What You Have Heard Is True

by Carolyn Forche

  “Mirá, this is what I have been trying to tell you, all of you. Here you live happily. Children live happily, with a great sense of tranquillity. I come from a country where there is only misery, and I’ve been thinking . . .”

  The logs hissed from the wetness of the unseasoned wood, and a blackened split of oak fell into the ash.

  “Thinking what?”

  “The risk I’m taking is very great. Someone said to me—Allan said—why don’t you tell the Americans this and why don’t you tell the Americans that? Tell them where their money is going. But the man who is suggesting that I talk doesn’t know what it’s like to come out of a military—concentration camp. I’ve been making these declarations in the offices on Capitol Hill, and I have realized something. The Americans already know what’s going on, and have known for a long time. What’s going on is fine with the Americans, so what am I doing here? Yes, I tell them, we introduced civilians into the black-windowed vans. Yes, we were out of uniform when we did this. The people were hooded and bound and had no chance whatsoever to save themselves. We were under orders. So now the Americans know the truth. I told them who Orlando Zepeda is, the vice minister of defense. I told them about the commander of the Belloso Battalion. They know. So it doesn’t matter now if they put me in prison. I feel much more tranquil. The information is released. I feel tranquil. And I don’t care whether the tape recorder is on or off.”

  * * *

  Some nights later, Allan brought a police artist to the house who carried with him a book of faces: a catalogue of noses, eyes, lips, chins, beards and mustaches, foreheads with their hairlines, the hair itself, and this artist sat beside Alex, asking him to choose a nose from among the noses that most clearly resembled the nose of the man Alex had been calling William, the American adviser who taught his unit techniques of interrogation and methods of disposal. They were to make police sketches of two men, William and another American who never gave his name but who spoke Spanish well and Alex believed him to be originally from elsewhere. This nameless, quieter American seemed to be there always to observe William, as if he were an apprentice, but he was also there, Alex thought, because he was the only person who spoke both languages.

  “He used to interpret for us.”

  “Interpret interrogations?”

  “No. Interpret William to everyone else.”

  Such sketches were then done by hand, and the artist patiently redrew Alex’s changes of mind until there were two sketches before us, his final version of both faces, drawn to Alex’s satisfaction. He marveled at the accuracy of the depictions and, after the artist left, kept lifting the sketches from the coffee table and gazing into them, his face clouded with anger.

  I don’t remember quite what these sketches were for, nor to whom they were to be shown. Allan wanted them, perhaps for a film he was making about all of this, or for the television news, hoping someone would come forward to identify these Americans, and, of course, the significance of having to depict them in this way was not lost on anyone.

  * * *

  Every dawn I heard the shower running down the hall, a door opening and closing, and then footsteps hurrying down the stairs. Before everyone else was up, Alex was usually seated at the table, hair slicked back, dressed in the crisp new clothes Allan had brought to him: khakis and a dress shirt buttoned all the way up, no tie, waiting patiently for coffee. On this particular morning, I woke earlier for some reason and was already busy in the kitchen when he came down. Buenas.

  On this morning, a light snow drifted like ash from the clouds. According to the radio, there was a blizzard in Nebraska, with gusting winds and temperatures as cold as 25 degrees below zero. In Michigan, where my parents still lived, it was also snowing. Outside now there were only flurries, ticking like coarse salt against the windows, with here and there a dry brown leaf rattling on a branch.

  Alex had his own radio now, a portable Grundig shortwave, and he had been spinning through the frequencies that morning. I remember vaguely listening to the high whines of his signals, intermittent voices, and white noise coming from his direction, when I noticed that he’d gotten up and crossed the room, turned on the television set, and was kneeling before it, watching with his eyes close to the screen. There was footage from El Salvador with the breaking news that six Jesuit priests at the Catholic university had been murdered, along with their housekeeper and her daughter. Among them was Father Ellacuría. Alex was studying the footage: soldiers milling about, and although it was not yet reported that these murders had been committed by the Salvadoran military, Alex was convinced that he recognized members of his own unit in the footage.

  * * *

  A few nights later, I was sitting with him again. Harry and Sean were both asleep. The refrigerator hummed but otherwise the house was quiet. It was still snowing. Something had changed in Alex since the Jesuit murders were reported. He was armored again, much as he had been that first night, and he was nervous too. I offered him a glass of water, and he said no but then took it. There was something he wanted to ask me.

  “Do you think I killed some of your friends?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re looking at me as if you think I killed some of your friends.”

  He was leaning toward me, reading me, narrowing his eyes, and then, satisfied, leaned back into the couch and smiled, as if he were teasing or joking.

  “I’m tired,” I remember saying. “I’m going upstairs.” And I asked if he wanted an extra blanket.

  “No, thank you. I don’t sleep.”

  The next day, Allan brought Alex’s “girlfriend” to the house to “calm him down,” and she stayed with us too, for about a week, mostly in the guest room with the door shut. I began to make telephone calls on the advice of a human rights lawyer in San Francisco, but it seemed there was no provision in international law to protect such men as Alex. No country would provide asylum to a confessed perpetrator of crimes against humanity, no matter how contrite, no matter how valuable his testimony. If such a man emerged from the darkness of the abattoirs to give evidence of state crimes, there was simply no place for him to go. I realized that Alex now knew he was trapped.

