Obdulio’s Roses by Philip Pardi
Two moments, simultaneous:
I’m staring at the front seat of a small car. Sara has come to pick me up. This is November, 1989, Boston, cold. I’m 23, leaning forward to move what’s on the seat, and it’s The Boston Globe, and the faces of the Jesuits are looking up at me. No, it’s their bodies, face down, in the garden behind the rectory. No, it’s their faces. I remember it both ways.
I’m staring out the window, water about to boil, thinking which tea. This is New York, the Catskills, I’m 53, not paying attention to the radio until
A court in Spain has sentenced a former Salvadoran army colonel to 133 years in prison for the murder of five Spanish Jesuit priests in his home- land in 1989. Inocente Orlando Montano, 77, was found guilty of ‘terror- ist murder.’ The killings happened during El Salvador’s civil war, when Catholic priests were often accused by the government of collaborating
The kettle’s whistle. The warmth of Sara’s car. Pungent mint. Where the bodies were found: roses.
* * *
I remember I went to El Salvador sure of so many things.
Sara, Alejandro, and Deborah drove me to Logan. November, 1990. In those days, you could walk, all of you, right up to the gate, but Alejandro was dangerously triple- parked, so we said our goodbyes just inside. Sara took my new camera and clicked a picture. But the crowds, you know. The first picture on my first roll of film is of someone blurry hurrying past. You can see my elbow in the background, my pack leaning against where my legs must be.
* * *
Within days, I found myself at a labor union where our team provided protective accompaniment.
The band El Indio was playing and everyone was dancing, and after every song, people would call out “La Hierba,” a favorite song, apparently. El Indio kept playing their danceable political tunes, but “La Hierba, La Hierba,” until finally Javier said, Listen, compañeros, we’re in a new political moment, that song isn’t for now. A few songs later, again, “La Hierba, La Hierba,” and again Javier: This is a moment of negotiation, we need to prepare ourselves. I was lost until Amparo explained. “La Hierba” had been a pop song about couples slipping away for trysts in the fields, and the chorus was “la hierba se movía,” the grass was moving, or swaying. You know what that means, said Amparo, with an eyebrow raised. I can guess, I said.
She explained that El Indio took the same music and chorus, but each verse is about a guerrilla attack on the army, and when the grass moves or sways, it’s the guerrilla combatants wreaking havoc. The song begins, “I went to spend the afternoon with the guerrillas.” During the war, when war was the thing, this was the song to play, to encourage folks to join the guerrillas, if not for years then for a day. But now negotiation was the thing, so the songs were about negotiation. Art with a message, preparing people who were risking their lives to adapt to a new possibility: the war might end not with a victory but with a negotiated settlement, which would mean taking and giving. It was all so new. They were working to make it sound like a good thing.
* * *
I never knew exactly how many were killed by the army in Los Angelitos in 1976.
The survivors fled, and now, in 1990, they were trying to reclaim their land. This was toward the end of the war, and there were two of us, cameras in hand, accompanying them. There was a German fi lmmaker, too, though when I saw his footage later, it seemed like all he ever filmed were mothers nursing babies. And sometimes the villagers would hide us, the goal being to get past this or that checkpoint, but when there was a chance of the army doing what the army might do, we were near the front. Eventually, the caravan was blocked by army vehicles, and the villagers said, Well, then, tomorrow we’ll unload the trucks and walk, and the soldiers said, If you walk, we’ll shoot, and the villagers said to us, Will you walk? And I had no idea what I would do but I said, Yes, we’ll walk.
In the end, they negotiated and were able to return to the land they had fled fifteen years before. But what I remember is the first night, how quiet it was, even the hum of the woods, quiet, and the second night, how they backed up a jeep, moved a truck, and soon there was merengue blaring and some brake lights to dance by, and everyone danced, right there on the dirt road. And one person told me, This is how we survive, you know, the stress, and another told me, This is to warn the guerrillas that we are here, so they don’t stumble upon the soldiers by mistake, and I didn’t know which to believe, and much later someone said, The only reason they let us through was the army was scared of being exposed like that, night after night, with guerrillas nearby. But on that second night, my only worry was people smiling at my dancing.
