What You Have Heard Is True

by Carolyn Forche

  “This is another one. They are similar: two wildcats facing each other, standing on their hind legs, as if they were about to pounce. The funny thing is, I was given one of them years ago, and then when we were in Guatemala, I received the other. They came from different places, years apart. When you put them together, you will see. They were once the same cloth. They are yours now.”

  “But you can’t,” I protested. “Why are you doing this?”

  “Oh, but I can, Papu. And someday you will know why.”

  * * *

  I spent that night and the next at Margarita’s, lying on the gray tile floor between the twin beds, occasional headlights moving along the walls, pausing, moving again. There was gunfire in the distance from time to time, and Margarita would tell me where it was coming from and how far away it was. Garrison. Power station. Do you want to keep my dress? She asked. You should take it. I didn’t want to go back to the United States and I gave her my reasons. She listened and seemed to consider them. The silver lighter sent its wavering flame from her hand to her face and then she held it to mine and admitted that she understood that it would be difficult for me to live in my country again without ever coming back. But think of us who have to stay here with war coming. You will be isolated, Carolina, yes, but you stand a good chance of surviving. For us—who knows? Our throats could be cut in a moment.

  I would never again feel the fear that I felt in those days, even in other countries at war. In that place and at that time, there was a special quality to the fear.

  That afternoon, Leonel made arrangements for me to spend time with Monseñor Romero at Divine Providence. A Venezuelan journalist was scheduled to interview the archbishop and I had been approved to join them. Monseñor arrived alone, walking under the flame trees and bougainvillea in his white cassock. It was five p.m. on March 14, the hour when the little parrots flock over the city so punctually that people set their watches by the passing. We sat at a table at one end of a community room, drinking water, with a fan turning back and forth, and Monseñor tapping lightly on the Bible he always carried. The Venezuelan journalist was there, and when he began asking questions, I turned on my little cassette recorder and preserved what I believe was Monseñor’s final interview.

  When asked whether peaceful means for finding a solution to the conflict had been exhausted, Monseñor replied, “No. For if that were true, we would already be in the midst of a full civil war.”

  The Carmelite Sisters of Divine Providence hurried in and out, carrying brief messages, bringing fresh water, and remaining at hand should Monseñor need anything. The journalist wanted a “story” from the archbishop, something new, controversial, and “newsworthy,” and so he pressed him about his relationship with the popular organizations, which now had military wings. He wanted to know what Monseñor thought about the guerrillas.

  “My relation with the organizations is one of a shepherd, a pastor with his people, knowing that a people has the right to organize itself and to defend its right of organization. And I also feel perfectly free to denounce those organizations when they abuse the power and turn in the direction of unnecessary violence. This is my role as pastor: to animate the just and the good, and to denounce that which is not good.”

  A wind rose in the palms, and the fan was unobtrusively silenced by one of the sisters. It was almost dark, but the lights in the room were not turned on. The sisters didn’t want Monseñor to become tired; they wanted him to join them in the little convent kitchen for supper, and allow him a few hours of peace. The journalist, however, wanted Monseñor to clarify precisely his position, now that the people were beginning to take up arms.

  “As I have told you, I do not have a political role in El Salvador, but rather a pastoral one. As a pastor, it is my duty to construct this Church, my community, the Church. That is what I am responsible for. And this Church, as a people, illuminated by God, has a mission too among the people in general.”

  The journalist had failed to elicit a condemnation of the organized opposition, and as the nuns were hovering nearby, he must have understood that his time was up. As delicately as he could, the journalist raised the issue of Monseñor’s own safety.

  “I have a great confidence in the protection of God,” he said. “One does not need to feel fearful. We hear from Jesus Christ that one should not tempt God, but my pastoral duty obliges me to go out and be with the people, and I would not be a good pastor if I was hiding myself and giving testimonies of fear. I believe that if death encounters us in the path of our duty, that then is the moment in which we die in the way that God wills.”

  After the journalist left, we went to the kitchen, where Leonel also joined us. As the sisters hurried the food to the table, they joked with Monseñor and teased Leonel about something. The mood was light and unhurried. Over platters of frijoles, plátanos, cheese, and fruit, they talked about the day, recent developments, things that had happened to people they knew, and then Monseñor asked me about the night of my meeting with Alfredo. Leonel nodded, so I told Monseñor a brief version of what happened, including the men holding machine guns over the roof of the taxicab. He listened with his eyes on the freshly wiped table, then nodded and said to Leonel, “It is for the best” that I leave the next day or something to that effect, that arrangements had been made, and I must have appeared surprised and resistant because Leonel suddenly chimed in firmly with “I agree.”

  “But, Monseñor,” I said, “forgive me but it is so much more dangerous for you.”

  Monseñor now had his Bible on the table before him. He was tapping it with his fingertips again, and I saw the same soft light that I saw during the interview, silvery, coming from his eyes, his skin, even his fingernails, an emulsion of light, such as sanctity bestows.

