Salvador (6 page)

No mention of “Señorita Universo 1975” dampened “Señorita El Salvador 1982,” which, by the time I got upstairs, had reached the point when each of the finalists was asked to pick a question from a basket and answer it. The questions had to do with the hopes and dreams of the contestants, and the answers ran to
“Dios,” “Paz,”
“El Salvador.” A local entertainer wearing a white dinner jacket and a claret-colored bow tie sang “The Impossible Dream,” in Spanish. The judges began their deliberations, and the moment of decision arrived: Señorita El Salvador 1982 would be Señorita San Vicente, Miss Jeannette Marroquín, who was several inches taller than the other finalists, and more
gringa
-looking. The four runners-up reacted, on the whole, with rather less grace than is the custom on these occasions, and it occurred to me that this was a contest in which winning meant more than a scholarship or a screen test or a new wardrobe; winning here could mean the difference between life and casual death, a provisional safe-conduct not only for the winner but for her entire family.

“God damn it, he cut inaugural ribbons, he showed himself large as life in public taking on the risks of power as he had never done in more peaceful times, what the hell, he played endless games of dominoes with my lifetime friend General Rodrigo de Aguilar and my old friend the minister of health who were the only ones who … dared ask him to receive in a special audience the beauty queen of the poor, an incredible creature from that miserable wallow we call the dogfight district.… I’ll not only receive her in a special audience but I’ll dance the first waltz with her, by God, have them write it up in the newspapers, he ordered, this kind of crap makes a big hit with the poor. Yet, the night after the audience, he commented with a certain bitterness to General Rodrigo de Aguilar that the queen of the poor wasn’t even worth dancing with, that she was as common as so many other slum Manuela Sánchezes with her nymph’s dress of muslin petticoats and the gilt crown with artificial jewels and a rose in her hand under the watchful eye of a mother who looked after her as if she were made of gold, so he gave her everything she wanted which was only electricity and running water for the dogfight district.…”

That is Gabriel García Márquez,
The Autumn of the Patriarch
. On this evening that began with the grandson of General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez and progressed to “Señorita El Salvador 1982” and ended, at 12:22
A.M
., with the earthquake, I began to see Gabriel García Márquez in a new light, as a social realist.

There were a number of metaphors to be found in this earthquake, not the least of them being that the one major building to suffer extensive damage happened also to be the major building most specifically and elaborately designed to withstand earthquakes, the American embassy. When this embassy was built, in 1965, the idea was that it would remain fluid under stress, its deep pilings shifting and sliding on Teflon pads, but over the past few years, as shelling the embassy came to be a favorite way of expressing dissatisfaction on all sides, the structure became so fortified—the steel exterior walls, the wet sandbags around the gun emplacements on the roof, the bomb shelter dug out underneath—as to render it rigid. The ceiling fell in Deane Hinton’s office that night. Pipes burst on the third floor, flooding everything below. The elevator was disabled, the commissary a sea of shattered glass.

The Hotel Camino Real, on the other hand, which would appear to have been thrown together in the insouciant tradition of most tropical construction, did a considerable amount of rolling (I recall crouching under a door frame in my room on the seventh floor and watching, through the window, the San Salvador volcano appear to rock from left to right), but when the wrenching stopped and candles were found and everyone got downstairs nothing was broken, not even the glasses behind the bar. There was no electricity, but there was often no electricity. There were sporadic bursts of machine-gun fire on the street (this had made getting downstairs more problematic than it might have been, since the emergency stairway was exposed to the street), but sporadic bursts of machine-gun fire on the street were not entirely unusual in San Salvador. (“Sometimes it happens when it rains,” someone from the embassy had told me about this phenomenon. “They get excited.”) On the whole it was business as usual at the Camino Real, particularly in the discothèque off the lobby, where, by the time I got downstairs, an emergency generator seemed already to have been activated, waiters in black cowboy hats darted about the dance floor carrying drinks, and dancing continued, to Jerry Lee Lewis’s “Great Balls of Fire.”