* * *
In February, 1991, the US and its allies invade Iraq.
We had planned to see a movie, but “it’s not the night for a movie,” I’m told. Instead, we walk past Pupuseria Magdalena, past the boys breathing flames for a few centavos on the corner of Boulevard de los Heroes, past my favorite San Salvador snapshot – machine gunners in jeans guarding McDonalds – through the hotel bar and slowly up to the second floor to watch American TV and spill American beer in the ad hoc office of a UPI reporter. Tomás is already yelling at the TV. On the screen: a sky lit icy white and two announcers under the table, then nothing but their headshots and ‘Live from Baghdad’ in yellow. “Tracers, nothing but tracers,” cries Tomás. “Stand up and look out the window for Christ’s sake.” We hate their page- one war.
“What does the beginning of war look like?” asks someone behind a desk in New York. “What do you see?” Tomás opens a beer. “Carpeting,” he says.
* * *
Our job, when we aren’t leading workshops, is to bear witness.
We have cameras, but more than that, we have American or European passports. In a country like El Salvador, where foreign aid is determinant, these are deterrents; failing that, if something happens, it will happen to us, too. Phone trees will be activated; congressional offices will be called. We sit in offices, walk alongside marches, look out from the front seats of cars, sleep in the homes of activists and priests, pace outside meetings. If there is a guitar, if it is handed to me, if things are slow, I’ll play a Bob Dylan song. They’ve never heard of Dylan. At first they have trouble with my name, until someone says, Like Phil Collins! They’ve heard of Phil Collins.
* * *
Between the war and the post-war came the ceasefire: a moment when the army was restricted to its barracks and the guerrillas were in fifteen camps around the country, and the U.N. was everywhere in their blue and white jeeps and vans, a moment when the compas – that’s the guerrillas – were suddenly all over the newspapers.
They did a survey: What do you hope to do when you return to civilian life? What are your dreams for the post- war? And the most popular answer – this was a guerrilla army that had battled the U.S.- backed military to a standstill, to the tune of four billion dollars in U.S. aid during the 1980s, plus training (plus, Patti told me, they would hear American pilots on the radio when the air force was bombing Guazapa, “so not just training,” she would say, pointing her finger), I mean, in this country the size of New Jersey, there was nothing the army could do to root them out. And when the compas were surveyed about their dreams, the most popular answer was to be a taxi driver in San Salvador.
I thought of the young compas I knew. After all they had seen in the war, all those years in the mountains, plus whatever horror had made them join in the first place, and all they wanted now was a chance to be a young person in the city, to move freely, beholden to no one, to just, as a young person, be a young person.
Except Ángel. He wanted to surf. So what he does now is surf. Lives by the beach.
* * *
And then one day I sat in the church where in 1980 a man shot Monseñor Romero.
It was a Monday; I sat there alone for a long while. It’s beautiful; you have to work to bring the history into focus. The early 1980s. In those days, people vanished. Maybe their bodies were found, maybe not. But the ones they found, unspeakable. My friend Eduardo told me – he was embarrassed, but once started he went through with the story – in those days he would wear his wife’s underwear. He paused in the telling; maybe he blushed under his beard. Because, he said. Because if he was taken by the army or the police and his body turned up, he would be unrecognizable. His face, I mean. But that way, his wife would have a way. Because not knowing was the worst. To imagine the torture ongoing. The not knowing, the imagining.
* * *
I don’t have it in me to tell you the story of Romero.
