People were crawling over wood and debris, rummaging in the ruins.
“They’re looking for something,” Leonel said, “something, anything they can use: a bottle, a comb with a few teeth, maybe a spoon. You’d be amazed what you can find after a fire like this, and as it is, they have nothing.”
He was right. An old woman was dropping things into her apron and looked up as we passed, her eyes bright in a face now the color of smoke.
“Tell me what happened back there. I thought you were going to pass out or some goddamn thing. I’m glad to see you are okay. Did you inhale too much?”
“I don’t know.”
This wasn’t the truth. I would try to tell him the truth, but not right this moment. I had to first think about it for myself. Instead I asked him to tell me what he thought had happened here.
“Simple. This is a barrio where the poorest people in the city live, and someone wants this property, so they want these people out. They pay some guy to torch the place, usually during the day when most people are at work, not because they care how many die but because too many deaths would draw more attention. In fact, no one is going to investigate arson even when committed in broad daylight. So the buildings burn and the insurance company pays the owner, who turns around and sells the land to the buyer waiting in the wings. Nothing happens for a while, and then, one day, construction begins, but not to replace housing for the poor, you can be sure.”
“What do they build?”
“Often, these days, they build a fast-food restaurant. It used to be banks.”
“What about the insurance companies?”
“What about them?”
“Well, they seem to be the ones who pay.”
“No, they are not. Insurance companies are also insured against loss, and there are ways of making these arrangements so that everyone wins, you see, everyone except the people who have been displaced. They are the ones who pay.”
“How do you know that this fire wasn’t accidental?”
“Do you see any fire trucks?”
Our windows were covered with handprints, but the sound of hands slapping the windows had stopped. There were no trucks, there was no water running down the street, no hoses stretched out or rewound on their reels.
* * *
I have to go back now to childhood for a moment in order to make some sense of this. My mother is standing at the stove in the kitchen stirring pudding in a double boiler. She is busy. The baby, one of the babies, is on the speckled linoleum floor crawling around at my mother’s feet, and my mother wants me to pick up this baby and take it away from the stove, but I’m carrying an issue of a magazine, large for me, held open in my hands to photographs taken by American soldiers from the Second World War who came upon the bodies of concentration camp prisoners. I am six or seven years old. Do I pick up the baby? Probably, but I don’t remember picking her up. I ask my mother to tell me about the photographs in the magazine and she says something like Not now, I’m making dinner, and probably something else, either about folding the cloth diapers that are always mounded on the sofa or pairing and rolling the socks, also in a mound.
“What is this?” I ask, holding the magazine pages open for her to see.
“Give me that. You’re not supposed to have it.”
“But what is it? What are they doing?”
She is still stirring the pudding. The baby isn’t there any longer. A door slams so hard that the flies fastened to its screen rise off in a buzzing cloud—someone coming in or going out—a little chaos in the kitchen, too much for my mother. Already three younger siblings born and three more to come, and she can’t really pay attention, but I need to know who they are because the people in the photographs have also appeared in my dreams.
She takes the magazine away from me. Through the steam from the stove she said she would tell me when I was grown.
* * *
—
All through my childhood the nightmares came, and then somehow the faces disappear, the terror and the black wings, the lunging of that world, like a roller coaster in pitch-black space, and having always to sleep with blankets over my head. Then another dream replaces these flights of darkness, and in this dream people appear whose faces seem to be smudged with coal dust, or so I thought. Their palms are blackened, and pressed open against something that comes between us. No sound comes from them, but they want something, and I don’t know what.
* * *
—
What had come between us was a window, where now the same sooty hands were pressed against the glass. Later I might tell Leonel how I might have seen this place more than twenty years earlier: this place, this fire, these people with soot on their hands. Would I tell him that I had seen them during recurrent night terrors as a child? Could I possibly tell him this?
This all happened almost a decade after the Second World War. My parents were young and exhausted, but they would lift me from the bed and walk me down the hall and back until I stopped screaming “The people” and woke and realized where I was. Always in the dream it was the same: men, women, and children standing before me, holding up their blackened palms and asking for help, but seemingly unable to come closer. I knew that there was some barrier keeping me on one side and them on the other, as sleep is kept apart from waking, but I hadn’t known the barrier was glass.
“It’s time for you to get some protection too,” Leonel said, once we were back on the highway.
“I don’t want a weapon. I don’t know the first thing about them.”
“Do you need coffee? You seem like you need coffee. You’re right, however, you’d probably wind up shooting me in the balls. But I wasn’t talking about that. It’s time for you to pay a little visit to the U.S. embassy and introduce yourself to the new ambassador.”
“You have to be kidding me. I can’t meet the ambassador.”
“Why not? You’re a U.S. citizen, aren’t you? He’s your ambassador, isn’t he?”
“But I’m no one. Why should he meet with me?”
