What You Have Heard Is True

by Carolyn Forche

  “You took this?”

  He was quiet, then nodded.

  “Tell me. Can you?”

  “I don’t usually talk about the pictures.”

  A quick cacophony of sirens and car horns rose from the street to his sixth floor.

  “Okay, I’ll tell you. This probably won’t shock you as much as it would most people. I was driving north from San Salvador because I’d heard there was a major battle in Chalatenango province. There’s a place there, a military installation or barracks—I think it’s called El Paraíso—Paradise. The road was pretty much abandoned. The military had burned the fields on either side, so that there could be no cover for the guerrillas. They were trying to prevent ambushes, I suppose. There was an almost ozonelike tension in the air, like the prelude to a storm, and there seemed to be some . . . alteration in the atmosphere—a hot, dry wind, almost like near a desert. There was this haze in the road, the haze of heat, and I saw, about a hundred yards ahead of me, a group of men, so I started slowing down, and as I drew closer I saw that they were soldiers, and one of them was using a machete to chop up a corpse in the road. There were several corpses. Another soldier was sitting by the side of the road eating a melon, also opened by machete. There were several others standing over the dead with their rifles, and there was also an officer, also with a machete.

  “At first, because I was tired and had seen a lot of combat in the past days, I thought maybe I was hallucinating. Was I seeing what I was seeing? Yes. I pulled the car within twenty feet of them, opened the door, got out, and as I walked toward them I started taking pictures, without too much conscious deliberation, without thinking, I just needed to take these pictures, and while doing so I began to engage the government soldiers—Oh, what happened here?—in a friendly manner. As I spoke to them, the officer moved behind the corpses and the others also moved behind them to pose. I remember the heat of the road and looking into the open chest cavities of some of the dead, and a leg that had been hacked off. I took ten frames in black and white and maybe three or four in color. Then there was a shift within me, and also perhaps within them, but whatever I had been doing was now over, and I was in danger myself, a danger I hadn’t perceived in the beginning, but the soldiers who had done this could also do this to me, and they began acting a little strangely. This was the moment when I realized where I was and what had happened, and I remember asking about the battle up the road, and they said Yes, it’s dangerous, be careful, or something like that. I got back in the car and drove around the bodies, because they were in the middle of the road, and I also drove around the soldiers, and pressed hard on the gas pedal—I wanted to get out of there. Within maybe ten minutes, I reached a firefight, and someone there turned, wheeling his weapon to point it at me, the weapon he had just been firing, and a sound came vomiting out of my mouth, the word ¡Firme! Attention! given as a command to soldiers. It wasn’t me speaking. But the soldier immediately came to attention. He might have thought I was an American military adviser, there were plenty of those. They had been arriving by helicopter in Gotera—those small bubble helicopters. Gringos. They were there to pay people off, they were intelligence officers—with some sort of folios under their arms. They were there for a few hours and then they were gone, but yes, I was the one who had given the command, yet it wasn’t me speaking. In my memory, these two events are connected: this hallucination that was, in fact, real, and this language that was not my own. Perhaps that saved my life.”

  “Was there ever a time when you really thought This is it?”