You can look it up: Oscar Arnulfo Romero (1917–1980), Archbishop of San Salvador. A single bullet, through the heart, from a gun in the hands of a man in a car parked outside the church. Quite a shot. They had elevated Romero to archbishop because he was friendly with the rich families. He blessed their quinceañeras and baptisms, was chummy with the president. As late as 1976, 1977, he was denouncing his own priests for talking politics. Then, something. How to say it and not sound simple? He listened. That’s what stays with me. The image of him listening. You read stories about him going to villages and barely saying a word. Until, more and more, he spoke out. Finally, in that sermon, he told the soldiers, if they were ordered to attack civilians, to disobey. He called on them to disobey. You can find that sermon: March 23, 1980. The very next day, they shot him, and then snipers attacked his funeral.
* * *
Tania told me her family didn’t own a radio back then, but on Sundays, she never missed a word.
Everyone with a radio had it on loud. I could walk to the store or wash clothes at the pila and hear everything, she said. Romero would say things in the calmest way. “Don’t be offended if we talk about politics and economics when we preach the word of God.” You’d hear these crashes, like a bomb went off, but it was applause. The whole cathedral, bursting into applause. No one ever clapped in church before. People always talk about his last sermon, “stop the repression” and all that, but you have to read the whole thing. He’d list the people killed by the army during the week. Seven in La Cayetana, he’d say, and a married couple and their children ages 7 and 13, and he’d tell the story of the wife who found her husband decapitated. After they killed Romero, there was no hope for peaceful change, Tania told me. So I, you know, she said, I joined the fight.
* * *
Then there was the day during the cease- fire when Jaime was banging on the front door.
He was working for the U.N., doing small stuff, when a co-worker called him over and said, Hey, don’t be obvious about it, but look at that guy in the waiting room. Jaime looked. It was a smallish man, quiet- looking, sitting leaning forward with his hands held so his fi ngertips barely touched, and he seemed to be praying. He seemed, said Jaime, small. “Como un pajarito,” said Jaime. Like a small bird. And Jaime’s friend told him, That is the man suspected of shooting Monseñor Romero. And
said Jaime
now
I can’t
stop
shaking –
* * *
El Salvador had the 1960s, too, Eduardo liked to tell me.
We were the hippies, with our long hair and weed. Then there were the squares who took things seriously. They got political, but we just kept having fun. Some of them went into the mountains. As early as the early 1970s there were guerrillas. We started to get it, but it’s all about 1980. Carter then Reagan. Endless military aid, even when Romero asked the U.S. to stop. They kill Romero in March. That gets our attention, Eduardo said, and at some point, the squares and the hippies get together. That’s the history of the civil war: before Romero, hippies and squares; after, a revolutionary movement. But 1980. You could make a movie just about 1980. Maybe six hundred villagers killed near the Rio Sumpúl in May. The entire group of civilians representing the guerrillas in negotiations in November. Four American nuns in December. Every morning, in the streets, bodies. Parts of bodies washing up on the beach. Do you want me to go on?
* * *
Jeanne Kirkpatrick, advisor to president- elect Reagan (and soon to be ambassador to the U.N.) will say the American nuns were “involved.”
You find your hand in a fist thinking about it. The nuns are re- turning from a conference. They are intercepted near the airport by members of the Guardia Nacional. Raped. Villagers hear screams in the night. Their bodies will be found in a shallow ditch, and Jeanne Kirkpatrick will say they were “involved.”
* * *
In the camps where the guerrillas were gathered during the ceasefire, they still carried their guns, still did their exercises and formations.
One afternoon, after whatever workshop we had done, we heard a gunshot – that was unusual, but I didn’t want to act like a startled foreigner. But then came the news: Franco’s gun had gone off while he was cleaning it, and Blanca had come running and despite the blood had tried mouth- to-mouth while a doctor came running, but all the doctor could do was gently lift Blanca off Franco’s body. Franco: a boyish face is what I remember. Once he asked me to translate some song lyrics for him. Sure, I said, what songs? “Cold as Ice,” “Billy Jean.” We sat there, and his gun was on his lap pointed toward me, and I said, is the safety on, and he said, Oh sure yeah, this is the safety and see it’s on. He paused. Or maybe on is this way, I always forget, and he clicked it, and before I knew it, I was standing and he was laughing, and it became a good joke, how Franco made me leap out of my seat like a frog.
