A Flower in the Desert (32 page)

I asked Juanita, “Had she met Maria before?”

“Yes. A year before, on an earlier visit. They had planned this, the two of them, since that time. They communicated through letters. Melissa would send letters to a woman she knew in Santa Isabel, letters written in a code, and the woman would get them to Maria. Santa Isabel is not far from Cureiro.”

I nodded.

Juanita told me that when Melissa arrived at Father Cisneros's, Maria embraced her, laughing. The two women sat down for a parting glass of wine with the priest. They were still celebrating when they heard the truck drive up.

“It was a death squad,” Juanita said. “The Esquadron de la Muerte. You know of these people?” She leaned forward, watching me, and stubbed out her cigarette.

“I've read about them.

Sitting back, she nodded slightly. “Yes, of course. Read about them.” There was no sarcasm in the words, no bitterness. Only a stony recognition of the huge gulf that separated her experience and mine.

“Why did they come that night?” I asked her.

“Someone had talked. Intentionally or not, someone had revealed that Maria was to leave the country.” She shrugged. “Perhaps Maria spoke of it to the wrong person.”

“Was Maria involved in politics?”

For the first time, Juanita smiled. It was the scant, grim smile of pity. “To live in El Salvador,” she said, “is to be involved in politics. It is to suffer, every day, endlessly, from the terror and the cruelty. My father was a doctor, a liberal. He protested the treatment of the farmers. He and my mother disappeared in 1984. They were killed, of course. My brother was killed in 1985, murdered in his bed and mutilated because he had dared, in public, to call a National Guard officer a swine. I escaped in 1989, leaving my husband behind. He died in November of that year, when the FMLN attempted to capture San Salvador. Only Maria remained.”

She reached for another cigarette, lit it, sat back exhaling. “Was she political? Oh yes, she was that very dangerous thing, a liberal. Not an activist, not a Communist, not a rebel. Only a
liberal.
She had trained as a nurse. She cared for people. She attempted to ease their pain. A very dangerous person.”

She sucked again on the Kool, blew smoke downward. “A liberal. Such a dirty word here in the United States. A dirty word, also, in El Salvador.”

“Why would they want to kill her?”

“Because she was leaving. To leave is to suggest that El Salvador is not the paradise which the government claims it is. Therefore, no one is permitted to leave. If someone attempts to do so, and she is caught, an example is made.”

I nodded. “Go on,” I said. “The truck arrived at Father Cisneros's house.”

Juanita told me that as soon as the truck pulled into the dirt driveway, Maria knew, or suspected, what it signified. Quickly she swept the third glass from the table and dragged Melissa into the bedroom. The bedroom light was on; probably Maria didn't dare now to turn it off. She pushed Melissa into a closet and forced her to the floor, ripped some of the priest's clothing from hangers and hurled them over the woman. Told her, in a hurried hiss, not to speak, not to reveal herself, no matter what she heard, no matter what happened. Melissa's life, Maria told her, depended on it. Maria pushed the door shut, but it swung slightly open, and in her haste she failed to notice this.

Poking her head above the priest's worn robes and surplices, Melissa was able to see a thin wedge of the bedroom: a corner of the bed, a narrow rectangular section of the white plaster wall. She was too frightened, Juanita said, to pull the door shut again. She could shut only her eyes.

She heard them come to the front door, heard Father Cisneros protest, heard the thud of the rifle butts against his body as they clubbed him. She heard a struggle, a shouted curse from Maria, the sharp crack of an open-handed slap, and then laughter and a confused thumping, a scrambling and clatter of shoes.

And then the soldiers, some of them, were in the bedroom with Maria. Melissa had kept her eyes shut—in the atavistic belief, perhaps, that if she couldn't see them, they couldn't see her. But now her eyes snapped open of themselves. She saw flashes of Maria's long dark skirt swirling amid a flurry of khaki legs and black leather paratrooper boots. Heard Maria cursing and spitting, heard the rough bark of male laughter. Heard the sudden creak of the bed, a female gasp, male grunts, fists smacking against flesh. Saw, from only five feet away, a pair of khaki trousers drop to reveal pale hairy legs. More khaki trousers crowding around. More curses from Maria, harsh, defiant. More laughter from the men. Then the bedsprings squealing rhythmically, wheezing like an asthmatic old man. Loud shouts of encouragement, still more laughter. And then they did something to Maria, something painful, and her curses suddenly stopped and she began a long shrill wavering shriek.