  “Many times. During the January offensive, I was on that same road in Gotera, going north toward Perquín, and I went up to El Carosal, a little town north of the Torola River. I stopped at a guerrilla roadblock. I knew these areas were often booby-trapped by the army or by the guerrillas, so it wasn’t safe to pick up stones, or to move them, and while I was there, firing broke out, and I was no more than six or seven feet from the car, but because the bullets were so close, I knew that someone was aiming at me and not at something else, so I fell to the ground and crawled under the car and the car started taking rounds. I’m underneath the car. There’s almost no clearance, maybe an inch. I’ve got the transmission in my face and I’m thinking I don’t want to get hit in the head. Some people don’t want to be hit in the genitals, some don’t want to be hit in the butt, but I didn’t want to be hit in the head. So I put my camera bag in back of my head. Each time a bullet hit the car, the car jumped, then fell back down again. At that point, I thought about getting out from under the car and crawling toward a ditch. I would have to slide myself maybe two or three feet to reach that lower position, but as soon as I started to move out there was a ráfaga—a burst of fire—that rippled through the macadam right there where I was going to move to. Then a helicopter flew over and sent a large round into the roof of the car. I wouldn’t know that until later. The car had probably been shot eight to twelve times. But it still ran! Most of the bullets had gone through the door panels. There’s a weird sound when a bullet goes through a door panel. A tearing and a suction sound, something unlike other bullet-impact sounds. When I started to pray under the car, I couldn’t remember the Our Father, but I did remember the Hail Mary. Finally, the shooting stopped. I was bleeding from a cut. Flying stones? Then after about fifteen minutes, as I was getting ready to get back in the car, a military vehicle arrived—maybe it wasn’t fifteen minutes—but the military vehicle pulled up and there were some soldiers on foot, and they patched me up and I got back in my car. Later I found this—rolling around inside my camera.”

  He placed a bullet on my palm that looked like a miniature, half-peeled banana. “My camera saved my life.”

  “Did you find out who had been shooting at you?”

  “It’s hard to say. There had to have been a military column, and there had to have been a guerrilla column, but I didn’t see any of the guerrillas, and I didn’t see the army until after it was over.”

  “How did you know it was safe to come out from under the car?”

  “The firing had stopped—when you say ‘safe,’ what do you mean?”

  A few hours later I accompanied him into the darkroom he had set up in the loft in the course of his ongoing project to transform one floor of this former spice warehouse that still smelled faintly of spices. He needed to develop some film and make a few prints. We stood together wordlessly in the safe light, while he swished the print stock through the trays of developer and fixative, and the images appeared, ghostly at first from white paper. When he flipped the light on, I saw the news clipping tacked to the wall among some other papers, with the photograph of the two journalists lying in the street.

  “That was the worst. Olivier.”

  The prints were now hanging to dry, the trays empty of their chemicals, and he was washing his hands. I must have read the caption before, identifying the journalists, the two names, but I didn’t remember, and didn’t make the connection, when I first saw the story in Newsweek, with the man who had stood beside me at the seminary when the army trucks arrived.

  “That was in Gotera too. San Francisco Gotera. The town was deserted. Olivier Rebbot, Benoît Gysembergh, and I had gone there together, I think we were in two cars. We knew it was a combat zone, but Olivier felt comfortable with me because I also spoke French. I was walking along a streambed and saw a corpse that had been eaten by dogs. His spine had been stripped of flesh but he still wore trousers.”

  “Did you photograph him?”

  “No. There was no reason to do it. The man wasn’t there any longer. I don’t photograph corpses unless there are people nearby, living beings, unless the photograph can have some meaning.

  “At a certain point, we came under fire. There was an army patrol, but I didn’t see any other soldiers. We were south of the town, close to the road to San Miguel, I think the distance was thirty to forty kilometers, thirty to forty minutes of driving on that winding
road. For some reason, we were walking on this side of town when a firefight broke out between the guerrillas and the army. We were not with either group.”

  “That’s dangerous not to be behind the fighting of one side or the other, isn’t it?” (Leonel had always told me that, among other things he taught about military engagements.)

  “No kidding. Well, as you do in these situations, when the shooting started, I looked for cover. We were on an urban street, everyone hiding inside. They were adobe houses, painted in pastel colors. I pressed myself against the side of a building. Olivier crouched on the other side of the street near a stone wall. I began taking pictures of the army patrol moving up the street on foot. The guerrillas were about a hundred yards away, pinned down. I was watching the army, and then saw that Olivier had been hit. He was lying on the paving stones in the street. I got down on my hands and knees, crawled toward him, and turned him over. He’d been lying facedown. The shooting continued. I put my body over his because he was already wounded and I wanted to protect him from anything else. He was conscious but unable to speak. We weren’t communicating verbally. We were pinned down in the crossfire. There were cracking sounds and I knew I couldn’t raise my head. I thought we were both going to die, that we would be pummeled by bullets. I thought that if I could get low enough, if I could be eaten by the earth, if the earth could open up and make a space for us, we might be protected.