* * *
Now boyish Franco had shot himself in the face. An accident.
But he was never the same, Ángel told me later. Franco had been in love with a woman, a compa younger even than he was. But then he got suspicious. She was so friendly with so many, and that hardened him, but for my part, said Ángel, I think she was deeply in love. First love, you know how strong it is. So when he ended it, she was destroyed, and when he took up with another compa, she went to pieces. She left. She went to town, then to the city. Then she returned with the army, as their guide. She knew so much. She knew which merchants in town were friendly with the compas, she knew which houses had hiding places, she knew who had passed information. In the mountains, she knew where the compas had dug holes to hide the wounded, to cache their arms and medicines. It was a river of blood, said Ángel.
* * *
In those days, when I needed to get away, I’d go watch the kids playing soccer on a makeshift field somewhere.
You could tell from a mile away who was getting three meals a day and who wasn’t. If you were close, you could see it in their faces. From further away, in how they ran. Sometimes you would see one who clearly wasn’t chasing after one who clearly was, and for a while it was close, but then the one just gave up. You could see the giving up.
* * *
By the time I made my trip to El Mozote, it had become an obsession.
In photos, I’m ashen
I think it was the tenth anniversary. Or a year later, 1992. In those days, still they found bones. Chickens and hens found them. Children. In the fields, along the river, in the spot they cleared for the new church. There was a team of Argentinians, exhuming. There’s a monument with nearly a thousand names, but the most famous name is Rufina Amaya, who isn’t on that list. And then there’s Ray Bonner, from the Times, who was the first to interview her. You can find his story, dateline “Mozote,” January 27, 1982, below the fold on the first page. (The headline that day: “Reagan vows to keep tax cuts.”) Actually, there were two stories on the same day, one in the Times, one in the Washington Post, but the massacre was the same, and her story was the same. In both of them she slips away in the confusion as the U.S.-trained soldiers round up the women and children. In both of them she hears her children calling to her as soldiers kill them one by one.
* * *
I saw her once.
She was living north of where it had happened, on the road to Perquín. This is how Bonner puts it when he’s describing what he found in early 1981: “Somewhere amid the carnage were Mrs. Amaya’s husband, who was blind, her 9-year- old son and three daughters, ages 5 years, 3 years and 8 months. Mrs. Amaya said she heard her son scream: ‘Mama, they’re killing me. They’ve killed my sister. They’re going to kill me.’ ” Later, when she wept, she buried her mouth in the soil, to make no sound.
It was a week before the compas found her. First they heard her, crying in the night – they thought it was a ghost. Later they guided Bonner and two others in from Honduras. She told her story and it came out on the front pages of the Times and Post. And nothing.
Then in 1995, I was reading every day the stories coming out of Srebrenica.
Again, thousands. Again, the world could care less. Again, a reporter managed to find a way in to interview survivors. It felt eerie; it was like a light going out. I stood up – I remember exactly where I was: in our tiny attic apartment in Greenwood Lake, N.J. – I had to stand up to keep reading the paper, and when I was done I turned back to page one, and there was the byline: Raymond Bonner. I don’t know if he has nightmares, but if not, maybe it’s because I have them for him. He lives in Australia now. I looked him up. He owns a bookstore.
One time, out of the blue, I heard him on the radio after Rufina died in 2007. She left behind a new family. Her children must be in their thirties by now.
* * *
An exhumation moves slowly.
