What You Have Heard Is True

by Carolyn Forche

  We weren’t so naïve as to assume that we had moved on, as our culture phrases it, or worse, that we had achieved closure, but we had created a home for our son that resembled those of his playmates, and they could come to our house for playdates without anything seeming amiss. Our kitchen was well stocked with juice boxes and packages of crackers shaped like little fish. There were alphabet magnets on the refrigerator that held Sean’s drawings in place, and he could already count to ten in Spanish and knew the Spanish words for house, milk, chair, dog, and good night.

  When the telephone rang one night that November, I recognized the voice as a friend of ours, a documentary filmmaker most known for his exposés on intelligence agencies and covert operations. Allan sounded jittery, but he always sounded that way, so I thought nothing of it. He spoke rapidly with interjections, talking to himself, and also as if someone else were listening in on his conversations. Most people would have thought him to be a bit paranoid, but we realized there was probably some basis for his caution. He told us that he needed help, he needed a favor, and could he come by for a few minutes to speak with us? He didn’t want to talk on the phone, the matter was too sensitive, but in those days, many people hesitated to talk on the phone. I said yes, of course, come over, and then went around scooping up Legos from the floors and gathering Sean’s “persons” into his toy hamper. I must have fed Sean his dinner and had most likely already tucked him into bed when the doorbell rang. Through the tiny peephole, I saw that Allan was with a woman who had been assisting him with some film editing. I don’t remember her name. Maybe it was Andrea. She was quite thin and wore her hair upswept and wispy. Her black clothes seemed to flow about her, draped on her bones and held there by the clasp of her hand. She spoke and dressed like a New Yorker and wore many strands of pearls around her neck, which few women activists wore. It was she who explained to us who Alex was, and she who asked if we might allow him to stay with us for a short time. I mention this because it might have been her demeanor and graciousness rather than Allan’s jittery, darting-eyed plea that made us imagine saying yes.

  Alex had run away from a military unit in El Salvador that might or might not have been part of a certain brigade, the Atlacatl, but according to Alex, his unit had also functioned as a death squad and was responsible for many killings. He knew how the military death squads operated: who gave them their orders, who trained them. His life in the military was not as he had imagined it would be, however, and he had become afraid for his life. When he’d enlisted, it was promised that he would become an intelligence officer, someone important, and would wear his uniform with honor. This is what he wanted, this was all he wanted, but things had gone terribly wrong and by the time he realized how wrong, he felt himself to be trapped, so when the opportunity came, he ran away. He wouldn’t tell us much about the journey, but it had taken him to Guatemala and Belize before he reached Mexico City by bus, where he knocked on the door of a human rights office, telling the people there that he wanted to confess his crimes, to tell the truth, to expose his commanding officers and their advisers, who, he insisted, were Americans.

  The human rights office in Mexico didn’t seem to know what to do, but they decided that Alex was a credible witness, and his testimony should really be heard in the United States. They made some phone calls, and that is how the matter landed with the filmmaker Allan, who recognized immediately how important such a person as Alex might be, given the rarity of death squad members’ coming into the open. Alex had to be carefully handled, as the filmmaker put it. The matters of which he spoke were of vital importance, but to be in possession of such information was dangerous. Alex needed to talk to members of Congress and the media and also people who were well placed in the international community. None of this would be easy. There would certainly be those who wouldn’t want Alex’s story to be made public, especially regarding the alleged American advisers. This young, fleeing soldier had to have a place to stay while he was here, preferably a quiet place in a respectable neighborhood where he might feel safe. He also needed to be with people who would understand his situation and wouldn’t look at him as if he were a monster. This more than anything. Not a monster.

  It would be only for a few days, or a few weeks at most, and of course it went without saying that utmost care would be taken, whatever that might mean. I didn’t ask Allan if we were his first choice for this, if others had turned him down, but I do remember that as he talked, Harry and I had one of our silent conversations, studying each other, and when Harry closed his eyes and brought his hand to his mouth, I knew he was in the past, and thinking as he had in the past. He needs, Allan said, to be with you. I told him who you are. He wants to talk.

  At the time, giving Alex shelter seemed the right thing to do. It is what the Catholic activist Dorothy Day would have done, and what those in the hospitality house movement, who were feeding the hungry and homeless in American cities, would also have done. So later that night, the filmmaker returned with Alex, who had with him only one small bag of things that had apparently been given to him in Mexico. He wore a big green army jacket into which he seemed to disappear, offered by someone along the way to ward off the cold. I showed him to his room and gave him some Salvadoran towels, at which he smiled broadly. I showed him where the light switch was, and how to open the window, and when I turned, I saw that he was looking at himself in the mirror above the empty bureau, a bit surprised at seeing himself there. He leaned in, made a stern face, leaned out and smiled, ran his hands through his hair, and leaned in again. He was smooth cheeked and I guessed him to be in his midtwenties. His eyes were black, deep set, and they narrowed when he spoke as if he were skeptical or nearsighted. As he studied himself in the mirror, he caught my reflection and spun around, startled, facing me as if he’d been caught stealing something, and then he smiled again as he would were he having his picture taken, an odd grimace showing gold-rimmed front teeth.