  “My child,” he said, “my place is with my people, and now your place is with yours.” That is what I remember verbatim, and the rest had to do with his wish that I speak about the sufferings of the poor, the repression, and the injustice, that I would say what I had seen, and when I told him that I didn’t think I could do this, that I would have no opportunity, that I was only a poet and not a journalist or public figure, he assured me that the time would come for me to speak, and that I must prepare myself and I could do that best through prayer.

  He rose from his chair and we all stood, and he made the sign of the cross in the air above us and we all crossed ourselves and then he was gone.

  George Orwell writes of living in an atmosphere where certain things had dropped away and others had taken their place; I felt that now too—my life was all of a piece: My heart and intellect and soul were aligned with what I was doing in the world, and the people around me were also living and working in this way, and on behalf of each other were willing to live at risk. Many other writers and poets had also written works that expressed the feelings and thoughts I was having. Leonel had shown me, for example, this quote from Albert Camus: It was in Spain that men learned that one can be right and still be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, that there are times when courage is not its own reward. He also kept this from Bertolt Brecht, folded into his wallet, and later, he passed this slip of paper to me: Sink down in the slime, embrace the butcher,/If you could change this world, what would you not be willing to do? But on the issue of what is to be done, things were not always so simple for him. He fell back on his Antonio Gramsci: If you hit a nail with a wooden mallet with the same strength with which you would hit it with a steel hammer, the nail will go into the mallet instead of the wall.

  “You want to know what is revolutionary, Papu? To tell the truth. That is what you will do when you return to your country. That is all I’m asking of you. From the beginning this has been your journey, your coming to consciousness. All along I have only been responding to you. When you ask me a question, I try to place you in a situation in which you might find your answer. I do not have your answers, Papu. I am just a man.”

&nb
sp; * * *

  I didn’t want my final view of the country to be from the air: white cattle grazing the field near the runways, haze wrapping the volcano, to leave Madre Luz, her hands on my shoulders, her eyes fixing upon me with the light that issued from them, did not wish to hear Vaya con Dios, embrace the younger sisters and go. I would stay with Margarita that night and early in the morning I would be driven to the new airport Comalapa Internacional that had replaced the dark shell of Ilopango, and after a brief layover in Guatemala City I would be on my way home and would not return for another twelve years, the years of the civil war that could not be prevented and would claim almost one hundred thousand lives, with eight thousand people disappeared, five hundred thousand internally displaced, and another five hundred thousand taking refuge in other countries. Leonel would remind me that history counts its casualties in round numbers. I would not return until “the signing of the peace” in 1992. Within a week of my departure, Monseñor Romero would be assassinated in the chapel of Divine Providence while celebrating Mass for the repose of a woman’s soul. Madre Luz would reach him as he lay on the sanctuary floor and hold him as he gave his life. More than one hundred thousand people would fill the cathedral, the plaza, and the streets for his funeral, bishops from many nations, priests and nuns, but no government representatives from these nations. It was the poor who would attend the funeral for Monseñor Romero. When the first bomb went off in the plaza, the people would flee into the cathedral until it could contain no more, and with further explosions the cathedral itself would seem to shake, and there would be gunfire and panic. The American photographer from Time magazine would be there again, as he had been that day when the army prepared to attack those who had taken refuge in the seminary, and he would take photographs of the crush of people against the cathedral gates until he had to put down his camera to help them. His were the iconic photographs of the horror of that day.

  On the day after Monseñor’s assassination, hearings on El Salvador were held in the U.S. House of Representatives, as scheduled. In the morning, the intelligence agencies testified in closed session; in the afternoon, we were allowed into the room to hear the testimonies of human rights organizations and the religious community. The afternoon session was as compelling as the morning session was secret, but in the end, the committee voted to approve sending twelve military advisers (changing the name to “trainers” so as not to stir memories of the American war in Vietnam), and the first $5.5 million in military aid to the Salvadoran government. A short time later, Amnesty International invited me to join an ad hoc working group on El Salvador for a meeting at the United Nations.

  The next few years involved turmoil in my personal life, a move to the East Coast, a brief period of teaching at two universities and in the old territorial prisons of Alaska, and the publication of my second book of poems, The Country Between Us. It was through this book, and as a poet, that I found myself at last speaking to people in the United States about the war in El Salvador, as Monseñor said I would. The travel of those years is a blur of dark auditoriums, church basements, blue-lit airport runways, late nights in the living rooms of activists who seemed always to bring tortillas and black beans to their potlucks. I spoke at colleges and universities, but also in bookstores, churches, synagogues, community centers, and even at Rotary Club breakfasts, anywhere anyone would listen, and everywhere people seemed responsive, so there were at least some Americans who would take the word of a poet. We hoped to prevent U.S. military intervention, to provide sanctuary for refugees, and bring the war to an end, but every year U.S. military aid for the war increased exponentially, and so for most of that time, we believed ourselves to have failed, and I would remember that when our situation was particularly fraught, Leonel would turn to face me in the Hiace, paying no attention to the road ahead, and shout over the wind Das Boot!—the same thing he whispered in my ear on one of the last nights, when I embraced him and felt beneath his raincoat—something he otherwise never wore—an arsenal of holstered armaments. I told you, Papu, that when it became truly dangerous, you would know. Das Boot—remember? It was a film about a German submarine patrolling the Atlantic during World War II, whose crew is “beset by tension, boredom, despair, dwindling supplies, storms, and a sense of futility.” Das Boot entered our dark lexicon. But I would also hear Monseñor’s voice, coming from the convent kitchen: We must hope without hoping. We must hope when we have no hope.