  Harry had also noticed a shift in Alex’s demeanor and by now had seen the dead eyes in his photograph. Sometimes, he told me, the camera sees things we don’t. It was time for Alex to go.

  When they left, I gave him a packed lunch and a carton of cigarettes. He wouldn’t look at me at first, and then smiled sheepishly.

  “You did the right thing, coming here,” I told him. “I hope you find peace.” Que le vaya bien—

  A few weeks later we were told that twenty-seven federal agents had surrounded the apartment where Alex was staying in Los Angeles, had apprehended him, and summarily deported him to the custody of the Salvadoran government, whereupon he was immediately imprisoned. Some years later, Sean would tell me that he didn’t remember the man called Alex, who had once stayed with us, but he had always wondered how he had learned to play chess.

  The photographs of the people Alex and the others killed were collected by Salvadoran human rights workers into those plastic photo albums with peel-away plastic pages: the high school faces of the dead, some of them still students, others social workers or teachers, labor organizers, activists, lay church workers. There were doctors and lawyers among them. But most seemed oddly to be the same age, about eighteen, posing in the last photograph taken as they were about to finish school. Yes, there were some who were younger and some older in these pictures, those who had looked into a camera at a wedding or family gathering, but still they comprised a graduating class of the dead. We didn’t, of course, think of them as dead yet but as disappeared, and until one of them was found at a body dump or on the beach or in the morgue, and the swollen or mutilated face somehow matched to the smiling face in the book, we thought of them as missing. When a body was found that matched, it would be p
laced in a coffin, sometimes with a window cut over the face so that the mourners could see that yes, this was indeed that brother or friend, and the coffin would be taken to the altar for Sunday Mass, where Monseñor Romero welcomed them and recited their names into microphones, so the names would be heard throughout the basilica or the cathedral, and also on the radio and in the streets. It didn’t matter how many names. He called out all of them.

  All we had in the beginning was one table in a shack with primitive tools and no saws to break up the bodies. We were going to have difficulties here, the doctor told me, but it doesn’t matter. We can do it with one knife. That is how they began to perform autopsies on the butchered dead. Later the forensic specialists from Argentina would excavate the mass graves at sites such as El Mozote in Morazán, where hundreds of civilians were massacred by the Atlacatl battalion trained in counterinsurgency by the Americans. El Mozote had declared itself neutral, aligned with neither the guerrillas nor the army. El Mozote had twenty houses, a church, and a convent. In the days before the massacre, people from the surrounding countryside had taken refuge there. When the soldiers arrived, they made the people lie facedown while they searched and questioned them. Then the villagers were told to lock themselves in their houses overnight. Anyone seen leaving would be shot. The soldiers spent the night there too, and in the morning the villagers were gathered together again: men separated from women and women from children. First the men were taken, then the women and girls were raped and machine-gunned. They cut the throats of the children and hung them in the trees. When everyone was dead they set fire to the buildings. The single surviving witness had hidden herself in a tree. Over a month later, journalists reported blackened bones and rotting human flesh beneath the ruins, but these reports were denied by the governments of El Salvador and the United States, and the journalists accused of “gross exaggerations.” Such massacres also happened at that time in La Joya canton and the villages of Jocote Amarillo and Los Toriles and also in Cerro Pando canton. Eventually the forensic specialists gathered and stored the remains in a one-story white building. Shoeboxes held the skeletons of infants.

  Small things can always be carried. Miniature clay figures broken into many pieces. I have a small collection from the war years, and I had always planned to repair them, but for that I would need patience and time, a magnifying glass, the tiniest of tools, and whatever glue would hold together pieces of unfired clay. My sight is not what it was, nor my memory. It would require days of sorting: a pile of limbs, plantains, hats, mangoes, cántaros for drawn water, market baskets, another basket of shoes, heads, and roofless huts, the man and the woman broken while making love under the clay dome, one or the other crying out. I have kept the pieces, so it wouldn’t be impossible, just as certain thoughts have kept their broken moments in my forgetfulness: the abandoned road, the still-smoking crib of blackened corn, the blue smoke rising from ruined fields.

  There were eight attempts to assassinate Leonel, and finally the military sent a unit of sixty soldiers to apprehend him. He received an advance warning and managed to hide himself in a large pile of garbage against a building on his street. He had to stay in the garbage for hours. “The dogs knew I was there,” he said, “the children knew I was there, everyone knew I was there except the army. I was very moved that no one gave me away.”

