What You Have Heard Is True

by Carolyn Forche

  Just like that, I thought, hanging up the wall phone in the kitchen after I heard the click on his end. He thinks I can drop everything to fly to Texas. Texas, for God’s sake.

  “Who was that?” Barbara asked, probably from the stove, where she would have been making herbal tea, as she often did to soothe her migraines.

  “Nothing. I have to go to Texas.”

  She would have turned toward me, blowing on the tea to cool it a little, studying me over the rim of the cup, and asked if this had something to do with that man, Leonel, about whom I couldn’t seem to stop talking since I had gotten back, and when I said yes, concern flared in her eyes, but she wouldn’t have said anything. Almost all of my friends seemed to feel the same way about my new interest in this strange person and his distant country, although I had known enough not to tell them everything. We’re worried about you, they all said. But this concerned Texas now, not El Salvador, and so she agreed to drive me to the airport on Friday, if I came back by Sunday night, in time to resume my normal life.

  * * *

  As it turned out, he had driven the Hiace to Texas right after he learned of Chacón’s death. He needed time to think, he said, to lie low to assess the situation, and that is why we were going to a motel bathed in pink neon on the outskirts of San Antonio, near an American military base where one of El Salvador’s junior officers was in training.

  There was no moon, so other than the bright wedge of our headlights on the road, and the red blinking lights of communication towers in the distance, there was only arid darkness.

  “If they really listen to all the phone calls, why did you tell me about Chacón over the phone?”

  “Because they were listening. I wanted them to hear me report this to you.”

  I rolled the window down for the night air. “I’m not following you. And by the way, where are we going?”

  “It’s not far now. Mirá, Papu, they shot one of their own, and for the first time. They have never, ever before moved against one of their own. If you think of the institution of the military as an impenetrable wall, well, now there’s a crack in that wall.”

  “Are we really almost there? I have to use a toilet.”

  “And there’s a group of younger officers who are not at all pleased with this tanda now in power, but they have been afraid to make a move.”

  “Move as in make a coup?”

  “Move in any way. It isn’t so much that Chacón has been ultimado, but by whom. I’ll pull over. You can go in the bushes.”

  “No, Leonel. No bushes.”

  “So tonight we’re going to meet with one of these young officers, and tomorrow we’ll pay a visit to the base, and then, if you insist on getting back by Monday morning, we’ll hit the road, as you people say.”

  “We’re driving back?”

  “Yes. It will take us about eighteen hours. I already studied the map: El Paso, then Tucson, then Horseshoe Bend, but you have to promise not to drive us over a cliff when it’s your turn.”

  “You’re coming to San Diego?”

  “No, I’m coming to your house for a few days.”

  Barbara will appreciate that, I thought.

  “I need to study,” he said. “I need to know everything about the war in Vietnam. Do you think you could bring me books from the university library?”

  “If you tell me what you want. Or we could go there together and . . .”

  “Military strategy. Logistics: strategic, operational, and tactical. And bring me everything the library has that is on, by, or about General Võ Nguyên Giáp, who, by the way, happens to be one of the greatest military strategists of the twentieth century.”

  “I don’t know who that is.”

  “No, you probably wouldn’t. He defeated the United States in Vietnam. We’re here.”

  “We’re meeting at a motel? Why? Isn’t your friend meeting us on the base?”

  “Because here he will talk more freely. He didn’t want to have this meeting on the base.”

  “But we’re going there tomorrow, you told me.”

  “Yes, we’re going there, but not to talk, to shop. I need some things.”

  It must have rained sometime during the past few hours. The pink VACANCY sign flickered upside down in a puddle.

  Just before he knocked on the door that gave onto the parking lot, Leonel warned me that this man might seem a little bit nervous, a little bit scared. “Don’t say much,” he said. “Play it the way you did in El Salvador.”

  “Play—?”

  “He doesn’t know who you are, and that is a good thing. He does know, however, with whom you have been talking.”

  He put his hand on my shoulder. “Be yourself,” he said.

  The young officer’s uniform was sharply creased, his dark, wavy hair neatly combed. It was clear that he had come to this highway motel strictly for this meeting, and other than the full ashtray, there was nothing that suggested he had been here long. The ashtray told me that he was nervous before we arrived, or else he was a heavy smoker, but he didn’t smoke in our presence, so—. Propping himself against the headboard of one of the twin beds, he stretched out with his polished shoes set neatly on the floor. We were on the other bed, Leonel the closest to the officer whose name I don’t want to recall. Some of their conversation went past me, and this wasn’t only because the Spanish was colloquial and rapid but because, as Leonel later told me, I wasn’t familiar with the “actors”—with “who was who”—and why this was “the moment,” and how dangerous things would be going forward, so important was this moment and vital to the integrity and professionalism of the army and so on. The ultimado of Chacón, he added, had surprised the younger officers, but also heartened them.

  “There is hope,” he said.

  The next morning, this particular young officer met us at the entrance to the base, then rode with us to a parking lot and, before leaving the car, handed a small package to Leonel across the well of the gearshift. Leonel thanked him, tucked the package under the driver’s seat and, when we were outside, carefully locked the Hiace.

