What You Have Heard Is True

by Carolyn Forche

  “Yeah, well, I studied engineering but it was boring. I don’t, you know, want to get involved with that stuff anymore. I came here to get away from all that. Truth is, I hated it.”

  “So, you won’t help us with the bridge. Do you know someone who can?”

  “No, man, I don’t. I’m sorry. Not too many engineers around here.”

  Leonel rose to his feet and thanked the man for his chai and his time. He said something about perhaps being in touch, and we left.

  “What was that about?” I asked when we were back in the Hiace.

  “Okay. It was a bit of a waste of time, but only an hour. Let’s go.”

  “Why did you think he could design a bridge?”

  “I don’t know. Someone told me this Greg was an engineer, so I just thought I’d give it a try. In the rainy season, many of our roads are impassable, and there are also many small rivers. So, say you wanted to set up a cooperative farm in a remote place, but you wouldn’t be able to get access to the land, or take supplies there, or carry out your crops, so I had this idea for a portable bridge. Something you could set up, and after the vehicles had crossed, you could take the bridge apart and carry it with you somewhere else. This Greg, he thinks he’s Che Guevara. But he won’t draw plans for a simple bridge. This is something you should learn, Papu. Lesson number four: If someone promises to do great things, ask them first for something small, like a bridge or a cow.”

  We returned to San Salvador the next day, crossing again at Las Chinamas. When we reached San Salvador, Leonel took me to the convent of the Sisters of Divine Providence, the Carmelite nuns who ran a small hospital for terminally ill cancer patients. He often joined the nuns for meals and seemed close to one older nun in particular, Madre Luz, who listened to the story, or half the story, of what I had seen since coming to the country. (Leonel left out the meeting with the high-ranking official concerning what was to be done about the “Richardson case.”) When he complained that I hadn’t been allowed to join the delegation to Aguilares, Madre Luz suggested that I accompany her sisters when they made their bimonthly visit to the village to provide, among other things, dental care.

  “I didn’t know you were taking care of teeth these days.”

  The nun kept her smile and threw her head back a little at this joke and told him that they bring along a dentist. Then she looked me in the eyes, nodded, and put her hand on my arm.

  “You could wear the habit of our order,” she said. “That might be the safest way.”

  I pictured myself in the habit of the Carmelite sisters, brown dress and veil, white headband, white robe and veil in the warm months.

  But Leonel didn’t think this was a good idea. If we were stopped while coming or going, it might be discovered that I was not a nun, that I wasn’t even Salvadoran, and if that happened, it would also bring the sisters under further suspicion. Things were already bad enough, according to Leonel. Monseñor Romero, who lived in a small room here on the hospital grounds, was the only person speaking out regularly against repression and the right hated him for it, and by extension hated the nuns. Yet no matter how endangered the archbishop was, he refused to have bodyguards, and he insisted on driving himself around the city in his own car. The nuns also refused. Their protection, they said, was God.

  “They get death threats every day,” Leonel said. “Madre Luz takes the calls.”

  As the elder nun listened to this, she reached across the table and patted my hand again. Lunch was set before us, a blessing asked, and then she said she would pray about it, and at that moment, everyone was rising to their feet and pushing back their chairs as Monseñor Romero himself came to the table, gesturing for all to sit down, apologizing for coming late, saying that there were so many meetings this morning, so many problems to address, that he had lost track of the time. He sat at the head of the table in his white cassock, smiling at a joke someone had apparently told, while a plate was hurriedly put before him, and after crossing himself, he held his fork aloft and exchanged news with Leonel and Madre Luz.

  I had heard so much about Monseñor, especially from Margarita, but had seen him only from a distance in the cathedral, and now he was here, at this kitchen table, chatting over chicken. I heard my name, then something inaudible, and Monseñor nodded his head yes, glancing at me. Then he said yes again. To what had he said yes?

  Monseñor took off his eyeglasses and rubbed them with a white handkerchief he had retrieved from his cassock, then put them back on, and as he rose from the table, all rose and crossed themselves for his blessing. As quickly as he had come to the table, he was gone, and we were back on the road.

  “What did he say, Leonel? What did you tell him?”

  “Nothing. Why?”

  “You were saying something about me. What did you say?”

  “I told him that you were a poet visiting from the U.S.”

  “That’s all?”

  “What do you mean ‘that’s all’? Maybe I said something else, I don’t remember. And what else would you have me say? Mirá, Papu, about Aguilares—the nuns must be protected at all cost. They must be above reproach. You cannot be running around in their clothes, and this means you will not be going with them. If you want to go to Aguilares, we will find another way. But I don’t advise that you go. Why would you? To meet with people who would soon after be killed maybe because they were seen talking to you?”

  “Leonel.”

  “I know what you’re going to tell me. You’re going to tell me that I’m not being fair. It’s something you Americans say when you are told the truth.”

  “And that isn’t fair, either. Where are we going?”

  “It’s not safe for us to stay in San Salvador at the moment. Not until we see what comes of that meeting we had the other day. If anything comes of it.”

