Buying the Night Flight (5 page)

In El Salvador we rented a Volkswagen and, in a frenzy of activity, prepared immediately to start the eight-hour drive back to Guatemala. But when we went to the Guatemalan embassy, we had another moment of terror. It was Saturday and the consulate was closed; we couldn't get our Guatemalan tourist cards until Monday and our rendezvous with the guerrillas was on Sunday. If we missed this meeting, it would be virtually impossible to re-create it.

Henry looked at me. I looked at him. I almost cried, and then he got an inspiration.

"We'll go to Pan American and buy plane tickets to Guatemala and get our tourist cards from them," he said. And the next morning we were indeed in our third-class hotel in Guatemala City talking to Miguel, the German-speaking, upper-class guerrilla who would be our guide.

Now we could only wait -- until that moment when they would come for us. The hotel, one of those back-street hostelries that seemed created deliberately for intrigue, was our prison. We did not dare go out for fear of being seen. The staircases creaked. The dining room was always deathly silent, and everyone entering was followed by suspicious looks that slid and slithered from eye to eye and from table to table. And then there was the bellboy.

It was perhaps not unnatural that my nerves were on edge. One night I heard a slight movement at my door -- just enough of a rustling to terrify me. I looked out the keyhole and looked into two eyes. For a moment I thought I might faint. Then I swung open the door to find myself facing the little, pockmarked, phantomlike bell boy, who, I had noticed, had a certain feral look about him. We finally decided he was simply a twenty-three-year-old voyeur -- exactly the next thing I needed.

By this time no one except one Guatemalan friend knew where we were. We were out of touch with the office and I left dated letters to be sent to my family, who had no idea what I was doing. If anything had happened to us, only my friend would have known or could even have guessed it.

Then one day they came for us. "This is the time," Miguel said with a strange smile, half excited and half wistful. But there was still more waiting. In a small
bodega
, or bar, they left us for four hours that seemed an eternity. "This is some kind of ruse," Henry kept insisting, suspended between anger and frustration. And in many ways it was this last waiting that turned out to be the most frustrating: Could it be that even
now
it might not work?

But I also knew that we had gone too far now to turn back -- and that gave me a strange new feeling of repose. A major rule of dealing with revolutionary movements is this: You put yourselves in their hands and you demonstrate every kind of trust. (This, of course, comes
after
you have made all your careful calculations.) For all intents and purposes you no longer have any will of your own. In our case our lives and wills were quite simply held in abeyance -- held captive by these fanaticized, inexperienced, idealistic, often cruel, often immensely kind, sometimes crazy young men. Already two Americans, Ronald Homberger and Robert Moran, were known to be dead; they were killed in trying to make contact with these very "boys." One was most probably an innocent scholar, the other probably a Vietnam veteran bent on revenge. We really never knew everything.

And sometimes it was simply better not to think too far ahead. I called the waiter and asked for another sandwich and beer. And after four hours they came for us.

***

Twenty-nine persons stood up, slim profiles thrown against the sky, with packs on their backs and machine guns thrown casually over their shoulders.

"The
compañera
is ready," one of the boys joked. "I'm calling her
compañera
already."
Compañera
-- the Spanish term for female comrade. It seemed I was accepted.

The group fell into line. There was one group of armed guerrillas in the front, another behind, and our "unit" in the center. "Follow the person directly in front of you," they told us. "Make no sound. And show no lights."

It would have been a splendid idea to follow the person in front of you if you could have seen the person in front of you. But it was midnight and the sliver of a moon was sliding rapidly behind the trees. Somewhat to our surprise -- and soon to our horror -- we found that the guerrillas used no paths or roads. Their idea of going up a mountain was simply going up a mountain. Up the rocks, over the bushes, through the thorns, down into the canyons!

As absurd as it sounds now, I had on only flat walking shoes. I wore brown pants and a light blouse with a patterned sweater over it. Most of the time I looked simply terrible, and every once in a while I had to creep away and vomit, while Henry, who was very proper about manners, would look at me with an expression that was a mixture of reproachfulness and "I-told-you-so" embarrassment. I was not embarrassed. I was just intent upon getting through the whole thing. But the final absurdity was my black purse. I have always carried a certain type of good, practical black purse with pockets in the sides where I can put my various notebooks and cards. Of course I carried this black purse to the mountains. It was a friendly, familiar thing in this strange new world.

For the next four hours we staggered, we fell into ditches, we dragged through creeks, we climbed huge rocks and generally suffered for what seemed an eternity. "We had thought of taking you farther into the
montaña,"
Cesar said to me once, with a distinctly ironic twist on his lips, "but we decided the walk would be too hard for you." It struck me that I'd never heard a wiser decision. At 4:00 A.M., just as I was wondering whether I could go any farther, Cesar declared, "All right, we'll stop and sleep here." He motioned toward a grassy place on the side of the mountain; it seemed to bother him not a whit that it was sloped at a forty-five-degree angle.

He curled up in a checkered blanket with his machine gun in his arms and promptly fell asleep next to Henry. Henry complained later that Cesar's machine gun dug into his ribs all night. I complained that every time I tried to relax on the slope, I began sliding down -- and that directly beneath me was a sixty-foot drop into a canyon with a waterfall. When morning came two hours later, all around my feet were gullies where I had dug into the mountain to keep myself from sliding off of it.

The next three days that we spent with the FAR were among the strangest of my life. I felt totally suspended in time -- I no longer was sure what or where I was. We spent our days sitting around in the sunlight chattering endlessly in Spanish. Henry took pictures of guerrillas jumping, guerrillas talking, guerrillas posed for battle. All around us were the three thousand troops the army had sent out -- we could hear their shooting all day long. It was we whom they were seeking. The days had a certain rhythm and timing. Three times a day the old peasant man would come. He would deliver the sacks of tortillas and the plastic bags filled with bean paste. Then he would sit back on a rock for a full hour gazing fondly at the young rebels.