Actual information was hard to come by in El Salvador, perhaps because this is not a culture in which a high value is placed on the definite. The only hard facts on the earthquake, for example, arrived at the Camino Real that night from New York, on the AP wire, which reported the Cal Tech reading of 7.0 Richter on an earthquake centered in the Pacific some sixty miles south of San Salvador. Over the next few days, as damage reports appeared in the local papers, the figure varied. One day the earthquake had been a 7.0 Richter, another day a 6.8. By Tuesday it was again a 7 in
La Prensa Gráfica
, but on a different scale altogether, not the Richter but the Modified Mercalli.

All numbers in El Salvador tended to materialize and vanish and rematerialize in a different form, as if numbers denoted only the “use” of numbers, an intention, a wish, a recognition that someone, somewhere, for whatever reason, needed to hear the ineffable expressed as a number. At any given time in El Salvador a great deal of what goes on is considered ineffable, and the use of numbers in this context tends to frustrate people who try to understand them literally, rather than as propositions to be floated, “heard,” “mentioned.” There was the case of the March 28 1982 election, about which there continued into that summer the rather scholastic argument first posed by
Central American Studies
, the publication of the Jesuit university in San Salvador: Had it taken an average of 2.5 minutes to cast a vote, or less? Could each ballot box hold 500 ballots, or more? The numbers were eerily Salvadoran. There were said to be 1.3 million people eligible to vote on March 28, but 1.5 million people were said to have voted. These 1.5 million people were said, in turn, to represent not 115 percent of the 1.3 million eligible voters but 80 percent (or, on another float, “62–68 percent”) of the eligible voters, who accordingly no longer numbered 1.3 million, but a larger number. In any case no one really knew how many eligible voters there were in El Salvador, or even how many people. In any case it had seemed necessary to provide a number. In any case the election was over, a success,
la solución pacífica
.

Similarly, there was the question of how much money had left the country for Miami since 1979: Deane Hinton, in March of 1982, estimated $740 million. The Salvadoran minister of planning estimated, the same month, twice that. I recall asking President Magaña, when he happened to say that he had gone to lunch every Tuesday for the past ten years with the officers of the Central Reserve Bank of El Salvador, which reviews the very export and import transactions through which money traditionally leaves troubled countries, how much he thought was gone. “You hear figures mentioned,” he said. I asked what figures he heard mentioned at these Tuesday lunches. “The figure they mentioned is six hundred million,” he said. He watched as I wrote that down,
600,000,000, central bank El Salvador
. “The figure the Federal Reserve in New York mentioned,” he added, “is one thousand million.” He watched as I wrote that down too,
1,000,000,000, Fed NY
. “Those people don’t want to stay for life in Miami,” he said then, but this did not entirely address the question, nor was it meant to.

Not only numbers but names are understood locally to have only a situational meaning, and the change of a name is meant to be accepted as a change in the nature of the thing named. ORDEN, for example, the paramilitary organization formally founded in 1968 to function, along classic patronage lines, as the government’s eyes and ears in the countryside, no longer exists as ORDEN, or the Organización Democrática Nacionalista, but as the Frente Democrática Nacionalista, a transubstantiation noted only cryptically in the State Department’s official “justification” for the January 28 1982 certification: “The Salvadoran government, since the overthrow of General Romero, has taken explicit actions to end human rights abuses. The paramilitary organization ‘ORDEN’ has been outlawed,
although some of its former members may still be active
.” (Italics added.)