  “Which meeting, Leonel? I’m losing track of all the meetings.”

  “The meeting we had the day we had to sleep in the chicken house. That meeting. A la gran puta, Papu, what meeting did you think?”

  “I’d forgotten.”

  “Yes, well, lesson number five. It is best not to forget things like that.”

  * * *

  —

  We spent the night in another house belonging to yet another friend in Santa Tecla, and the next morning drove to meet with campesinos on a cooperative farm some distance from the city, so by afternoon, we were both sweaty and covered with dust. Nevertheless, Leonel insisted that we had to go, right then, to the Estado Mayor, the headquarters of the Salvadoran military.

  “We have to meet with one of the younger colonels,” he said, “actually a lieutenant colonel, to be more precise.”

  “Why? I don’t really want to go. I have had enough of the colonels.”

  “Well, that’s up to you, of course, but I advise that you come with me. He’s expecting both of us. You don’t have to say too much. Just listen. You may learn something. Have you ever seen the headquarters of a military dictatorship? No? Well, here is your chance.”

  “Like this?” I asked, sweeping my palms over my dusty clothes.

  “Yes. Especially like this.”

  * * *

  —

  The uniformed gatekeeper studied Leonel’s identification, made a telephone call, and waved us into the compound. Leonel walked slowly, almost casually, talking about other things while in a lower voice he told me to look around, to take things in, but not to make notes until later. Don’t say too much, he said. Walk slowly. Act like you are comfortable.

  At every encounter with a soldier, we were stopped, questioned briefly, and waved past until we reached the row of folding chairs against a wall where we would wait for a quarter of an hour. What I remember is how much light shone on the waxed tile halls, on officers’ portraits, on the buffed shoes of the soldiers patrolling the halls and the rifles they carried, light pouring through the open d
oor, catching on their helmets, and sounds? I didn’t hear shouts or screaming in distant rooms as others would later report. I heard only the opening and closing of doors.

  The lieutenant colonel’s office was smaller than I expected. There was a little Salvadoran flag on the large wooden desk beside an inbox and an outbox, both full, and a brown felt blotter where the young lieutenant colonel placed his folded hands after shaking ours and gesturing for us to sit on the chairs opposite the desk. A fan, yes, there was a fan, turning back and forth near the open window, but not so much as a paper stirred. The voices of the two men blended with the hum in a blur of small talk that grew louder as the minutes passed, until they were talking about the many murders and disappearances that had been taking place in the capital and around the country.

  “People are starting to blame the army,” Leonel told the lieutenant colonel, who bristled visibly at this. “The army has to prove its professionalism. It has to clean itself up,” Leonel said.

  The lieutenant colonel responded with something I didn’t understand, but it seemed that he was defending his fellow younger officers and attempting to refute Leonel’s suggestion that they might be involved in the disappearances.

  “The reality doesn’t matter,” Leonel said. “What matters is perception. And right now, the army isn’t looking very good.”

  Given what was happening in the country, I was surprised that he would speak this way to a member of the armed forces, but I sat stone-faced beside him, hoping for the meeting to come to an end.

  “By the way,” Leonel said, “you have a shower here, don’t you, Colonel? Do you mind if I take a quick shower before we leave?”

  The lieutenant colonel looked as surprised as I felt.

  “Why not? As you wish.”

  He ordered a younger aide to show Leonel to the facilities, and then he left the room.

  “Wait here,” Leonel said. “I’ll be back shortly. Make yourself at home.”

  Some minutes passed, according to the clock on the wall, and there were sounds of distant, echoing voices, boot soles on tile, and the fan grew louder, something was wrong with it, like the sound of the fan my former husband had rigged in our attic apartment, pocketa pocketa—the sound of a chopper in fog flying over a firebase.

  The lieutenant colonel kept his desk clean, but in the ashtray there were several twisted paper clips. I noticed that one of the drawers in the file cabinet wasn’t quite closed, and it crossed my mind to go leafing through the manila folders that I could see plainly from my chair. The second hand clicked audibly. There was no wife, there were no children; the only photograph in the room was the portrait of the president of the republic wearing a dark business suit and a blue-and-white sash such as beauty contestants wear. Somehow this reminded me of Leonel’s story of the Miss Universe pageant held here just two years earlier. “So much poverty,” Leonel had said, “and this is what the government spends money on, this is what they’re interested in, a goddamn beauty contest. Well, the people protested as of course they would. They even occupied the cathedral for a week, and when the protest march was fired upon by security forces, as marches here always are, thirty-seven people lost their lives. They say fifteen, but they are wrong. It was thirty-seven. Most of the dead were students. The president of the republic called them Communists, of course, and charged them with plotting to overthrow the government. All because of Miss Universe.”

  The mild-seeming man wearing the sash and smiling from the wall was the minister of defense and public security at the time, so he either ordered or approved the attack on the marchers.

  Later, as we drove out of the compound, I confessed to Leonel that I had wanted to search through the lieutenant colonel’s files but had been afraid.

  “You wouldn’t have found anything.”

  Leonel’s hair was still wet, as was the neckline of the fresh guayabera he wore.

