What You Have Heard Is True

by Carolyn Forche

  “You did not see me,” he said stiffly, and he excused himself.

  * * *

  Leonel was skeptical when I told him the story of the man with the attaché case, because such a man “doesn’t usually allow himself to be seen.”

  “Describe him again,” he said, “you have to give me something more than sunglasses.”

  “He didn’t look Salvadoran.”

  “You’re telling me what? That he was a gringo?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, you said you spoke with him. Was he a gringo?”

  “I think so.”

  “You have to do more than think so. You have to be sure.”

  “Can we drop it, then? I’m not sure.”

  “Mirá, Papu, guard your credibility. This is something that cannot be recovered once lost. Remember the rumor that flew around about a young girl with a man’s head stuffed into her stomach? Remember that? You know they found her that way. I know they found her that way. But it doesn’t sound true.”

  “So?”

  “So you can’t say it. You can’t write it. Even in a poem. If you had a photograph of the goddamn thing no one would believe you. As for your man in the basilica, your observations are imprecise. Next time pay closer attention. Someday you will be talking to your own people. Writing for your own people. I promise you that it is going to be difficult to get Americans to believe what is happening here. For one thing, this is outside the realm of their imaginations. For another, it isn’t in their interests to believe you. For a third, it is possible that we are not human beings to them.”

  WRITTEN IN PENCIL:

  The telescope is trained on the fly crawling the neighbor’s roof tiles the AK is once again taken from beneath the blanket and set out of reach we are in the dark the Hiace is parked elsewhere there is only the loading and unloading of magazine clips as he did with the eyes closed did they ever tell you who killed the poet no I suppose they didn’t it happened on Mother’s Day and no it wasn’t the military or the death squads it was the guerrillas themselves who accused him of spying for both the CIA and Cuba and why Cuba we will never know most people are accused of being CIA but back to Mother’s Day as I was telling you they were holding him in a safe house and he left to visit his mother they said briefly and while he was gone another man also being held was executed they said and when Dalton returned to the safe house the man who is now in command of a large faction of the guerrillas the most proficient faction in military terms fired at Dalton and he missed you might ask how that is possible Dalton “threw himself on the bed” so they said and the poet shouted No me mates but this commander fired again and the second shot killed the poet so they said in my opinion it was a personal matter between them but also a conflict over strategy or so they said however this will tell you something about them and never take the safety off and never even if you think the clip is empty should you aim the weapon at your head.

  Leonel was with Viera, the labor leader who took me with him in his truck that night from the compound where they asked about poetry. Viera and Leonel were now both involved in attempting to execute the agrarian reform that was to be part of the new junta’s project, although few were more skeptical than they were about how the reforms would be carried out, who would truly benefit, and if this might be too little too late.

  “If we succeed,” Leonel had said, “we succeed, and if we fail? If we fail we are demonstrating this reform to be false, to be a matter of bad faith.”

  I went with them once or twice to listen to the speeches delivered by bullhorns in the campo to gatherings of weathered and skeptical men who nevertheless listened politely with arms folded and hats on as they were told the land would soon be theirs.

  I would call this period the era of being my own person. I was spending more time with Margarita at the Catholic university and in the human rights office, and I was meeting on my own with people who were authorized to speak for the guerrillas in a more official way than the young people in the bell tower. One of these meetings took place in Margarita’s living room and I remember how surprised I was by the appearance of this guerrillero spokesman: chubby, with thick-lensed glasses that kept falling down the bridge of his nose. His political analysis was impressive. I’m not sure who he thought I was. No one asked in those days. Someone had vouched for me, I was told, and from his tone he thought I was somehow someone worth his time. Also in those days, I worked closely with Margarita, which meant that I worked closely with the human rights office of the Church. I didn’t always know what we were doing. There were lists and photographs and details about disappearances and always the steady presence of Monseñor moving among us.

  That night I was to meet with a defecting member of the Christian Democratic Party whose name was given as “Alfredo.” We were to have an interview on the eve of his exile, or a few days before. It didn’t occur to me until later that this might be the man Luisa loved. I don’t remember who made the arrangement or what was expected to come of it. I didn’t tell Leonel because he seemed too busy. But Alfredo and Leonel knew each other, so I assumed everything would be all right.

  I was to meet Alfredo in the lobby of Hotel X, swarming that night with heavily armed soldiers, private security guards with hidden weapons, foreigners (except journalists, who were at El Camino Real), the usual businessmen and mistresses, what Leonel called NGO types, a few prostitutes, but no kumbayas. The white noise and cambios of two-way radios could be heard, as usual, among the palms. Everyone was watching everyone else. A waiter tried to keep people happy with drinks. Empty bottles clustered in glass cities on the low tables. Outside, more soldiers patrolled, casting their armed shadows on the marble façade, as vehicle after vehicle pulled to the entrance to pick up or disgorge passengers as quickly as possible. I decided to wait outside, beside a nervous bellman. No one coming or going seemed to have any luggage for him.