  He arrived in Washington, D.C., and was eventually granted political asylum. During much of the war, he worked tirelessly to inform individual congressmen and senators about El Salvador, particularly those who had committee assignments that gave them power over such matters as certification of respect for human rights. Sometimes I worked with him, but I also spent some of the war years in Lebanon, South Africa, and France, and when I returned to the United States, I continued to give readings and talks, but was mostly taken up with keeping a household and raising our son. When the Chapultepec Peace Accords were signed in 1992, I returned to El Salvador to attend the celebrations of the peace at the invitation of Resistencia Nacional and my friends in the Catholic Church. I also went back several times during the 1990s to help Leonel with various projects, mostly investigations of political assassinations and corruption, so we did work together during stretches of time, and I was able to see Margarita too, who also visited me once in the United States. We have stayed in touch with each other. In 2009, I was invited to attend the twentieth-anniversary commemoration of the murders of the six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper, and her daughter. That was a very moving week and included visits with Leonel, who now lived with a dog named Rupert who appeared to be a husky, and a mean parrot who tormented the dog. One afternoon then, I was sitting in Leonel’s casita, watching the parrot pull on the dog’s coat and run away, and talking with Leonel about gold-mining operations in Cabañas, when John Taylor, the Peace Corps volunteer who had picked me up that first night at Ilopango International Airport all those years ago, walked in unexpectedly. We were pleasantly surprised to see each other but, in hindsight, it was a bit strange that we reunited just then after thirty years. We sat for an hour or so and talked. Leonel was happy that we were there. Like old times.

  It isn’t the risk of death and fear of danger that prevent people from rising up,” Leonel once said, “it is numbness, acquiescence, and the defeat of the mind. Resistance to oppression begins when people realize deeply within themselves that something better is possible.” He also said that what destroys a society, a state, a government, is corruption—that, and the use of force, which is always applied against those who have not been convinced or included. He was always talking about corruption: trying to prevent it, expose it, eradicate it. He was dedicated to the task of bringing the sin to the eye.

  “This is the stage of denunciation,” he said, “which precedes the revolutionary moment.” He did not believe in war as a solution. There is no instance, he said, of a country’s having benefited from long warfare. But if the armed struggle begins, it must not fail or the poor will suffer for another two hundred years. He said he hoped that the leadership of the various guerrilla factions were not imagining more than they could achieve. It wasn’t that he was either for or against them.

  “I have no doctrinal allegiances. I’m interested in critique of ideology rather than its promulgation. But we will see,” he said, “as your poet Bertolt Brecht suggested, the power of the poor to change the course of history is the world’s one hope.” (When he quoted poets, they were somehow almost always referred to as my poets.)

  “What I have been doing is something like three-dimensional chess. When you are playing chess with oppressors, you must think twelve moves ahead. Must not let your guard down. Must stay focused, as the Vietnamese were, must have patience as they did, must study and know the enemy better than they know themselves.” Eventually, he would tell me that he had gone to Vietnam, and I was never clear whether this was at the end of the American war or just after, but he had met General Võ Nguyên Giáp, who commanded their forces against the Americans and was considered one of the greatest military strategists of the twentieth century, according to Leonel. Did I remember the photograph I had seen in the casita? The man with whom he was shaking hands? That was General Giáp.

  In Vietnam, Leonel had studied how the war had been fought, but he’d not had much time, which is why he kept reading anything published on this subject. Later I was told, by someone in a position to know, that some of the Salvadoran guerrilla fighters had received their training from Vietnam, not Cuba, so they fought like the Vietnamese. One night, after one of the peace talks, Leonel took a friend out to see the flickering of flashlights in the surrounding hills.

  “They keep moving on the perimeter,” he’d said, “they don’t rest or slow down. They can fight with fewer this way, fast and mobile but fewer, light on their feet, without the need for massive supply lines. They can discharge their weapons and run ahead, firing from another place, so that it seems they are greater in number, forcing the enemy to use up its ammunition.”

/>   * * *

  —

  It was Leonel, working tirelessly for years, who “put the peace talks together,” as they said, and brought about the end of the war.

  “It was like putting a massive jigsaw puzzle together and it took him years. He did it with friendships, contacts, connections. We were only some of the pieces of this puzzle,” the person in a position to know said.

  I asked this person, whom I will call David, many questions, and here is some of what he said: “Leonel was invited to join the Resistencia Nacional faction of the guerrilla forces but he declined, saying he could do more good on the outside. He was in touch with their commander, Fermán Cienfuegos, who called Leonel Gordo—you can guess why. It was Leonel who arranged the first peace talks between the FMLN [Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front] and the military. The representative of the FMLN was, as it turned out, the “Alfredo” of the night of the cashews raining on the roof of the little casita. Alfredo had long had Cienfuegos’s permission to talk to Leonel, and Leonel had given him good information throughout the war. Leonel had talked to everyone, as he always insisted, but because that included the Americans in those days, he came under suspicion.

  “It was the commander of another faction who put out the word that Leonel worked for the CIA,” said David, “the same commander who, it is alleged, killed the poet Roque Dalton. But you know, Carolyn, at that time the CIA operatives in Central America were old Cold War anti-Communists and Leonel despised them. He would talk to them, but that’s all it was. Talk.”

  I wanted to know about Leonel’s collection of miniature ships, which had grown to the size of several fleets. Leonel had first shown a few of them to me when he was drawing his first mural in California. They were made by Wiking-Modellbau in Germany.