  “When the firing stopped, a Red Cross vehicle came along, and I remember picking Olivier up and dragging him. One of the soldiers on the corner, who was in a firing position, came over and helped me drag him into the back of the Red Cross jeep. I got in, and they drove to the hospital in Gotera, eight blocks away. Olivier was convulsing, covered with blood. I was covered with his blood. He asked if he was going to die and I said no, you’re not going to die. He had an open chest wound.

  “I bashed through the doors of the hospital and there was nobody there. The place was empty. And I can remember running around in the halls of this small clinic, and finally finding two doctors who had been treating combat injuries for two days, and were trying to get some sleep. They came out, saw Olivier, set up the operating theater, and I watched them do the surgery. They put green drapes over him. There were no nurses, these doctors were in their midtwenties probably, and they managed to extract the bullet from his lung. They handed me the bullet, a little toxic mushroom in my palm. A NATO round. I still have it. One of them told me, as they do, that if Olivier made it through the night he might live. And then they pushed his gurney into a ward. The sun went down, and there was Olivier on an IV drip, feverish, delirious, and slipping in and out of consciousness. The ward was now filled with the wounded. I sat there all night with him, watching his chest rise and fall. Morning comes and there begins a flurry of communications, between the capital and New York and Newsweek—.

  “The Associated Press publishes a photograph of Olivier wounded and me with him. Benoît Gysembergh does the same in France. So these images are out there in the world, unbeknownst to us. I’m getting calls from New York. I said: He’s been wounded, he’s been shot through the lung, it’s extremely serious but he survived. They ask if I’ll drive him to the capital and I say I don’t think that’s a safe thing to do, I don’t think he’ll make it, I think he’ll bleed to death, and they say okay, we’re going to send a private plane. So they chartered a small plane, which arrived either the next day or the day after. I flew in that small plane to San Salvador with Olivier and then somehow in another plane to Miami. I remember getting off the plane in Miami. My memory begins to weaken here but I believe that when we landed in Miami, I turned Olivier over to other people and I went back to El Salvador. I got back on the plane and was in Gotera again within forty-eight hours. The fighting continued for a week until the offensive was called off, and I received the news that Olivier had died of a massive hemorrhage. I had lied to him, telling him he was going to make it. I felt ashamed to have survived.”

  He had finished with the work in the darkroom, so we crawled through a low window and onto the roof of the adjacent building. The river wind came. There were doves and pigeons flying in and out of the windows of the warehouse across the street. The sirens and horns were far away now and it was almost possible to hear the wings of the birds and the river water slapping against the piers.

  “A short time later,” Harry said, “we went to the ocean to scatter Olivier’s ashes, which were given to us in a metal can like a paint can. I held it in my hands, and we drove in a cortege of five or six cars to Sheepshead Bay in southern Brooklyn, and boarded a tugboat. It was one of those cold, sparkling winter days. The light was perfect. The crew of the boat were members of the Longshoremen’s Association that had refused to load weapons onto ships bound for El Salvador. They understood who we were and what we were doing. They were people who understood in a country that didn’t. Karen DeYoung was there, and Olivier’s sister, Sylvie, Olivier’s mother, and me. We were trying to pry the paint can open with a screwdriver. Karen finally managed to get the top off. I looked inside and there was this—bone meal—and we tossed it out over the water, along with flowers, and his mother said, “Adieu, Olivier. Adieu.”