  Alfredo came in a loaned car, a businessman’s car, something that wouldn’t typically be driven by a man going into exile. He leaped out and opened the door for me, explaining that we couldn’t stay here, that it would be better to meet at his house. Quieter. No people. I don’t remember the drive there. It was dark. While in vehicles, I had begun to focus on the side mirrors, on the presence or absence of Jeep Cherokees, on breathing, on getting there, on being once again somewhere inside. I had already played with the tape recorder to be sure it worked, already said Testing, testing, rewound, and listened. The recorder was borrowed from someone. Luisa, I think.

  The little house was in a compound surrounded by a high brick wall. There was a grove of avocados, a few palms and other trees and, farther along the drive, a larger house, one story, wrapped by a veranda. There were no lights on inside that house. The swath of bare ground was bathed in the purplish light of a sodium lamp. Chickens skittered through the pool of light. Finally, we came to the place where Alfredo was staying and I could understand his choice of this house: a casita tucked deep into the property, hidden by foliage and overhung by a spreading cashew tree, its fruit hanging in glowing red bulbs.

  He had been living here for a few months, and it was safe enough, he said, given the circumstances. There were shelves of books, a low table stacked with papers, something he was writing. There were cushions on the floor. A wool rug covered the earthen tile and little else. In the tiny kitchen, now lit by the open door of a small refrigerator, Alfredo was rummaging for something. Beyond the kitchen there was a bedroom not much larger than its bed and, beside it, a water closet.

  Alfredo returned with two glasses of beer and seated himself opposite me on the other of the two cushions. We kept the lights off, as many people did in those days, but a silvery smear entered from outside. I wouldn’t have to ask questions, as it turned out, or not many, or not yet. He would hold forth into the recorder, describing events up to this moment, events that had brought him to “take this decision,” to go into exile and work for t
he opposition from abroad. This was, I soon realized, the last time he would give an account of this decision for himself. I asked him about the differences among the guerrilla factions, and why he chose to work for one rather than another. Alfredo could not then have been more than a few years older than I was, but I regarded him as more mature and sophisticated. He was handsome, well educated, and thoughtful, with the demeanor of a young professor of philosophy, albeit one whose name had been published in newspapers on a list of those targeted for assassination. Breaks in our conversation occurred when we used the toilet or I stopped to unwrap a fresh cassette. We finished a pack and a half of cigarettes between us, and filled three sixty-minute tapes that night.

  We talked for three hours then, but that didn’t account for the drive from the hotel, the settling in, the beer pouring, the breaks, the retest of the machine. It was actually four that had passed. Alfredo realized this before I did, suddenly hiking his shirtsleeve to check the luminous numbers on his watch. At first, I didn’t know why he had gotten up so quickly, but I followed, gathering my woolen bag woven with jaguars, the tape machine that wasn’t mine, the notebook in which nothing had been written that night.

  “We have to leave now,” he said, “right now we must go.”

  When I saw what time it was, I knew what we had done. We had stayed beyond the curfew during a state of siege.

  Alfredo opened the little door of the casita only a crack, enough to let a bit of night jasmine into the room, before closing again.

  “We can’t do this. It’s too dangerous.”

  “Then I have to make a phone call.”

  “There is no phone here.”

  “What about in the other house? Is there a phone?”

  “No, nothing.”

  “Then I have to go. They don’t know where I am. They’ll come looking. It’s dangerous. It’s against the rules.”

  “Whose rules is it against?”

  “I promised Leonel—”

  And then he conceded that yes, Leonel probably would come looking for me.

  “All right, then, we’ll go. But then I will also have to stay at the hotel.”

  He went into the bathroom, shut the door briefly, and returned, putting on a jacket.

  The businessman’s car was parked facing outward so we could coast down the long drive with the lights off, then out through the break in the walls. In slow motion I remember this: getting in, buckling the seat belt, rolling the window down halfway.

  It was as if we had forgotten that people no longer did such things as talk all night.

  Alfredo drove slowly, so close to the avocado trees that their branches brushed the roof. Just before pulling into the street we saw them, three men, hunched over a taxicab that was idling with its doors open, three men whose automatic weapons were aimed at our windshield. They wore black masks. Alfredo does not remember that part. He is already grinding the gears into reverse, whipping the car sideways against the wall, and calling me to get out and run back to the casita. I hear voices shouting underwater, the slamming of car doors, a long squeal of tires. Water silences the world. I’m running through the avocado trees, losing first one shoe and then the other, tree to tree until I reach the casita and push through the unlocked door. I didn’t know where Alfredo was or what I would do if he didn’t return. I didn’t know if anyone was behind me among the trees, or whether the taxi in the road had been the vehicle to squeal away. In dreams to come, the windshield is shattered over and over in a spray of light, but now I’m in the casita and out of breath, wildly searching for a place to hide where there was none.