  “Leonel, why the shower? Couldn’t you have waited? And how do you know I wouldn’t have found anything?”

  “Think it through. We were seen, the two of us, going into the Estado Mayor, one of the most important military facilities in the country. And an hour later, we were also seen walking out, and I’m all cleaned up, looking like a goddamn nightclub singer. Whoever is watching us has to imagine that I’m on quite friendly terms with someone in the military, and I have the sort of access civilians don’t usually get.”

  “What do you mean ‘watching us’?”

  “Watching. Believe me, someone is always watching.”

  The radio was between stations, two voices interweaving, one selling something, the other singing to a past love, and the rest pure noise.

  “Mirá, Papu, who is Leonel Gómez? It’s a serious question. Gómez is seen talking to campesinos in Cabañas, but also in Santa Tecla and San Miguel, although his coffee farm is in Santa Ana. He frequently visits retired military officers but also nuns and priests. He comes and goes from the U.S. embassy, from certain military garrisons, even a goddamn ice cream parlor. He talks to this one. He talks to that one. Gómez pays many visits to Divine Providence but he doesn’t believe in God. So who is Gómez? Nobody knows.”

  “Last summer Claribel’s husband told me that some think you work for the CIA.”

  “Bud told you this? That’s a good piece of information. Thank you.”

  Leonel had tuned the radio more precisely now, so we seemed to be listening to a single voice: an announcer for a sporting event, fútbol maybe, and as I knew this didn’t interest him, the radio was on for another reason.

  “What do you mean ‘information’? Do you work for the CIA?”

  He laughed. “Some people say so. Those visits to your embassy have paid off.”

  “What are you talking about, Leonel? Stop playing games. What ‘good piece of information’? If it’s true, tell me. If it isn’t, why do you want Claribel and Bud to think so?”

  “I don’t know what they think, but this confirms something for me. I know who started this rumor and now I know who is spreading it.”

  “That doesn’t answer my question.”

  “Do I work for those sons of bitches? What do you think?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, that’s what I want: for people not to know but to have all sorts of suspicions. This is my only protection—this, and my trophies for marksmanship. Without these things, I would have been dead a long time ago. Do you think Chacón is alone with his band of killers? There are quite a few others—in the army, in the treasury police, in the national guard, and some civilians too, who are on the payroll of certain oligarchs. There is even a dentist among them they call Dr. Death. At least I think he’s a dentist. They use machetes, knives, ice picks, blowtorches, and primitive electrical equipment. Many of them have had sophisticated training in the so-called School of the Americas, where they learn more refined techniques. But, Papu, this is a poor country, as all of these rich sons of bitches will tell you, and they don’t have special equipment and facilities, so they make do with lit cigarettes and rope, plastic bags and toilets full of shit. I’ll let you use your imagination.”

  We had entered a narrow street clogged with traffic, and people were weaving among the vehicles. One by one the drivers honked their horns and shouted from their windows the equivalent of “What’s the problem?” The radio lost its way between stations, so there were several voices speaking at once.

  “Roll your window up. We’re going to use the air conditioner. Something is burning. Can’t you smell it?”

  “Yes, now I do.”

  “This is usually a shortcut.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Well, now we are going to wherever this fire is.”

  “Why do you think I wouldn’t have found anything in the colonel’s office?”

  “And why would you have looked? That was a stupid idea, Papu. Goddamn Mata Hari. What
if you were caught? What do you think would have happened then? And what did you think you would find, a list of who is next?”

  “I told you. I thought the better of it.”

  “You thought the better. Let me tell you something. These people don’t keep records. They don’t give written orders. Orders are simply understood. They aren’t even given verbally. There is no need. A nod and a phrase or two is all that is required. ‘Take care of this,’ for example, is such a phrase. What you are going to find in that colonel’s basket is an order for a hundred kilos of cornmeal for a barracks kitchen.”

  “Then what does ‘take care of this’ mean exactly?”

  “It means to kill the person. Or that’s what it means in this context.”

  * * *

  —

  Somehow the traffic had thinned, or vehicles had pulled onto side streets to avoid driving into smoke. Now there were mostly people on foot: thin, small, poorly dressed, their hands and faces smeared with soot. They were surrounding the Hiace, pressing their hands against the glass, cupping their palms in a gesture to receive coins, touching their hands to their mouths to ask for food, then falling back to be replaced by others, many of them young children whose hands left sooty prints on the windows. We were coasting slowly, and the windows muted the street noise. No. There was no noise. No sound. The people were moving in slow motion now, mouthing words I couldn’t hear or understand, holding up their gray hands.

  “What’s wrong, Forché?” I heard Leonel asking. “Are you okay?” He had broken the strange silence, and there was also a rushing of air.

  “Drink some water,” he said, reaching into the back for his canteen. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  The crowd was still moving alongside us. We had reached the still-smoking wreckage, where several buildings appeared to have burned and then collapsed.

  “Maybe the smoke got to you.”

  “No,” I said, and then heard myself saying, “I have seen this before,” as if in the voice of someone else.