Left tibia, 5 centimeters. One person brushes, digs, dictates; another takes notes. Clavicle, female, fragment, 27 centimeters. Fragment of a girl’s dress, red, including three buttons, also red. When we step away, we find kids playing war, but they call it soldiers and guerrillas. For guns, they throw tiny pine cones at each other. For hours, all I can hear are children laughing, racing, laughing. Say they are eight, nine, ten. They were born right after the massacre, somewhere. If their parents survived it means they fled before the army arrived. Possibly they made it to a refugee camp in Honduras. Then, too, some of the families moved here from elsewhere because the land was empty. The soil is good. The nights are cool.
* * *
During the war we led workshops on human rights and nonviolence.
Then as now the only way to get everyone’s full attention was to get away from the office, so we’d go somewhere. But if they knew what you were doing, forget it. So the union or peasant group or the organization of mothers of the disappeared, whoever it was who had invited us, would pretend. Usually, we were a church group. Our hosts, I’m sure they knew, but the point was they didn’t have to know.
We’d work outside, in the shade of palm trees: I cannot possibly describe the beauty, but more than the beauty, the way the beauty of the world at such moments would breathe itself into me. Parrots. Massive and (I was told and I believed) wise Ceiba trees. Torogoces. Mangoes, limes, and avocados picked for lunch. Sweet, sweet coffee, all manner of kindness, and all the ways that getting away from the daily routine loosens us, allows us a reaching that is really a filling into a form we can’t always inhabit but which we carry with us always, hopeful. The laughter, the endless laughter. The dancing when the work was done. All this. And then the stuff of the conversations, the receptionist, so quiet at work, talkative now, the bomb that spared her but took everyone else in the room, or the young man explaining how they beat you in prison. Here, he said, raising his shirt, pointing to his sides, where it will leave no bruises.
* * *
On one retreat, I got sick. Everyone thought from too much sun, but I’m sure it was from holding onto both the beauty and the horror. I kept to my dormitory room for a day.
Our hosts were nuns, and they were worried. They kept asking the others, “Y el padrecito?” And the little priest? No one could figure out who they meant, but then they remembered they were a church group. The nuns thought I was a priest. They kept bringing me soup. I hadn’t eaten meat in years, you understand. They’d appear at the door, at first quietly in case I was sleeping, then quietly because they were always quiet, bearing chicken broth, beef stew, and eventually (because I needed something stronger) pig’s feet soup. That really did it – I was up all night. But in the morning, oddly, I felt better. When I came downstairs, everyone was looking at me. The nuns were serious but my colleagues seemed to be on the verge of either laughing or crying.
Over breakfast, Amparo whispered that the nuns had seen my light on when they went to bed and seen it again when they got up early, and they thought I was up all night praying. “He’ll be better in the morning,” one of them had announced. “There’s a lot of God in that little priest.” Seconds later I had entered with a boisterous buenos dias and announced I was starved, and one of the nuns had turned away and crossed herself. I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t come clean; maybe I didn’t want to come clean. I didn’t know what to do, so I just smiled, and the more I smiled, the wider their eyes as they turned away.
* * *
After the war, Tania will get her MBA and work for the country’s largest beer company, where a lot of her co-workers are former soldiers.
Every day is an act, she tells me. I pretend not to know anything about politics. And the weirdest thing – or it was weird, but now I’m used to it – is they are nice people. I mean, two of them were Guardia. You know what they did, right? And now they’re nice?
* * *
When I return after the war, Tania insists on meeting me at the airport with her favorite taxista.
On the flight, the man next to me is on a visit to his family. They made it through the war, but then – imagine! he says, like he is still surprised by the whole thing – they started demanding payments. The gangs, you understand. He says, “I don’t blame them, I mean, we told a whole generation, here, solve your problems with a gun, so now they are solving their problems with a gun.” First thing off the plane, we pass a mural and an exhibition with relics and mementos and pictures – all about Romero. At this point, he is nearly a saint, and the man walking ahead of me crosses himself as he continues on. An hour or so later, arriving in the capital, we cross over a new highway leading out to the west, and it’s called Boulevard Monseñor Romero. I am looking out the window like a kid, back after so many years, but Tania keeps looking at my hat.
