Buying the Night Flight (4 page)

It is always the same with these clandestine affairs. You make the contact, you behave correctly, you let yourself be known, you are as honest as humanly possible if only because the slightest suggestion of guile will immediately destroy the project and put you in danger, and you persist without giving the impression that you are nervously or abnormally overeager. It is a fine -- a very fine -- balance, and you fail to strike it at the danger of extreme loss. You're not playing games; you're playing with temperaments tuned to calculated and sometimes spontaneous brutality, all revolutionary collegiality one moment and calculated savagery the next. You have to realize that you as a human being are nothing to them because the cause is everything; these are people who dehumanize themselves in order, in
their
thoughts, to humanize or order the world in their image.

At 3:00 p.m. the next day Humberto, the student leader, "dropped by" again. This time we sat for a few minutes in the big overstuffed sofas in the Pan American Hotel's inner lobby, and he mentioned nonchalantly, "I would like to take you somewhere." I nodded without speaking.

We began by walking casually around the blocks near the beautiful old central plaza, with its fountains and its flowers and its whispers of the cruel ballads of the old conquistadores. Once he said to me in a low voice, "You are lucky. You are going to see someone important." I nodded. I still assumed I was simply going to see some of the Communist students.

Then we got into a car with a driver and rode a few blocks.

Then we got out of the car and walked around the block precisely three times and waited under a tree.

Then we got into a station wagon and drove for two hours around the city, gradually easing our way to the outskirts. I had lost my sense of direction and bearings completely by now.

Then we drove down dirt roads and stopped several times. When no cars came, we drove on.

As this dramatic ballet continued, I became more and more fascinated. I didn't feel afraid, which in retrospect was quite foolish. Instead, I felt intensely alive, with nerves whizzing and singing and blood flowing. Indeed the process in itself became so interesting to me that I very nearly forgot the purpose and end of our odyssey.

Two and a half hours after Humberto had picked me up at the hotel, we walked into an unfinished, creaking modern house some where in the suburbs and sat down on a simple cot and some stools. Almost immediately two very young, very eager, and almost merry young men swept in, doors banging behind them, with all the casualness of a neighbor dropping in on a summer afternoon in Wisconsin. It was as if the wind had suddenly dropped some brightly colored leaves at my feet, instead of the dark wraiths of history they actually were.

There was the notorious Luis Turcios, a lithe, liquid figure wearing a stylish black sweater, black pants, and white shirt and tie. A handsome young man, he carried about him a distinct joie de vivre. With him was the slight, blond, intense Cesar Montes, who had the pitiless air of "the revolution" engraved on his every action, instilled in his cold eyes and in each taut answer.

Montes, indeed, struck me as so thoroughly different from Turcios that I had to wonder -- and this question has recurred to me constantly in nearly two decades of interviewing "revolutionaries" -- what they had in common besides revolution. Montes was only about five feet tall, with high cheekbones and moody, sulky eyes. He occasionally wore glasses and then he looked scholarly and deceptively young. But after a few hours with him I realized he had a certain forcefulness as a leader.

Turcios, on the other hand, was full of the very devil, in love with being a "revolutionary" and in love with life. His ideology was fuzzy, and he called himself a "Communist without a party." There was no such relativity about Montes or his ideas. He knew exactly where he was going. He was a member of the central committee of the Guatemalan Communist Party, even at his young age; and although his family background was shrouded in a mystery that he most definitely encouraged, it was believed that his parents were originally Mexican Communists.

He and Montes began by explaining their classical "three-stage" movement. "Now we are only entering the first stage," said Montes. "We are teaching the peasants and preparing for the moment when we can fight the army and take power. The second stage will be to transform the guerrilla war to a regular war, and the third stage is the general offensive when the whole people will rise in regular and irregular fashion."

Turcios, who, with so many other Third World revolutionaries, had studied as a Guatemalan soldier at Fort Benning (and insisted that the experience taught him a good deal), explained that they were already building
"focos"
or centers of resistance in the rough, barren Sierra de las Minas area east of Guatemala City. From there, the dream went, their "peasant army" would sweep down eventually upon Guatemala City just as Castro's army had ostensibly swept onto Havana in 1959.

In years to come I was to infiltrate and write about most of the major guerrilla movements in the world, but this one was to turn out to be archetypical and even prophetic. Their strategy was to become one of the major strategies of those fanaticized young men and women of all of the developing world -- and, as it happened, I was the first outsider to see and study it in a Central America that would soon be in flames just because of young people like them.

We talked for two hours before Humberto, our driver, and I drove back to the hotel in silent satisfaction. Mine, indeed, was so great that I could scarcely contain it. I had no idea why I had been chosen from the list of eight correspondents who had somehow gotten their names to "the movement," but never mind. I had the interview and I had it at the most difficult and dangerous time.

***

It would be nice to say that at times like this I thought only of conveying information to the world, but that, frankly, would not be true. That responsibility is certainly the dedication of my life; but I have to admit that first I felt only the most delighted sense of personal accomplishment. I sat in my simple little room at the Pan American, with its woven Guatemalan spreads and heavy furniture, and laughed aloud out of sheer joy. The laugh seemed to hang for a moment in the silence. Then I walked around and looked at myself in the minor. I walked out on the balcony, and the whole bustling world down on those narrow streets seemed lovable and friendly, even though I had spent most of the day talking with people whose lives were devoted to killing. Such are the crazy little victories of journalists!

At moments like this the sacrifices one makes to be a foreign correspondent -- husband, children, the house with the view of the lake, the comforts of normalcy, and the reassurances of conformity -- seemed, quite simply, irrelevant. The joy is a matter both of personal transcendence and at the same time of a deep penetration of the world: of an odd sense of movement both ways.