  “We’re going to the PX,” Leonel announced gaily. “It’s like a department store, but for military personnel and their families. They have everything: groceries, clothing, electronics. If you want anything, put it in the basket, and our friend here will buy it for you as if it were for himself and you can pay him later.”

  Then he added: “We don’t have military ID cards, so we’re not allowed to shop here, technically speaking. But it’s all at reduced prices, and there is no tax.”

  The young officer calmly pushed the cart but bought only cigarettes for himself. Leonel, on the other hand, added a small tool kit, khaki trousers, pipe tobacco, a camping stove, and some other things to the cart, walking at a slow pace through all the aisles, examining many items, all the while talking in a low voice to the officer, who sometimes nodded yes and sometimes no. I decided not to purchase anything.

  We shook hands and left the officer there, standing where we had been parked, one hand shielding his eyes, and he watched us drive off. Leonel waved through the window. The young officer raised his hand slightly but didn’t really wave back.

  “Excellent,” he said loudly over the blast of wind on the open road.

  I had him stop at a Circle K convenience store so that I could telephone Barbara to warn her that we were coming, and so that Leonel could buy an ice cream bar and a soda, but otherwise we drove for the next eighteen hours under the pulsing desert sun, and through the night as the air cooled, taking turns behind the wheel and stopping only for gas. He would talk most of the time, except when he took his short naps, usually in the back of the Hiace. During one of these, I remember having the feeling, vividly, that he was no longer in the van.

  Barbara had left a note on the kitchen counter: Have gone to stay with B and M. He can use my room. Let me know whe
n he leaves.

  She must have left only a short time before because the bowls in the finch cage were brimming with millet and the paths she had vacuumed into the carpet were still visible. Leonel set his things neatly against the wall in the living room, eventually including the stacks of books I would borrow for him, which did not, apparently, include as much as he’d hoped they would. He was not interested, he said, in the history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, nor in analysis of the American prosecution of the war or our domestic debates concerning it. He wanted to know about how the war was fought on the other side, during the “Second Indochina War,” “The Resistance War Against America,” sometimes shortened to “The American War in Vietnam.” He wanted to know about the tactics and strategy of the North Vietnamese Army and the National Liberation Front, about their tunnels and movements, their booby traps, and how they used the element of surprise.

  He was happy that I had found two books by Giáp himself, translated into English: The Military Art of People’s War and How We Won the War, and he stayed up several nights reading these.

  Never in the history of warfare, he would say over and over, never in the history of the world. I mean—God. This was his mantra, Never in the history, whether we were walking through the fog on the beach or he was pacing the living-room floor: air power, firepower, weapons, chemicals, thousands of pounds of explosives, B-52 bombers, F-4 Phantoms, UH-1 helicopters, armored personnel carriers, howitzers, Mk 2 grenades, napalm—armaments such as no people prior to the Vietnamese had ever had inflicted upon them in this kind of war.

  “I mean, Jesus Christ, Papu, the U.S. sprayed nineteen million gallons of herbicides over four and a half million acres of Vietnam, the most destructive defoliation the world has ever seen. And you know what?”

  He would pause at this moment of the speech, as if waiting for an answer, and then he would ask again. “You know what? The Americans lost, that’s what. They lost. I think I know why, but I’m trying now to answer the more interesting question: Precisely how did the Vietnamese win? And by the way, we have to go to a hardware store.”

  “What do you need?”

  “Foam rubber. Chicken wire. I have to build something for the trip back. For this,” he said, setting the small package on the table given to him by the junior officer in Texas. It was wrapped in aluminum foil in a brown paper lunch sack: a small brick of something, a little larger than a box of kitchen matches. He unwrapped the aluminum foil, revealing a substance that resembled modeling clay or marzipan, the almond paste my mother used to sculpt realistic-looking fruit candies. This was also almond colored.

  “It’s made of plasticizer, synthetic rubber, some mineral oil—and RDX.”

  I was now lifting it to my nose to smell it. It weighed just over a pound.

  “That’s short for research department explosive.”

  I put it down.

  “Careful,” he said. “Treat it gently. Even though, as far as I know, it won’t explode without extreme heat and a shock wave from a detonator of some kind. I could probably shoot it and it wouldn’t explode. But just in case, I’m going to make a special package to contain it during my drive back. I do go through the desert, after all.”

  The smell was now becoming apparent. Motor oil?

  “Mirá, if you just light it with a match, it will burn slowly like a wet log. Soldiers used this in Vietnam for various purposes,” he said, “in small amounts for heating rations, even though the fumes are somewhat toxic, and they would sometimes eat just a little bit to get high, or a little more to get sick enough to go on leave. It didn’t usually work. Papu, as I said, even if I shot it with a rifle, it wouldn’t—and look, you can work it like modeling clay. You can shape it any way you want. It pushes easily into holes and cracks in walls, and it will stick to anything . . .”

  “Leonel, can I ask what you are doing with this? And can you please take it back outside?”

  “Of course. I’ll keep it in the van, and I’ll build the cage outside, don’t worry. I just brought it in to show you. I thought you’d be interested.”