“He will meet with you because you are visiting at a time when there are almost no gringos here, no press, no nothing—a few Peace Corps, but aside from that and other than embassy staff, no one. He will meet with you because he doesn’t know who you are and he will make it his business to find out because his contacts in the military might have already said something. To get an appointment, all you have to do is pick up the phone. Here is the number for the main desk.”
“But I don’t need to talk to the ambassador. I have no reason. I have nothing to say to him.”
“Oh, but you do. The symphony of illusion, remember? You need to be seen entering and leaving the embassy, and if possible, you need to get yourself invited to an embassy function, a cocktail reception or, better, dinner at the residence. You can bring me as your guest. The food is excellent at those dinners, and the views of the city . . .”
“Leonel. I’m not interested and I’m not going.”
“You’re a goddamn Pekingese, Papu.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Otherwise known as ‘the lion,’ or Peking Palasthund. The breed originated in China. Barks a lot. Mop of hair in the eyes. Courageous. Not easy to train. I’m going to start calling you ‘The Pekingese.’ Or maybe ‘Great-Granddaughter of Genghis Khan.’”
Where were we? I didn’t know. Often, I didn’t know. We were on the road I called the road of the blond billboards—advertisements for expensive scotch and liquor made from sugarcane, frosted drinks, pearls, blond women with glossed lips.
“You are going to talk to the ambassador so as to remind him of his duty to protect American citizens and to investigate incidents having to do with American citizens abroad. Ask him how things are going with the Richardson case. I’ll be curious to know how he will answer you. Remember, Richardson is still classified as havi
ng disappeared while in the custody of the Salvadoran government. And oh yes, mention something about the San Lorenzo hydroelectric dam project. They don’t need to build it. We are a net exporter of electricity. If the U.S. approves the loan to build it, you will only be pouring American money into the pockets of military officers.”
“And what should I call you? What’s going to be your nickname?”
“Mein General. As in Jawohl, mein general. Or maybe just always say Jawohl. Or maybe something Greek. Have you seen the film Z? Costa-Gavras? We can name me after that guy.”
“The one killed at the beginning?”
“No, the one who investigates—Christos. Don’t forget to mention San Lorenzo.”
* * *
As we were waved into the building by the white-gloved marine guards, the air changed, and I realized that I had not been in an air-conditioned building in a while. There were potted palms near the planted flags on either side of the reception desk. The leaves were glossy as if each had been polished by hand. We clipped the visitors’ badges to our shirts and the elevator doors closed behind us.
“Welcome to the United States, my dear.” Leonel was laughing, looking around the elevator, up to the mirrored ceiling where we saw ourselves, then to the steel doors, and the numbers of the floors lighting up as the elevator rose.
“You’re not coming in with me, are you?”
“No. The son of a bitch can kiss my ass. I’ll wait for you outside his office. There’s a nice lady who works there, and I enjoy talking to her. She works for every ambassador, son of a bitch or not. But most of them are sons of bitches.”
The elevator doors opened.
“You realize,” he whispered, “that you are in the United States now. This building is their territory. It smells different in here, doesn’t it?”
“If you aren’t coming to this meeting with me, then why did you come here at all?”
“I enjoy visiting the United States. Besides, as I think I have told you, it is good for me to be seen coming and going from certain places. It helps with the symphony of illusion.”
The receptionist, the “nice lady,” had seated us in a waiting area and left to get the coffee Leonel had requested. He put his finger to his lips and pointed to the ceiling, the wall, the desk, and then to his ear.
“Be careful,” he whispered. “Here’s what I know about this man. He’s a graduate of the War College. A Catholic. Before this, he was posted to Colombia, Uruguay, Chile, Portugal, the Dominican Republic, and Venezuela. He’s a seasoned career foreign service officer, as they say, which means that he has read not only his briefings, but also the back files. He knows how hard the former ambassador worked on the Richardson case. Ambassador Lozano worked his ass off and put his job on the line. And he also knows how involved I was in the case, but he hasn’t asked to meet with me, and so far he has said nothing at all about Richardson. The thing to keep in mind is that this man is afraid. The right wanted him dead even before he got here, and they wanted to blame his death on the left. Now they are saying that some on the left would like, possibly, to kidnap him for ransom money, even though it is common knowledge that the U.S. government never negotiates in abduction cases.”
The receptionist returned, cheerily setting a tray before us in the center of a low table scattered with American magazines—issues of Time, National Geographic, and for some reason, a few issues of Popular Mechanics—then she motioned me to follow her to the ambassador’s office door, and opened it to let me enter.
He was already coming around the desk to shake my hand as if I were an important person, inviting me to sit in the chair across from him. He was clean-shaven and wore a well-cut suit, a crisp white shirt, and cuff links. “White collar,” my father would have said.
“So—what brings you to El Salvador?”