When we get to her apartment, she goes into her room and returns with a baseball cap and holds out her hand, saying, “Everything about your hat says, ‘Here’s the Gringo!’ ”
* * *
I think it was on that same trip that I found myself in a lovely place called the Museum of the Word and Image, where they have a whole wing devoted to photographs taken by Romero during his years of traveling and visiting communities. It just adds to the story, doesn’t it? Of this man who listened. He had a keen eye; he didn’t look away.
How many stories do we have of people who listened and didn’t look away when what was in front of them didn’t fit with what they knew? What stories come to mind?
Really, I’m making a list. Who has listened and heard and as a result changed their mind? What models do we have? What stories do we tell?
* * *
When the Peace Accords are signed in January, 1992, they include provisions for a U.N. Truth Commission to investigate wartime atrocities committed by both government and guerrilla forces.
The Commission is given six months. My friend Jaime works in the office, making photocopies, setting up interviews. The Commission advertises on TV, on the radio, in newspapers; they offer confi-dentiality; they fly around the country in helicopters to gather testimony. When the work begins, as they write in the opening of their Final Report, time stretches ahead of them into “Kafkaesque infinity.” The English-language version that eventually reaches me is either a hurried translation or a canny attempt to capture the lurchings of language forced to extremes. “Violence was a fire which swept over the fields of El Salvador; it burst into villages, cut off roads and destroyed highways and bridges, energy sources and transmission lines; it reached the cities and entered families, sacred areas and educational centres; it struck at justice and filled the public administration with victims; and it singled out as an enemy anyone who was not on the list of friends.”
To write that sentence, though. To make “violence” the subject, the actor, to naturalize it: a fire? Don’t scream just yet, I tell myself. But do put it down for a while.
* * *
In the days to come, I will read all two hundred pages, taking breaks to trace arcs that unfurl from my small sublet on 13th Street before slowly furling back.
But on that first day, sort of but not really reading, trying to get a sense of the shape of the thing, I find myself scanning the footnotes. Worse than making “violence” the subject of a sentence is corralling the dead into ever smaller fonts. My eyes land on note seventy- five and I’m out the door.
* * *
In there, somewhere, the story of the UCA, the Jesuit University.
November, 1989. I close my eyes, as if it might not happen if I stop reading. But like a movie it starts. The soldiers drag the priests into the garden and one by one shoot them in the head. Then they find Elba, the housekeeper, and Celina, the housekeeper’s daughter, in each other’s arms, hiding, and shoot them. They spray a wall with machine gun fire.
And Obdulio? He is the gardener at the university, and Elba is his wife, and Celina is their daughter, and Celina is 16. And because com
1. “Between 17 and 22 July, 68 civilians were executed by army troops during a military operation in Los Llanitos, Cabañ as. Between 28 and 30 August a further military operation by the Atlacatl Battalion in Las Vueltas, Chalatenango, resulted in the massacre of some 50 civilians on the banks of the Guaslinga river.”
bat has reached every part of San Salvador, Elba and Celina are sleeping at the university where they will be safe, while Obdulio keeps an eye on their home. And in the morning, who is it who arrives to find the bodies, the priests, his wife, their daughter, the bodies, who is it who arrives to fi nd the bodies –
* * *
You never told the story of the saw, a friend says to me one day. You mention it in that poem, but you don’t tell it.
I can’t, I say. The story of the saw has become “the story of the saw,” a placeholder for what I refuse to put into someone else’s brain. Why some details get voiced and some don’t, I can’t say. I’m trying to explain but, at the same time, I’m suspicious of his wanting to know, and when he insists – I just think these things need to be remembered – I turn on him: Listen, I say: I remember it. At least once a day, I remember it. Some days, the whole day passes, and I’m going to bed, and I know, before I even think about it, that I’m going to think about it. The saw. I’m telling you, what I see when I close my eyes is worse –
I don’t know what else I said. Looking back, the conversation is like one of those T’ang Dynasty paintings where the middle dissolves into clouds. I drove home with a keen sense of needing to ask and with an equally keen sense of there being no one to ask. It was winter; each morning, the blanket of snow outside matched the blank of the empty page. Long days like that. Wanting words but the right words, then wanting the absence of words. A list, unwritten, indelible. Easing into the third person; tiptoeing back. Slipping into prose because honestly some days how, how to enjamb another’s pain?
