Carolyn Forché - What you have heard is true: a memoir of witness and resistance

PENGUIN PRESS

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Copyright 2019 by Carolyn Forch

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All photographs, unless credited below, are courtesy of Carolyn Forch.

Photograph on courtesy of Bruce Forch.

Photographs on by Harry Mattison. Used with permission.

Photograph on by Benot Gysembergh, courtesy of Paris Match via Getty Images.

ISBN 9780525560371 (hardcover)

ISBN 9780525560388 (ebook)

Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the authors alone.

Some names and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals involved.

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In memory of

Leonel Gmez Vides,

19402009

Hope also nourishes us. Not the hope of fools. The other kind. Hope, when everything is clear. Awareness.

Manlio Argueta

For the strangest people in the world are those people recognized, beneath ones senses, by ones soulthe people utterly indispensable for ones journey.

James Baldwin

No te conoce nadie. No. Pero yo te canto.

Nobody knows you. No. But I sing to you.

Federico Garca Lorca

It is near the end now. We are walking in the rippling heat of a sorghum field: cicadas whirring to an empty sky. A man uncorks a water gourd, another man leans against a spade. There is a woman here too, wearing an aproned skirt over her trousers. Hard light and the dry rattle of sorghum seed heads. Im holding a spray of seeds. One of the men takes Leonel aside and tells him somethinga secret, like everything else. We get into the jeep and without explanation drive to another place, not far from this field. The campesinos, rural peasants, would have walked, measuring distance not in kilometers but in hours or days.

What are we looking for? I ask, and as always, he doesnt answer, swearing under his breath through the haze of smoke that hangs in the air where the corn had been growing. We stop near a cluster of champas, shacks made of mud and wattle. One of them has collapsed and smoke rises from it.

Wait here, he tells me, but I dont wait. I had stopped waiting for him months before this, but he cant seem to break this habit of telling me to wait. Smoke is rolling like a shore cloud along the fields just above the blackened stubble. We walk, and when he stops, I stop, and when he continues, I continue. He palms the air to say Slow down or Be quiet. I slow down and am quiet. When we reach the champas, no one is in them. No one is home. A large plastic bowl used for making the slurry that becomes tortilla dough is overturned on the ground. There is a childs T-shirt in the tortilla slurry. Behind one of the champas it appears that several hens have been held by their feet and whacked against a stone. They are lying on the ground, one of them still opening and closing its beak.

A hundred or so meters more, and we hear the whine of flies, the hissing and belching of turkey vultures, a flapping of wings like applause in the maize stalks as the fattened birds try to lift themselves. A flatbed truck follows at a distance behind us, with three campesinos standing in the back. They are calling out to us or to the driver of the truck but I dont understand what they say.

I dont know what I had expected to see, but not the swollen torso of a man with one arm attached to him, a black pool of tar over his crotch. I didnt expect that his head would be by itself some distance away, without eyes or lips. The stench in the air is familiar: a rotting, sweet, sickening smell. Human death. I bend down when I see the head, but I hear Leonel saying, Dont touch it. Let the others do it.

At first, I thought they were going to find the rest of the man and place his remains in the truck but instead they gather the arms and hands, the legs with their feet attached, and bring them to the torso where it lies on the ground. They set the head on the neck where it once had been, then the three men take off their straw hats and stand in a circle around the man they have reassembled. They stand and one crosses himself lightly. The parts are not quite touching, there is soil between them, especially the head and the rest. No eyes, no lips or tongue, birds nearby hoping we will go away and leave them to this meal. The air hums, we walk. Why doesnt anyone do something? I think I asked.

On this day, I will learn that the human head weighs about two and a half kilos.

Over the years, I have asked myself what would have happened if I hadnt answered the door that morning, if Id hidden until the stranger was gone. Knowing him as I came to know him, he would have sensed my presence and continued ringing the bell. On that day, I had been at my typewriter, a heavy IBM Selectric that a friend would later complain sounded like a machine gun. There were stacks of papers everywhere: human rights reports, students essays and poems, unfinished manuscripts, unanswered correspondence. A sea wind passed through the screens, lifting some of these papers into the air and sailing them to the floor. The finches were singing atop their bamboo cage, as its door was usually open, leaving them to fly about the house, perching on ceiling fixtures and open doors. In those days, I could type faster than I could thinkmy father saw to that when I told him I wanted to be a poet. I would need to be able to fall back on something, hed said. Fall from where? I had wondered to myself at the time. The typewriter was set on the kitchen table, and most days I worked there, the ocean almost audible, the air scented by the fields of nearby flower farms. As it was late morning, the harvesters of Encinitas had already left for lunch, having begun their work at dawn. At first, I might not have noticed the sound of the van pulling into the driveway, but its engine remained idling, so it wasnt simply turning around. Then the engine died and the doors were opening.

It was not my habit to answer the door when I was alone. My mother had been strict about this with her seven children. She couldnt watch all of us at once, she would say, so there were rules. Not opening the door to strangers was one of them.