  My walls were covered with maps: The United States had pushpins marking every place I thought I should go, the isthmus of the Americas had x’s every place I had been. There were also photographs tacked to the walls, reports, newspaper clippings, Post-it notes with various reminders, lists of names of the desaparecidos and the dead: a paper war room, a paper cemetery, a paper command and control. When the windows were open, some of these items were lifted from the walls and rocked gently down to the floor, so there were often also papers scattered there as well, or stuffed into boxes and folders. I knew where everything was, I told myself. For the desaparecidos, I kept records of where everyone was last seen and what they were wearing at the time. Friends no longer asked what all of this was for, or what I was doing, and accepted that for a while at least, I would bore the dinner party with the latest news and trivia, such as how one high-ranking American in the foreign service was making a fortune airlifting illegally logged mahogany by helicopter out of Honduras. Things like that. One day—and I mention this now because it became important later—I saw a photograph in Newsweek of a photographer lying protectively over another photographer’s wounded body in a street under fire. I tore it out and tacked it on the wall, most likely on top of something else. The photograph saddened me, but I thought nothing more about it at the time. Then another photographer sent word, asking if I would write a text for a book of photographs taken in El Salvador by thirty photographers from the United States and Europe. They had a text by a French writer already, but had decided that it wouldn’t work. It was too flowery too something and Harry didn’t like it, they said. When we talked about what sort of text it should be, every time I made a suggestion the response was We’ll have to check with Harry and get back to you. Harry was in Beirut. Harry was in Paris. We’ll get back to you. There was no Harry.

  * * *

  —

  It was decided that I would go to New York to write the text while in the company of the editors, who would be at the table, moving photographs around within a mock-up of the book, changing their minds about the sequence again and again. Perhaps because it was a beautiful summer night, they all came to meet me at the airport and the first to greet me was a man who opened his arms and announced See, Carolina? There really is a Harry. He was driving an old purple Oldsmobile convertible then. The top was down, Ruben Blades was on the radio, and while crossing the Brooklyn Bridge, this Harry recited Hart Crane’s poem “The Bridge” from memory. I was in the backseat, and I caught him looking at me in the rearview mirror as he made his recitation. It seemed that I was to stay in Harry’s loft on the Hudson River because the apartment the other editors shared was too small for guests. When we pulled into the parking lot that has since been replaced by a condominium building, he wrapped a chain around the steering wheel and padlocked it. His building had only a freight elevator with more chains, and as we rose on its dirty platform the six floors to his loft, I saw that the wallet in his back pocket was also chained to the loop on his jeans. Too many chains, I thought, and wondered if this neighborhood might require such security. The loft was without furniture except a bare kitchen table, hammocks slack against the support beams, and a mattress on the floor. I was familiar with that. He had rented an office typewriter for me and set it on a draftsman’s desk. They would leave me to write there alone during the day while they gathered at the apartment to work on layout. Did I need anything else? Would I be all right? I should take the mattress; it was more comfortable than the hammock.

  * * *

  By the second night,
we both slept on the mattress in each other’s arms, and when we weren’t with the others we spent long hours talking about El Salvador, where he had gone after the revolution had triumphed in Nicaragua and he was no longer needed to document medical facilities for the new government in the aftermath of the war. I learned that he had come under aerial bombardment in Estelí, and because of the photos he took there, Time had given him a contract. We had overlapped in El Salvador but hadn’t met there, and I explained that I didn’t meet many journalists because I was doing other things. What other things I didn’t at first say, but eventually I would tell him everything. One night I mentioned that I had, on one occasion, met a photographer in El Salvador, and I began describing the day at the seminary with the refugees. He was looking at me strangely.

  “You were that nun? I remember you now. I thought you were a nun,” he said, and he explained that it was because I dressed plainly, wore my hair short, and smoked like some of the other foreign nuns.

  We were lying without clothes in the heat of the summer night.

  “Obviously, I’m not a nun.” And then I said, “I thought you were CIA.”

  “Why? I’ve been accused of that before. It’s an accusation people like to make against Americans, but why?”

  “I don’t know. Your Spanish was too good. You showed up when no one else did. And I was suspicious of everyone then.”

  “That’s understandable. But I’m not CIA, I can assure you.”

  In the next days, we talked, going through the photographs Harry had taken in El Salvador, some of which were included in the book. I kept returning to one in particular, a photograph of soldiers posing for his camera in the middle of a road, with mutilated bodies at their feet.