* * *
The day of the arrest, if I’m honest, is a blur.
From the moment we are stopped to the moment I ring the doorbell at our team’s home, accompanied by a rumpled man from the U.S. embassy, it will be maybe twenty-four hours. It was our first time accompanying Eduardo and Clara. Accustomed to being harassed, they had noticed something different in the preceding days: now they were being monitored. Which explains the surprise, the annoyance, really, of the soldiers who block the road: they had never known Eduardo and Clara to not be alone on their morning commute. They are waiting at the bottom of the road: two pick-ups, a dozen or so men in camoufl age, German shepherds. The commanding officer keeps asking me who I am. We wait in handcuffs while they consult. Eventually, they put the three of us side by side in the back seat, and we are off.
“Who are these people?” I whisper to Eduardo. “National Police,” he says.
* * *
Traffic. Rush hour. A complete standstill. We turn around and take an alternate route, which brings us close to the office of a labor union where I also spend time. I look out at the stand where I sometimes get coffee and pan dulce. More traffic. People on the sidewalk look in at us as they walk past. And then who is looking in but one of the accountants from the labor union. With my hands cuffed behind me, all I can do is raise my face toward the window.
If you can imagine using your lips to do what your arms do when you raise your hand, that’s what they did, and the accountant stops in his tracks. He looks left and right. Later, he tells me his first thought was, Ah, so these foreigners accompany the police sometimes, too. But then he recognizes Eduardo’s truck directly behind us, sees soldiers behind the wheel.
* * *
By the time we are being processed, word is out.
Representatives from the union alert Eduardo’s family and contact the press. We are blindfolded and separated, the cuffs are tightened. I sit for a long time in what sounds like a garage, and a woman runs her hands through my hair and says, Such a handsome boy, why are you getting involved in stuff like this? Meanwhile, Eduardo’s brother is on the radio denouncing yet another abuse by the National Police, and the team I work with is working the phones.
Blindfolded, I am led down a tangled web of hallways. My guide neglects to tell me when to turn, when to lower my head, when to stop. After a few collisions – the walls feel like rough stone – a tentativeness takes over: body trying to move without exposing the body. Which I discover cannot be done.
* * *
Small things stay with me.
In the cell, there is half a mattress. The beans they bring me are cold, and though I’m famished, something tells me not to eat. The man from the U.S. embassy is annoyed by the whole thing. He visits me once, twice, maybe a third time. When he tells me the three of us are being released, he shakes his head. I think maybe you ought to run for mayor in Cambridge, he says. I think half the damn city has called me today. In the days that follow, I develop pink eye from the blindfold, and as I recount to our Salvadoran counterparts what happened, and as we agree on how lucky we were – the traffic! the accountant! – a channel opens. I’m shown scars. Cuts. Cigarette burns. Elena thinks nothing of pulling her shirt all the way up to show me her chest. We stand there, looking eye to eye. Then I look at her chest.
* * *
A few months later, at a birthday party, they unveil a piñata.
Music is playing, and the tradition is you dance a few bars before taking a swing with the bat they place in your hands, but first they blindfold you. I’m sitting with Tania as I see things unfold. I can’t do this, I whisper. The blindfold, I explain. She looks at me, and she has a very Tania look in her eyes: Tenés que hacerlo. You have to do this. They go from the smallest to tallest in the room, so it takes a while. I am last.