  “¿Vale?” I said. “Okay?”

  “¿Sí, como no?”

  So that is how I left him that first night, in the room by himself standing under a light fixture that I saw had become a trap of dust and moths.

  * * *

  The next day began with coffee and the jangling phone, with getting Sean ready for preschool, packing his juice box and snacks, listening to the message machine’s music of beeps and voices:

  “Hi, Carolyn, this is Joan, I was hoping to touch base with you before . . .”

  “Hey, if you’re home, pick up.”

  “Yes, this is Robert’s mother. I was wondering if you might be interested in . . .”

  “This is Sarah. Are you there?”

  And then Allan’s voice: “We have to be on the Hill by nine.” Click.

  Alex looked like a soldier, even without a uniform, short and muscular and quiet, always seeming to take things in, giving the impression that he didn’t miss much, despite his lack of English. He took what we gave him: iced tea, chicken, sliced papayas, an extra blanket, a glass of water at night, but he never asked for anything. When we slipped into English with each other, his eyes followed our conversation, as if somehow by listening well enough, he would understand. I showed him how to set the alarm on the clock radio and tried to explain the difference between the settings for music and the buzzing sound.

  “You push this all the way for music,” I said, “and halfway for the alarm.” But he wasn’t looking at the clock. I felt, even then, that he was studying me.

  Every morning he went with Allan to Capitol Hill. Sometimes Harry went with them, and a few times I did too, but mostly I stayed home, taking care of our normal house or grading student papers. When Alex returned, usually in the late afternoons, I would ask him how things went, and he would shrug and smile and shake his head. “Vale.” So I taught him to say Fine.

  At night, I would hear him talking into the tape recorder we gave him. He suffered from insomnia, and whenever I woke, which was ofte
n to check on Sean, to comfort him from a dream or cover him with the blanket he had kicked off, I heard Alex murmuring downstairs. Sometimes I watched him from the landing, in his circle of lamplight as he sat on the couch, leaning over the coffee table with his notes, and what he called his charts, talking to himself or into the machine. Sometimes I went all the way down the stairs and sat beside him to see if he wanted to talk, but usually he said that he preferred to tell the machine everything, and then we could listen later.

  On one tape, he tried to talk a bit about himself rather than other people, but he found this difficult because he was genuinely bewildered by who he had become, and found it almost impossible to connect his boyhood self with himself in the present.

  On this tape, he kept starting over: “Hello. My name is Alex.” PAUSE. “This is Alex speaking.” PAUSE. CLICK. “This is Alex. When I was seven years old, I was a normal child of that place, without ideas and without a future.” CLICK. He never said the name of his country. It was always “that place.”

  “What am I trying to say with these declarations? What can be done with the truth of one person?” he said into the machine.

  * * *

  CLICK. “I was born on the 21st of September 1962. My pseudonym is Alex. I’m from a middle-class family, and because of the times, I took refuge in military service. They promised me a special training for special work. I was to join an elite group, they said, and I was proud because of it, proud before my father and proud of what my intelligence had made possible for me. The training we received was very precise, very specific. At first it was about codes and code breaking, and then about surveillance techniques, and by the time it was about interrogations and disposing of people, it was too late.” CLICK.

  Alex said he would take people into the back of a van, tie them up, and bludgeon them to instill fear, not bludgeon to death, or even to loss of consciousness, and all the while the interrogator, or the intelligence officer or the adviser who was with him, would ask questions, and through their swollen mouths, broken teeth, and blood these people would try to answer, and often the answer, according to Alex, was “I don’t know.” And, in fact, Alex said, he believes now that this was true, that they didn’t know, and so, shaking his head sadly at this new realization, he whispered into the machine, “so they were telling the truth.” Nevertheless, when the questioner had had enough, Alex was told to dispose of the person, which he understood to mean killing.

  CLICK. “Our unit was ordered to dispose of people after their interrogations were finished. I always looked at the faces of the interrogators: the face of Corporal Alvarez, the face of Subsergeant [unintelligible], code-named Eduardo, for the sign.”

  The youngest victim in Alex’s memory was a boy of fifteen, the oldest an old woman, old enough to be a grandmother, he said.

  “How did you do it?” I asked, pretending that I didn’t know, that I had not seen the bodies such teams as his threw onto the roads or left at the so-called body dumps, stripped and hacked apart, eyes gouged or pecked by vultures, that I hadn’t seen the machete marks, the open mouths stuffed with genitals, swollen bodies in putrefaction, that I hadn’t taken the smell of corpses into myself so deeply that for the rest of my life I would know that smell and not mistake it for anything else.