  Early every morning Harry played a Nicaraguan revolutionary song on his cassette machine to rouse us to work, followed by serious Latin music or jazz. I told him my stories too, and he understood them. He had met Leonel in El Salvador on several occasions, he said, and thought well of him, but was also aware of the rumors regarding his possible affiliations, about which he “couldn’t care less,” except that he didn’t want me to be involved any longer in such dangerous activities, even though he himself, of course, would continue to work as a war photographer. He bought a coffeepot for me and I taught him to drink coffee, surprised that he hadn’t yet developed the habit. We shared a fondness for cigarettes. His refrigerator was filled with bricks of film, cigarettes, and Chuckles candy. I began to stock it with food. He figured out how to get the burners on the stove to work. Every night we went on the roof. Sometimes he cried out in his sleep (he said I did too), and several times called out to Olivier. I wrote during the day, attempting to produce a text that would please them, but one of the other editors thought that I wrote too much about the campesinos and not enough about the war. Harry defended me. He was restless and couldn’t seem to sit still long, so he ran a lot of errands. By that time, I’d been traveling around the country for a while and was thin and jittery. Harry thought I should get off the road, but understood why that wasn’t possible. I saw his El Salvador through his photographs. He saw mine through my poems.

  As if he were going to stay in one place, and I was going to live with him, we bought dishes. After two weeks, I had finished the text, the photographs were in their proper order, and Harry had asked me to marry him, whereupon he left immediately for the war in Beirut.

  * * *

  Years later, I would have long talks with one of the men who had leaped from the death squad vans and dragged people into them. His name was Alex. (Alex is a pseudonym, as even the death squad members had seudónimos.) I never learned his real name. All I have left is his photograph and several cassettes of the voice recordings he made and gave to me for safekeeping. Harry photographed him, and it seemed at the time that he was looking into the camera quite normally, posing for the camera, resting his chin in his fisted hands. The film wasn’t developed for a long time, until after Alex had left us. It was then, holding the image in his hands, that Harry remarked that the young man’s eyes were dead.

  He came to us when we were living in Washington, D.C., in a rented stucco house on a leafy street. The owners of the house, who were living abroad, had added a screened gazebo onto the back, perched high over a ravine planted with azaleas that blazed behind all our houses every spring. But this was November, so the azaleas were not in bloom, and the last of the yellow leaves were gusting to the streets, with the wine leaves of the Japanese maples still clinging to their gray
branches. The weather that autumn was unusually beautiful, clear and crisp. On some days, it was warm enough to have lunch in the gazebo, especially if the winds were calm.

  Our son, Sean, was three and a half years old that November, and the floors of the kitchen and living room were usually strewn with his “persons”—brightly colored plastic Lego figures wearing miniature construction hats, who had built their small cities on the coffee table and across the floor, leading from the oatmeal-colored sectional sofa, past the groaning shelves of books, and into the kitchen, where I was always stepping on them with bare feet. We were living a “normal life” by then. Harry was working as a documentary photographer in a housing project, and I was teaching aspiring poets at a nearby university. Our son was enrolled in a preschool that promised to teach him Spanish. We were among the few in our neighborhood not practicing law.

  If a Salvadoran was to enter our house then, he or she would know we had something to do with their country. Our bath towels were printed with colorful villages from the paintings of Fernando Llort, who also painted a plaque on our wall, and the box in which we kept our miniaturas. There was also a photograph on the wall of Monseñor Romero celebrating one of his last Sunday Masses in the basilica. I took the photograph. It shows him behind the altar, smiling and raising one hand, with an altar boy in a surplice holding what appears to be a telephone receiver to the bishop’s mouth, broadcasting his voice throughout the country. This altar boy will recognize himself in the photograph when he visits our house as a grown man. It is, historically speaking, the only important picture I have ever taken. Harry took many important ones, but now kept his work in archival storage boxes as they were not the sorts of images we wanted Sean to come upon, and Harry didn’t want to look at them anymore himself.