This tactic of solving a problem by changing its name is by no means limited to the government. The small office on the archdiocese grounds where the scrapbooks of the dead are kept is still called, by virtually everyone in San Salvador, “the Human Rights Commission” (Comisión de los Derechos Humanos), but in fact both the Human Rights Commission and Socorro Jurídico, the archdiocesan legal aid office, were ordered in the spring of 1982 to vacate the church property, and, in the local way, did so: everything pretty much stayed in place, but the scrapbooks of the dead were thereafter kept, officially, in the “Oficina de Tutela Legal” of the “Comisión Arquidiocesana de Justicia y Paz.” (This “Human Rights Commission,” in any case, is not to be confused with the Salvadoran government’s “Commission on Human Rights,” the formation of which was announced the day before a scheduled meeting between President Magaña and Ronald Reagan. This official
comisión
is a seven-member panel notable for its inclusion of Colonel Carlos Reynaldo López Nuila, the director of the National Police.) This renaming was referred to as a “reorganization,” which is one of many words in El Salvador that tend to signal the presence of the ineffable.

Other such words are “improvement,” “perfection” (reforms are never abandoned or ignored, only “perfected” or “improved”), and that favorite from other fronts, “pacification.” Language has always been used a little differently in this part of the world (an apparent statement of fact often expresses something only wished for, or something that might be true, a story, as in García Márquez’s
many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice
), but “improvement” and “perfection” and “pacification” derive from another tradition. Language as it is now used in El Salvador is the language of advertising, of persuasion, the product being one or another of the
soluciones
crafted in Washington or Panama or Mexico, which is part of the place’s pervasive obscenity.

This language is shared by Salvadorans and Americans, as if a linguistic deal had been cut. “Perhaps the most striking measure of progress [in El Salvador],” Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Enders was able to say in August of 1982 in a speech at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, “is the transformation of the military from an institution dedicated to the status quo to one that spearheads land reform and supports constitutional democracy.” Thomas Enders was able to say this precisely because the Salvadoran minister of defense, General José Guillermo García, had so superior a dedication to his own status quo that he played the American card as Roberto D’Aubuisson did not, played the game, played ball, understood the importance to Americans of symbolic action: the importance of letting the Americans have their land reform program, the importance of letting the Americans pretend that while “democracy in El Salvador” may remain “a slender reed” (that was Elliott Abrams in
The New York Times
), the situation is one in which “progress” is measurable (“the minister of defense has ordered that all violations of citizens’ rights be stopped immediately,” the State Department noted on the occasion of the July 1982 certification, a happy ending); the importance of giving the Americans an acceptable president, Alvaro Magaña, and of pretending that this acceptable president was in fact commander-in-chief of the armed forces,
el generalísimo
as
la solución
.

La solución
changed with the market. Pacification, although those places pacified turned out to be in need of repeated pacification, was
la solución
. The use of the word “negotiations,” however abstract that use may have been, was
la solución
. The election, although it ended with the ascension of a man, Roberto D’Aubuisson, essentially hostile to American policy, was
la solución
for Americans. The land reform program, grounded as it was in political rather than economic reality, was
la solución
as symbol. “It has not been a total economic success,” Peter Askin, the AID director working with the government on the program, told
The New York Times
in August 1981, “but up to this point it has been a political success. I’m firm on that. There does seem to be a direct correlation between the agrarian reforms and the peasants not having become more radicalized.” The land reform program, in other words, was based on the principle of buying off, buying time, giving a little to gain a lot,
mini-fundismo
in support of
latifundismo
, which, in a country where the left had no interest in keeping the peasants less “radicalized” and the right remained unconvinced that these peasants could not simply be eliminated, rendered it a program about which only Americans could be truly enthusiastic, less a “reform” than an exercise in public relations.

Even
la verdad
, the truth, was a degenerated phrase in El Salvador: on my first evening in the country I was asked by a Salvadoran woman at an embassy party what I hoped to find out in El Salvador. I said that ideally I hoped to find out
la verdad
, and she beamed approvingly. Other journalists, she said, did not want
la verdad
. She called over two friends, who also approved: no one told
la verdad
. If I wrote
la verdad
it would be good for El Salvador. I realized that I had stumbled into a code, that these women used
la verdad
as it was used on the bumper stickers favored that spring and summer by ARENA people. “J
OURNALISTS
, T
ELL THE
T
RUTH
!” the bumper stickers warned in Spanish, and they meant the truth according to Roberto D’Aubuisson.