  “Well, in my case,” he said, “I would take my knife to their throat and look them in the eyes so that I could see their fear and helplessness, which interested me, and I would start cutting. The air would create bubbles in the blood from the throat, and there would be a deep gurgling noise. Sometimes they were still looking at me, terrified and helpless, as this happened. That bubbling and gurgling is a distinct sound. Sometimes I dream of the bubbles.”

  “Alex, who did you think those people were that you were killing?”

  “I was told they were persons of interest, and also that they were Communists and subversives and so on. You know, subversivos. They were all subversivos. But I had no idea.”

  “And then what?”

  “And then we left them somewhere, sometimes in front of a specific house in order to send a signal, and at other times this seemed not to matter, so we took them, as I told you, to the beach or to the dump or we just tossed them out along the road. Some corpses were thrown into the lakes. And I know that several living people were pushed into the sea from helicopters. In some disposals we took them to the beach and tied them to dynamite so their bodies would explode and scatter on the rocks near the sea. There were all sorts of ways of doing things.”

  * * *

  After preschool one afternoon, Sean brought his chess set to Alex and asked if he would play with him. Sean didn’t yet know how to play chess, but he enjoyed moving the pieces around, which he also called “persons.” I might have asked Sean not to bother Alex, but to my surprise, Alex seemed pleased and began setting up the board.

  “I know this game,” he said. “I know this! ¡Ajedrez! This is the game they taught us during our training to help us understand strategy. Sí. I used to play against myself, both sides of the board. Either way I won, either way I beat myself.”

  He shook his head and laughed for perhaps the first time during his stay with us, and somehow, that afternoon, he taught Sean what the pieces were and how they moved—¡el rey, la reina, el caballo, el torre, el alfil, el peón, y muchos peones!—and somehow Sean learned to play, although he made his moves impulsively, while Alex studied the board for a long time between moves. Alex was a patient teacher, but he also took every game seriously, even those played against a child, and that is how I glimpsed that he was at least in small measure a child himself, he was still the boy he was on the day he entered military service. During their games, I brought them juice and Goldfish crackers or milk and bread with jam, and the birch fire rose behind them in the fireplace as night fell and the early winter windows blackened. It seemed all right then. Harry was coming home earlier and earlier, which was nice too, but I didn’t ask him why. I assumed that his work in the housing project was going well and, of course, he liked best to make photographs when the light was good, and the light faded early in November.

  * * *

  By the second week or so, Alex seemed to be growing weary of telling his story over and over, and was beginning to feel that no one understood what he was trying to say, or else they didn’t care, which was a source of great frustration. One night he said to me: “People think that what happens to someone else has nothing to do with them. They think that what happens in one place doesn’t matter anyplace else.”

  This reminded me of something I had read years earlier—a single sentence from The Captive Mind by the poet Czesław Miłosz, written when he was also young: If a thing exists in one place, it will exist everywhere. That sentence had lodged within me, glinting in the darkness of my unformed thoughts, and what it meant to me was that every evil permitted anywhere in the world could spread to the whole of the world. I quoted Miłosz to Alex, who seemed pleased that his observation was reflected in the writings of an important Polish poet.

  “What else does he say?”

  “Well, there’s a passage where he describes a village in Europe during the war, the villagers going about their business, a man bicycling to his office, buying bread I think it was, and the next day, this same man is searching through the smoking ruins of this village for a potato. Or something like that. I think the chapter began with Miłosz’s trying to explain why people in the West, Americans, seemed like large children to the Europeans. Miłosz thought it was because they had never experienced this kind of loss: a bustling village one day, and ruins the next.”

  “Like children?”

  “I think that’s what he thought, yes, as I remember.”

  “This is interesting, thank you,” Alex said.

  * * *

  Toward the end of his time in El Salvador, Alex had started to dream about the killings, and despite all his training, these nightmares took away t
he peace of his sleep, and he woke, more and more often, drenched and crying out, having gazed into his own eyes in the dream as a knife wielded by his doppelgänger sawed away at his throat.

  “I was killing myself,” he said, “using my own technique—I had to get out.”

  This was more than he had ever said. We were sitting on the oatmeal-colored sofa. It was well after midnight.

  “I realized what they had done to me,” he said after a long silence.

  “What who had done?”

  “My superior officers. They had taken my soul away and made me into a monster. This wasn’t me doing these things. It was the man who was trying to kill me in my sleep.”

  “Why didn’t you quit?”

  He looked at me with patient incredulity.

  “You can’t quit,” he said. “If they think you are even slightly pulling away or having doubts, they do something to you. And they know. You can’t hide doubts from them. They give an order and if you hesitate, that’s it. For a while I knew I had to get out but I also had to wait for my chance, because I would have only one chance, and if I didn’t make it that would be it. You can’t tell anyone. You can’t confide in anyone. You have to have a plan. My plan was to take a bus to Mexico City and find some group, human rights or Green Cross, and tell them everything and ask for protection.”

  “So what happened?”

  “I’m here, talking to you. I’m not going to say how I did it. Someone else might want to get out too, using the same method.”

  “These men who were going to kill you, Alex, who are they? Who did you run away from?”