"Tell me," I asked him finally, "why do you help the guerrillas?"

This time he climbed down from the rock with apparent eagerness and walked over to me. "For humanitarian love," he said. He looked me straight in the eye as he added, "They are the first ones who ever cared about us."

Cesar, so slim, so sure, so cool, then motioned to another, younger peasant who had come up with the older man. "Tell her everything," he said emotionlessly.

"Do you have any land?" I asked the younger man, as he scram bled dutifully down to face me.

"We pay twenty-five dollars a year to the landlord for the land ... " he began. (That was a lot, given their meager incomes.)

Montes cut in. "The landlord they never see," he added scornfully. "They have just enough land to live on a subsistence level."

"We're not allowed to live in our village anymore," the peasant began again.

"For helping us -- they were forced to move here," Montes inserted. "The police burned their houses, and burned down their chapel -- they are Evangelicals."

The peasant nodded. "And they destroyed our honeybees. I was four months a prisoner."

"Did they torture you?" the guerrilla commander asked.

"No," he said, shaking his head. "But my brother--they put that thing over his head and hit him."

"That thing" was a bag they wrapped over a prisoner's head until he couldn't breathe. Meanwhile they were beating him until he was almost dead, or frightened nearly to death from fear of asphyxiation.

"My boy, he was eighteen, died of malnutrition while I was in jail. One of my relatives had to pay one hundred fifty dollars to get free. I only had to pay eighty dollars."

Cesar and his men kept prodding the peasants: "Remember this ... Remember Justo de la Cruz, whom they killed and he didn't even know us ... Think of all the injustices .... "

It was an effective teaching method, I could see that. Besides, they were organizing the village into political cells, even though the final word came from the directorate general in the capital.

Most of the guerrillas had been to Cuba for some training, but when I asked Cesar about money from Cuba, he drew himself up proudly and said, "Haven't you read about our bank robberies and our kidnappings? We're entirely self-supporting."

"Say," Montes went on, "did you know the robbery of the Bank of the Occident was by the FAR? The papers say forty thousand dollars, but we haven't finished counting the money yet." He paused devilishly. "The bank was right in front of the police station," he added, grinning.

Another time Montes pressed me for what I thought of Fidel Castro. I demurred. I never did believe in expressing my own beliefs while on assignment. Finally he demanded, "Don't you think he's a big egocentric?"

"Well, frankly, I do," I relented.

"I do, too," Montes said with a big smile. "But we won't be like that."

I looked long and hard at him. I didn't say anything more. In years to come I would hear that phrase--"We won't be like that, we will be different" -- so many, many sad times.

Little by little I drew them out on their
acciónes
, trying to find out what they really did--and how they justified it.

There had been an "action" at Jocotales, for instance, a small working-class district of Guatemala City where the guerrillas' "city resistance unit" had attacked that November, killing three of the policemen in ten minutes of steady machine-gunning of the miserably poor adobe section. One of the men killed was a young sergeant, Rigoberto Parazzoli, and he was buried in a military funeral that punctuated the suffering and the senselessness of so much of all that was going on. His body was carried to the cemetery on the shoulders of a police guard while his widow sobbed and tiny barefoot boys sold water in tin cans for the flowers -- five centavos a can.

He was carried past the tombs of all the assassinated political leaders of the last two decades, for here the cemetery is the
Who's Who
of Guatemalan politics ... Colonel F. Javier Arana, hero of the Right in the 1940s (assassins never apprehended) .... Mario Mendez Montenegro, hero of the democratic Left until he died mysteriously in 1965 (case never solved)... . The list was endless, the tombs are solid rock, the assassins were in the palace.

After the funeral, where the sergeant was praised as a man who "defended Guatemala from political restlessness," Henry and I drove out to the police station, seeking out every bit of information and insight. A simple, honest-looking man, Lieutenant Antonio Anselmo Pineda, who was chief of the station, got up from an old wooden table and pointed out the holes in the ceilings and the small caves in the dirt floor where the grenades had exploded.

"What do you feel about the guerrillas?" I asked him frankly. "Do you feel any hatred for them for doing this?"

"Hatred?" he repeated, and he blinked his eyes. "No," he said slowly, in words that came to be haunting to me. "We don't know them. They don't know us. We wouldn't have attacked them, but they were attacking us. I don't know why they did it. I don't know what their motives were." He thought for a moment, and raised his eyes questioningly up to me. "Perhaps they know."

This touched me deeply. So few people could really understand the depths of this tragedy that had grown only more and more desperate over the last twenty years.

When I asked one of the more sensitive of the guerrillas about the sheer strategic sense of killing poor, ordinary policemen whom, after all, one might expect they were waging the revolution
for,
he responded by saying thoughtfully, "It is really very complex. If you kill a military officer, usually the people will agree with you. But if you kill a regular policeman, the people resent it. Very often the police are poor people themselves, who work on their days off painting houses and doing odd jobs, so they are well known. Too, we have to keep clarifying things. After we attacked the electric plant, the opposition phoned the firemen and threatened that we would attack them for putting out the fire at the electric plant. This was very clever because the people liked the firemen. We had to put out a statement saying it was not so."

***

The third day the shooting intensified. It was all around us, it was constant, and it was coming closer and closer. A barely perceptible nervous hum seemed to ride through our campsite like a phantom stallion. When I heard Cesar, Miguel, and the others speaking in Spanish about continuing to walk all night deeper into the mountains, I felt distinctly faint.