“It went on for many minutes,” said Juanita. “Perhaps for half an hour. Melissa said that she wet herself. She bit through her lip to keep from screaming. There is still a small scar.”

I nodded, but I was looking past her bald, unemotional recital to Melissa in that closet. It would be hot in there—August in El Salvador, yes, it would be stifling. There would be the smell of camphor, to keep away the heavy-bodied moths, and perhaps the smell of the priest's talcum and of the incense he burned at mass. And the smell of her own body, the smell of panic, and the sounds of her body as well, the roaring of her heart, the tight clenching and unclenching of her lungs. And, throughout it all, there would be the unbearable, mind-scorching terror of discovery.

“After a time,” Juanita said, “an officer came into the room, and the men stopped. The officer stood against the far wall, and she could see him clearly. She recognized him. He was a colonel with the Atlactl Battalion. You know of this group?”

“No.” My voice was raspy. I cleared it.

“An elite unit. It was a soldier from this battalion who shot Archbishop Romero. They are trained by advisers from the United States, of course.”

I nodded. Of course. And these advisers would be brave men, even honorable men, but men—or so I wanted to believe—who had no real understanding of the people to whom they taught their cool, efficient skills.

“He ordered the men out,” said Juanita. “They carried Maria from the room—she was unconscious by this time. Melissa waited in the closet.”

She waited there for hours, perhaps, after the soldiers left and silence slowly filled the house. She was unable to move. But finally she made herself get up. Moving slowly, as though underwater, she left the house and walked back to the car. It was nearly two in the morning when she started for Santa Isabel. Halfway there, she was stopped by a roadblock, two young National Guardsmen. She was able to talk her way through, but the Guardsmen took her name.

She knew that someone would be coming for her. The authorities had her name, and the authorities sanctioned the death squads. They knew about her Sanctuary involvement, and knew that she might represent a threat. They would want to question her about the attack on Maria and Father Cisneros. She knew she would never be able to withstand interrogation—sooner or later she would confess that she had seen a high-ranking Atlactl officer. There would be a “regrettable accident.”

Back at her hotel, she gathered her clothes and packed, left a message for the other Sanctuary volunteers, and then drove to San Salvador and caught the first plane back to the States, a flight to Houston. From there, she had flown to Los Angeles. Her car was still at the airport, but she had left it there, taken a cab to her house for a change of clothes, and taken another cab to her sister's, to pick up her daughter. And then she had vanished into the Underground Railroad.

“Why didn't she go to someone?” I asked. “Explain what she'd seen. The police. Someone in the federal government.”

Again Juanita smiled her small smile of pity. “The federal government? Your federal government is committed to the lie that the government in El Salvador is peaceful and democratic. Over the past ten years your federal government has provided four billion dollars of military aid to the regime. Your FBI routinely cooperates with agents of the Salvadoran security forces. Melissa had no reason to trust your federal government.”

“The police, then.”

“The police would have simply turned her over to the federal government.” She sucked on her cigarette, exhaled. “And you must remember that Melissa had already been called a liar in the courts. To many people she was merely a hysterical woman, a woman who had unjustly accused her former husband of a terrible crime. She felt that no one would believe her. But perhaps most of all, she was concerned about her daughter. If the Salvadoran government sent someone to this country to silence her, Winona would be silenced also.”

“But if no one would believe her, then the Salvadoran government had no reason to silence her.”

“It was Melissa who felt that no one would believe her. The government in Salvador felt otherwise. Because they did send someone. He killed her sister.”

Twenty-Five

I
SAID
, “
HOW DID YOU LEARN
about Cathryn Bigelow's death?”

She took another deep drag from her cigarette, exhaled. The room was foggy now with smoke and my eyes were beginning to sting.

“A friend in Los Angeles,” she said. “A Salvadoran. She knew of my connection to Melissa. The television and the newspapers in Los Angeles, they made of it a very big thing, the death of Cathryn. She was Melissa's sister, and Melissa was still missing.”

