fashioned heavy black phone and ask. Logs and kindling had been stacked, and because night had already come, the bed was turned down and the curtains were closed. Sleep, he’d said. I changed into a nightgown, splashed water on my face, and was given a start when I saw myself in the mirror, tired and drawn. I had become an older woman.

  With the lights off, the room was utterly dark. I felt for my cigarettes and lit a match, the flare illuminating the blackened, hand-hewn rafters along the ceiling. I wouldn’t sleep much, as it turned out. I would strike another match to the fireplace and sit on the floor, close to the fire, hunched over, tending the flames with the metal poker and opening the flood of thoughts released by the name of a port city in Vietnam. I had not allowed myself to think about this in a long time.

  “It would have been beautiful,” my former husband said, “that trip through the jungle in the highlands to Pleiku—were it not for people continually shooting at us, and hitting mines that threw tracks off the tanks, and getting mortared while attempting to change the track parts. It would have been beautiful. Water buffaloes standing in silver rice paddies.

  “When we arrived at Pleiku, it was different. There were Montagnards to help fill sand bags, but our base was continually fired upon,” he said. “That is where the pictures of me in the torn uniform were taken. Claymore mines were always going off on the perimeters. We carted off the dead and then the night filled with light flares and fire missions. It was always wet. I was al
ways scared. One night we had both tracks blown off the tank and I was left to call in artillery strikes, even though I had flunked out of officer candidate school, and howitzers were pounding us within thirty meters.

  “I was sent to Taipei for a week of R&R, and after a week of drinking, I had to go back to the war, excuse me, ‘the conflict.’ We were some of the first soldiers sent to Vietnam, and we were young, and we kept killing and counting. Our commanding officers loved nothing more than body counts.”

  At one point, I remembered him telling me that his armored personnel carrier had been hit and he was trapped inside, the only soldier not dead in that can of death, and after that he was assigned as door gunner on a Huey helicopter charged with picking up the wounded. He remembered a tarp blowing from the corpses of two men who no longer had faces. None of this was unusual, he said, nothing that happened to him was different from what happened to anyone else.

  * * *

  —

  I woke uncovered on the bed. The fire was out, and Leonel was knocking on the door, asking through it if I might rouse myself and meet him outside.

  After standing in the shower for a while, I dressed and went out wet headed to the Hiace where he was reading a topographical map.

  “How did you sleep?” he asked cheerily.

  “All right.”

  “Get in, then.”

  It was cold, and the sun had not yet cleared the ridge of mountains, but the east was scudded with fuchsia and cantaloupe cloud pack, and a few faint stars were still visible.