* * *
Leonel was pacing near the elevators when I rejoined him, as he didn’t want to be in the reception area, in case the new ambassador walked me out to the door. He had not wanted to shake the man’s hand, he said. Not yet. He gave me a look that I understood to mean we were to keep quiet until we were well away from what he called the jurisdiction of the United States, so we were back in the hot vehicle by the time he said, “Well?”—by which he meant: Tell me everything the man said, word for word.
I began with the ambassador’s “deep background” briefing, the speech he gave to all journalists, and to all “NGO types,” as Leonel called them, and all congressional delegations, the speech that described conditions in the country as he had found them upon his arrival, and as he expected me to find them as well, and the situation as it currently was, in the estimation of embassy personnel. This was followed by a summary statement of the U.S. policy line, and warnings against staying “too long” here, or going out “into rural areas,” as it was extremely dangerous for American citizens now, as he was hoping I well understood, and when I took my chance to ask about Ronald Richardson, he shook his head and explained that this particular disappearance didn’t happen “on his watch,” but that of his predecessor, and he regarded the case as unsolvable and hence closed. While he was talking about Richardson, I remembered, the ambassador kept clicking his pen. At other points in the conversation, the pen remained on the desk.
I watched him as he talked, trying to keep my face, as Leonel would say, unreadable. I asked about the upcoming review of the Salvadoran government’s human rights record, and about certain names of the desaparecidos, about which he had nothing to say, and then, as instructed, I inquired about the building of the San Lorenzo hydroelectric plant, and about the money that had disappeared well before the project was even begun. He asked how I knew these things about the San Lorenzo. I didn’t answer. He wanted to know how many Third World countries I had visited in my life. When the answer was “none before now,” his manner became, for a brief time, almost fatherly, and he warned me against having much to do with Leonel Gómez because, as he said, “we don’t know who he is.” And then he advised me to go home.
“That’s it?” Leonel asked.
“I think so, yes. Oh, there’s one more thing—there is an aquarium in his office filled with freshwater tropical fish. I used to have one too, so we talked a little about that. His tank hadn’t been cleaned in a while I noticed, but the ambassador said he found the aquarium soothing.”
A few days later, Leonel heard back from someone in the embassy regarding my meeting, and it was “good news.” Apparently, I must have upset the ambassador quite a bit.
“Congratulations, my dear,” Leonel said, “the ambassador said he was appalled by you.”
* * *
I had to remind Leonel that I would soon have to return again to California, if only for a while, as I hadn’t yet taken a leave of absence. I would be back at the semester break, and then for the summer, but for now, my time was up.
“Yes, yes, of course.”
He was squatting down in a dark machine shop, where his motorcycle had been disassembled for repair, the parts spread neatly on an oily tarpaulin, the chrome gleaming under a work light held by the mechanic who, for some reason, did not seem to know quite how to put the bike back together again. The only other light came from a broken window resembling a block of ice.
“You’re not listening.”
He fished through the parts, picking them up, setting them down, as if something were lost, and something might have been, because next he asked the mechanic if he was absolutely certain this was everything.
“Sí, estoy seguro, señor.”
“¡Vale!” Leonel said, getting himself to his feet. “Okay, then. We’ll see you in a few days.”
Apparently, the mechanic had assured him that he just needed a few more days.
Leonel seemed distracted, but he was always distracted around this motorcycle, and in matters concerning this disassembled bike, the mechanic always needed only a few more days.
The sunlight blinded me, and there was a whiff of what might have been a plugged sewer. He stopped at a market stall and bought two bottles of warm refrescos and, handing one to me, said: “But you have to get back here soon, because it seems that some other military officers would like to meet with you.”
Other military officers. I kept walking. This probably meant nothing. He was trying to intrigue me in some way, perhaps so that I wouldn’t leave yet, but I had to leave just a few days later and, for a time, fulfill my responsibilities teaching, grading papers, writing letters and notes toward poems. In those months, it was as if I were asleep, dreaming of finches singing from curtain rods and ceiling fixtures, a field on fire with carnations, rabbits gnawing on cabbage heads, the blank, salted air of that town on the coast. The call came about a week later, around midnight, so that it seemed at first that the ringing, too, wasn’t real.
“Papu?”
“Leonel! How are you? Is everything—?”
“Listen to me carefully. Chacón is dead. He was killed this morning, ambushed by his own military at the house of his mistress. I don’t think he had time to pull his pants up. They shot him like an animal.”
There was silence on both ends of the phone.
“I thought you’d want to know,” he said, and hung up.
A week or so passed, and he called again and asked me if I could possibly fly to Texas. There was someone he wanted me to meet. “I’m already here,” he said, “in San Antonio.”
“Texas?”
“Just for a few days. It’s important.”
“Can it wait until the weekend?”
“Yes. But look—”
“I know, I know. It’s important.”
“Yes, my dear, it is. Here is the number, call when you know your flight.”
What You Have Heard Is True Page 23