I'd glanced through the newspaper clippings about Cathryn's death, in the material I'd received from Ed Norman. The papers had covered the death heavily because Calvin Bigelow was such a honcho in Los Angeles money circles, and because he and his wife had already been forced to deal with the mysterious disappearance, only months before, of their other daughter. Like the L.A. police, the newspapers had downplayed, or ignored, the possibility of any connection between the two events.

Juanita Carrera said, “My friend telephoned to me because she was afraid I might be in danger.”

“When was this?” I asked her.

“Last Wednesday. In the evening.” She took a drag, leaned forward, ground out the cigarette, and leaned back, exhaling.

“And you left that night.”

“Yes. I knew some people who were safe. Here in Santa Fe. I went to them.”

“You were certain that Cathryn had been killed on orders from El Salvador.”

She moved her shoulders lightly. “Of course.”

“But why would they kill her at the beginning of October? Melissa disappeared in August.”

“Melissa told me, when I saw her, that she had written to her sister, to tell her that she was safe. Cathryn must have spoken of this to someone. And that someone told someone else. And someone in El Salvador sent a killer to learn from Cathryn where Melissa was.”

“Who would Cathryn have spoken to?”

She shook her head. “I do not know. I never met Cathryn. But it must have happened in this way.”

“You met with Melissa on the twenty-third of September?”

“Yes. A Monday.”

Melissa's card had been postmarked in Santa Fe on the same day. Cathryn was killed on the second of October. Santa Fe mail could sometimes take a week to reach L.A. The timing was right.

I asked her, “Does the phrase ‘
The flower in the desert lives
' mean anything to you?”

She frowned as though surprised. “Where did you hear of this?”

“It was what Melissa wrote to her sister, on the postcard.”

“Ah.” She took a deep breath, and frowned again, sadly now. “Melissa was making, in a way, a joke.”

“How?”

She leaned forward, slipped another Kool from the pack, lit it, sat back. “The death squads, sometimes they warn you before they come for you. Sometimes they do not. And sometimes they send only the warning, and they never come. For many people, to receive the warning is enough. The warning is a letter that says, ‘
The flower in the desert dies.
' It is signed E.M.”

“For Esquadron de la Muerte.”

“Yes.” She inhaled, then exhaled, cigarette smoke.

“And Melissa knew this?”

“Yes. I had told her of it. I had received such a letter myself, before I left Salvador. It was the reason I left.”

“Who else would know what the phrase meant?”

A small shrug. “Any Salvadoran. It was common knowledge. There are Salvadorans who have received such letters even while they lived in Los Angeles.”

“Tell me this. Why would a death squad come after you?”

“My husband was a fighter with the FMNL. The national liberation front. But, really, you see, they need no reason.” She paused, frowned. Finally, she shook her head. “You would not understand.”

“Try me,” I said.

She inhaled again on the Kool, exhaled, leaned forward, tapped the ash into the ashtray, sat back. She nodded. “I shall tell you a story. Three years ago, before I left Salvador, I went to visit a friend in the countryside. Constancia is her name. I knew her from school in the capital. Her parents had disappeared while she was in school and she had gone back to their village, to live with her aunt. I had seen her only two times since the time of school, when she had come with her uncle to San Salvador.”

Another drag on the cigarette. “On this day, I met her family. Her aunt, Tomasina, and her two cousins—these were young girls, not yet sixteen. Constancia had a young son, Gilberto. A baby, eighteen months old. I had met her uncle, of course, before this. Juan. A good man. The husband of Constancia, Carlos, he was gone, off in the hills with the National Front. The others, the seven of them, they lived in a house not much bigger than this room.”

Another drag. She leaned forward, tapped off her ash, sat back. “There was work to do, but Tomasina and Juan sent us off, so that we might talk. And we did. We talked for a long time, perhaps for several hours. There was a small river not too far from the village, and we sat there on the rocks, in the shade of the trees, and we talked. Not very much about the war. We talked about small things, unimportant things. The girls we had known in school. What clothes the women wore now in the capital. Constancia always had been fond of fine clothes. She had not owned any herself since she left the capital.”