  It was only minutes that I was alone before Alfredo arrived, ghost faced and leaning back against the door to close it behind him.

  “Death squad,” he whispered, catching his breath.

  “Why didn’t they shoot?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Where are they?”

  “Gone. They drove off.”

  “Why didn’t they follow us here?”

  “They think we have security guards and they didn’t want to engage them would be my guess.”

  “Do we? Have security guards?”

  “No. No one. Or they might think we have weapons.”

  “Do we?”

  “No.”

  “So what now?”

  “Now we wait. We have no choice. They might come back, but I don’t think so, at least not tonight. In the morning, we’ll get out of here.”

  We stretched out side by side on the bed, and as I remember we talked for a while, and then I heard his muffled breaths. It was utterly dark, as the sodium lamp outside had gone out. Not a gleam of light through the louvers and no buzzing. Just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it isn’t there, Leonel had said. Never believe anything until it is officially denied. I talk to everyone, he had said, I’m not pure or special. I would talk to the devil himself if it would make any difference, and come to think of it I have once or twice. He was in the guise of a gringo. We are all dying, Papu, there is no escape.

  It was then that I heard the first rounds of machine-gun fire, coming from just above the little house. Ten, twenty rounds. Silence. Another ten.

  “Alfredo,” I called out, jostling him, “wake up!”

  In his sleep he told me to go back to sleep. “Those are cashew fruits falling on the roof.”

  In the morning, he went to the main house, returning with a bulletproof vest and my shoes retrieved from the grove. He put on the vest, we got into the car, and he drove through the opening in the wall. It was a bright morning and the street was empty. I slid down in the passenger seat as low as I could, keeping my head down. The back of the seat was my vest.

  When we reached Hotel X, he told me to go upstairs and get my things quickly, taking only what I could bring down to the car in one trip.

  “And don’t stop at the desk, and don’t speak to anyone.”

  I didn’t have much with me, so this wasn’t difficult. I only wanted my notebooks. Against his instructions, I left a note on my pillow: With Alfredo. Am all right. Papu.

  When we reached the coast, I woke to the car door’s opening, to people, to hands. I was led to a hammock tied to two trees behind an elegant house, all glass and sea, palms and bougainvillea, sea wind, and the cries of birds. I let one foot drop to the soft ground to rock the hammock. Someone brought me a fruit drink, and later a tortilla with a scoop of black beans and crema. It was mostly Alfredo’s voice talking with the owners of this place, and it sounded as if they were his relatives, or close family friends. They wanted to know everything about the night before because it would now be necessary to move up the plans for his escape.

  “Carolina?” A woman was tapping my arm. “Carolina, don’t worry, Leonel is coming.”

  “Where am I?”

  “You are in a safe house. You are safe.”

  * * *

  When I woke again, it was because I felt the eyes of a child on my face, the way one can be awakened from sleep by the gaze of someone else. The child smiled, then ran away in the direction of a group of people, Leonel was among them. They were talking and he kept looking over at my hammock. I decided to roll myself out of it, half asleep as I still was from the heat. When I reached the group, he put his hand on my shoulder. It seemed that something had been decided. Alfredo was gone.

  The Hiace had become an oven. “You’re goddamn lucky to be alive, Papu.”

  He started the engine. He didn’t have to say anything else. I realized that I wasn’t crying and I wasn’t shaking. I wasn’t going to be sick. I rolled the window down and stuck my arm out. He passed me some water, I took a swig, recapped it, handed it back.

  “Don’t we have work to do?” I asked.

  “You’re all right, then?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes. Let’
s just go.”

  “You don’t have to talk about it. Alfredo told me everything.”

  “I wasn’t planning to talk about it. Let’s go.”

  “Well. Now you know. I’m sorry.”

  I hadn’t told him about being chased with Margarita, or about the night at the hotel with Luisa. I wouldn’t have chosen to tell him about this either, and until that moment I didn’t know why I was withholding information from him.

  “I think it’s time for you to leave, Papu.”

  “I’m not ready yet. I still have to get those documents from the coordinadora.”

  “Never mind the documents. Lesson number six: Not everything is a matter for the individual to decide, and this decision especially will not be yours to make.”

  He then reached into the backseat to retrieve his woolen bag, and withdrew from it a piece of cloth folded up. It was a jaguar weaving on a torn piece of cloth, the same as the one he had given me before.

  “But I already have this, Leonel,” I said, unfolding the cloth. “How did you get it back?”