  Why would I be? I thought to myself. He still hadn’t answered my question. What did he want with something like this?

  “I may have need of it,” he said, reading my mind. “One never knows. I may have to blow up the front of my fucking house if they come after me. Or I’ll have to blow up the front of the priest’s house if they come after the priest. Excuse my language.”

  We found the things he needed for the packaging of the little cage at a fabric house and a feed store. Foam rubber, chicken wire, wire cutters, and duct tape.

  “Is it legal for you to have this?” I asked him later over cold pizza.

  “I have no idea. That isn’t actually a big concern of mine at the moment.”

  “But how did you get it?”

  “My dear, if you have the money and know the right people, you can buy anything you want on a U.S. military base.”

  The little cage didn’t take much time, and he was careful to clean up the random bits of chicken wire and foam rubber. He even took a razor blade to the piece of duct tape left on the porch rail, where it had baked in the sun, and carted the whole of it away in a white plastic trash-bin liner, fitted neatly among the black storage lockers he seemed always to have in the Hiace, and once again it was Ciao, a peck on both cheeks, and a pat on the shoulder.

  “March, no later,” he said. “You have to get back in March.”

  After Leonel left, the dry Santa Ana winds began, the so-called devil winds flowing down to the sea from the hills, whipping up wildfires, and carrying spores of valley fever. People in Southern California believe this wind affects their moods, much as the sirocco from Libya was said to have driven people mad in Spain. It was not quite time for the Santa Anas, but here they were, bending the palms toward the ground and stirring dry earth into dust devils.

  During a lull, Barbara and I pitched a makeshift pup tent for the rabbits as they’d outgrown their hutch, but we kept having to go outside and stake it down. After telling Barbara and the rest of my friends as much as I could about what I had seen in El Salvador, and somewhat less about what I had done, we moved on to other things, mostly writing and work, but when the subject of Leonel or El Salvador came up, I caught the meaningful glances exchanged as one, then another tried to change the subject.

  This was hardly the Spanish Civil War, they said, a subject that interested North American poets at the time, nor could it possibly be Vietnam as there was nothing about it in the newspapers, which seemed odd, given the butchery I described, nothing even in The New York Times, which was, at that time, at last covering the “dirty wars” in Argentina and Chile. My friends attempted gently to discourage me from returning in March. I think I listened, but nothing anyone said seemed to have any effect on me.

  At the discount store Gemco, I bought some of the items on the list of things Dr. Vicky had mentioned needing: sanitary pads to use as field dressings, iodine, isopropyl alcohol, adhesive tape, elastic bandages, finger splints, cold packs, sterile gloves, burn ointment, antibiotic ointment, aspirin, tweezers, petroleum jelly, thermometers, and penicillin in any form, expired or otherwise. To this I added baby bottles, nipples, an aspirator for sucking phlegm, and a bottle of multivitamins for Dr. Vicky herself. All of this I packed into a rip-stop duffel bag, set on the carpet near the mattress where I slept and beside piles of books: versions of Teach Yourself Colloquial Spanish, vocabulary flash cards, Leonel’s rubber-banded Machiavelli, the poems of Roque Dalton in Spanish, and a copy of Donde no hay doctor, the village health-care handbook by David Werner et al., bought so I could learn enough to be of better help to Dr. Vicky in the months to come. The doctors’ offices that I called couldn’t help me with the penicillin, or any other prescription medicines for that matter. One suggested that I look in the Dumpsters behind health facilities as things were always being thrown away. The Dumpster was my
best bet, they thought.

  “What you need,” one of my few sympathetic friends said, “is a convoy of trucks and millions of dollars, not only for this year but also for next year and the year after that. Do you really think that one duffel bag stuffed with first aid supplies is going to do anything at all?”

  Then it occurred to me: Imodium, the new diarrhea drug. I needed to buy as many boxes of Imodium as I could afford. I had to turn around, drive back to Gemco, and buy Imodium. The chief cause of death in children is amoebic dysentery. We had to turn around.

  “I think,” this friend said, “that you should take a step back.” She was still talking as she followed me indulgently into the store. I must have been listening as I usually try not to ignore people when they’re talking to me.

  “The card,” I said. “I can put it on the card.”

  The pharmacy employee who had led me to the aisle of the antidiarrheal medicines showed me the different brands. There was also Kaopectate and Pepto-Bismol. I began loading up the cart, and I realized, of course, that I would need more duffel bags. Of course, I realized that.

  It was Leonel himself who came for me this time. He was standing beside a jeep just outside the terminal, where the taxis waited. The sun was blazing but he was wearing a jacket. When he reached me, he did something he had never before done. He held me close to him. I felt something then, just under his armpit: a gun in a shoulder holster.

  “I’m happy you are here. We have a lot to do.” Now I was at arm’s length, his hands on my shoulders as he seemed to study how much I had changed in the intervening two months.

  “You’re armed.”

  “Everything is fine.”

  “But you don’t usually—”

  “Wear a weapon? Papu, don’t worry too much. When things get dangerous enough to worry, you’ll know.”

  “And Margarita?”

  “She’s waiting for you. Get in.”