My name is called and the bandana is tied tight around my head. I reach up to loosen it, but Chepe thinks I’m trying to cheat – the point is you cannot see the piñata when you swing at it–so he makes sure it is covering my eyes completely. I freeze. Completely. Around me are people I know and love, and music, and children waiting for candy to pour forth, and maybe all of them know what is happening at that instant, or maybe none of them do, but then Tania knows. Next thing, her hand is on my shoulder. I just can’t bear to let him dance alone, she jokes, and as everyone laughs, we dance, and with one hand each on the bat, we bring down the piñata.
* * *
During the war, you were careful.
You shared nothing that didn’t need to be shared. You memorized phone numbers and addresses. When you met someone, you took your cues from the person introducing you. With strangers, you talked around issues, a kind of dance, till you knew where things stood.
I’d forgotten those habits until, years later, we were driving through Texas on our way to Austin, and we stumbled onto a Mexican restaurant in what seemed to us like the middle of nowhere. I remember it was near Palestine, TX, a beautiful spot: a deep green valley. We ended up talking with the waiter, a trim young man, and one thing led to another (where did you learn Spanish? Oh, I was in El Salvador for a few years. Where were you? Mostly in the capital. Do you know La Libertad? The beach! Yes, that’s where I’m from) and suddenly there we were, both of us, being careful. But curious, too. I left after the war, he said. It was tough, the war, I said, but the post-war was tough, too. You were there during the war? Yes, I said, for a short while. What were you doing? I was working on a few things, I said. By yourself? With an organization, I said. Consulting, I added, because it’s hard to do this dance when you’re out of practice, and he leaped, he guessed, excitedly: “Con la FAES?” With the Salvadoran Armed Forces?
It must have been tantalizing, the possibility that I was someone who knew his world, someone who would understand. I had to think fast, but my hesitation had already made it clear that no, no, I was on the other side. Then it must have hit me that we were in east Texas, far from the war, so I said, Well, I was with a human rights group, and he nodded. But his face was ashen, like he’d reached out and learned again never to reach out. I was determined to say something to him, I was going to lie and say I had friends in the army, something to bridge what had opened, but he never approached the table again.
* * *
As soon as I could after arriving in 1990, I went to the Jesuit University.
I had images of 1989 and murdered priests in my mind, so it was a shock to find well-dressed students studying in the cafeteria, buying their statistics and sociology textbooks at the bookstore, giggling on benches outside the academic buildings. I’d peek into classrooms and see sleepy students. I would tell my mother all about the sleepy students, trying to convince her that even during the war, life goes on. Riding the bus in the morning, looking up from the newspaper accounts of last night’s bomb blasts and gun fights, you’d see a woman emerge from her half- cardboard shack dressed in a bright bank teller or retail seller uniform – to have a uniform meant status – skip stone to stone across a muddy gutter, sidestep the waif of a stray dog, and hop onto the bus. Every time a helicopter was shot down in El Salvador, my family was sure it had landed on my head, but no, I tried to tell them. Life. Goes. On. In the offices of the university, with typewriters clicking away and students waiting for transcripts, you could see the photograph of Romero with a hole in his heart: when the soldiers had sprayed the wall with gunfire a year earlier, that’s what had happened, and that’s how they left it.
* * *
But in the garden out back, where Obdulio found the bodies, he had planted rose bushes, one for each of them, the Jesuit priests, his wife, and his daughter, and you could stand there for a long time doing something that must have looked, to someone looking on, like praying, and if you didn’t know exactly how to pray, no one was the wiser, and if you thought you knew anything at all about the world and how to move through it, right then and there, it dissolved, and more than standing there, what you will remember is the feeling of walking away.
Philip Pardi is the author of the poetry collection Meditations on Rising and Falling (University of Wisconsin Press, 2008). His poems, essays, and translations have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Gettysburg Review, New Orleans Review, Seneca Review, and Michigan Quarterly Review. with left-wing rebels. The priests and the two women were dragged from their beds early on 16 November, 1989, and murdered on the university campus.