I wrote the interview -- or it wrote itself, really -- in less than an hour. By then it was still only 8:00 P.M., and the plane to El Salvador, where I had to go in order to file safely, did not leave until 11:30 P.M. So I tucked the story away in my purse, dressed up, and went off to an elegant cocktail party at the American residence given by the American ambassador, John Gordon Mien. I took an almost catlike pleasure in chatting, drinking, and wondering together with my fellow correspondents about where Turcios could be, when all the while I had him quite literally tucked away in my pocketbook.

A short while later Ambassador Mien, a splendid man, was killed by Turcios's men. By then Turcios also had died, ostensibly in an auto accident. Guatemala in those days was an endless celebration of dying, and I was soon to be tentatively included in the program.

***

Since the Turcios interview was widely published and had worked so well, I expected no trouble at all when Henry Gill and I returned to Guatemala that next fall. But when I telephoned Humberto at home, he sounded a little put-off and strange. "I'm going to be at the hotel at noon," he said hurriedly and with a weak voice, "I'll meet you then."

It turned out that he was going to be at the hotel for the weekly
Rotarian luncheon!
Humberto, my guerrilla page, my first revolutionary, my leader into the clandestine labyrinths -- in six miserable months he had been graduated from the university, had been reformed into a bourgeois, had gone into his father's business, and become a Rotarian! My tempestuous lady of the afternoon had become a Tupperware saleswoman!

The chargé at the embassy cordially warned me of the danger of "what we know you are trying to do."

The police chief of Guatemala City looked sideways at me and gazed at me for a long time at a public meeting.

Meanwhile I was having no luck at all in making new contacts. And I was getting nervous.

By the time two weeks had gone by, I was growing discouraged. We were too obvious, and I had not been able to make even one miserable contact.

It was seven on a bright Sunday morning when the woman manager of the hotel knocked on my door. In a low voice she said, "I thought you should know -- some detectives are downstairs looking for you." It was precisely all we needed.

I telephoned Henry and we decided to walk boldly downstairs. It wasn't difficult to pick out the two detectives (let God be my witness) because they were standing
behind two potted palms!

***

There was always this Keystone Cops/banana republic aspect of Guatemala, but I knew all too well how lethally "comic" it really was: how many hundreds of mutilated bodies of prominent and not-so-prominent people appeared in alleys in the dark of the night, some killed by the Left, some by the Right, some through the intervening providence of some private passion that often did not answer to, but used, any ideology around.

The two skinny, illiterate kids behind the palm trees had obviously been given the job of following us everywhere. We'd be walking down a street and suddenly Henry would pivot around and snap their pictures, while they would break out into peals of laughter. They hid behind bushes for us, waved through the leaves, and flirted with me.

We would walk in one side of the cathedral with appropriate dignity, then dash out the side door and lose them.

It was all endlessly diverting, but it was a deadly, defeating diversion. I understood their tactics all too well: no one from the guerrillas would dare to contact us so long as the skinny ones were about. That was their final card in this strange game.

And it was precisely then, during that already irksome period, that the desk clerk one morning handed me a letter. I opened it and saw the outline of a hand drawn across it. It was a letter from the "White Hand," the infamous "Mano Blanca," the rightist killer organization directed clandestinely by the big landowners and by the military and in particular by Colonel Carlos Arana, later to become president of the country. The "Mano" killed and mutilated everybody it suspected even of sympathizing with democracy, much less with Marxism.

And the letter? Naturally it was filled with dirty sexual references -- this is the way Latin men deal with women who get in their way or break from the macho's cosmic plan for them.

"We are speaking to you as we speak to the men of America; we are telling you the entire truth so that you believe what we say and not just to frighten you," the letter began. "Since you arrived in the country before the elections in March, the services of security, the A1, the G2, the army, the Interpol, and the private espionage of the MDL and the White Hand knew that you had arrived in the country to spy .... " (At this point I paused to notice that I was even a little pleased by the sheer weight and variety of the attention I was receiving.) It went on, with frequent references to me as a
"puta"
or "whore," something that also rather pleased me since I had always resented my Illinois corn-fed looks. Then it went on to warn: "Now you are being watched, body and soul; wherever you go, there are eyes following you. Only a few days ago, four men were waiting for you to take you to a night interview, but you did not trust them, and it was a shame that you didn't go because we would have given you chase, you spy, and we hope you will go to a guerrilla camp because upon leaving the city for the mountains, you will never again return and your death will appear an accident during a gallant adventure." But I was considerably aggravated by the fact that they then accused me of also being the "mistress" of the former rightist dictator, one Colonel Peralta. It is one thing to have one's politics attacked, but Colonel Peralta, a little, gray-haired gnome of a man, was one of the least attractive men I had ever seen.

Now everyone in Guatemala City obviously knew where we were, who we were, and why we were. For the first time, I forced myself to contemplate the unthinkable -- that we just might not be able to do it. Henry and I passed days sitting lethargically in the lobby, drinking beer and feeling "eyes" on all sides. Worst of all by far was the humiliating thought of returning to Chicago without the story.

But, as it happened, just then our luck broke. The guerrillas got word through one of the contacts I'd made and contacted me by phone (in Guatemala, at least then, phone-tapping was not a problem) and we spoke in German. Since our skinny detective guards went home for lunch and dinner every day, I made a date to meet the envoys -- two very young, very polite students -- in a coffeehouse during the lunch hour. This ruse somehow worked. I suggested we leave the country (to El Salvador), and leave very obviously and ostentatiously, as though we had given up. They gave us the name of a third-class hotel in which to stay upon our return and arranged to contact us there on the following Sunday morning. When we left, we kissed so many people good-bye, it was like a Mafia wedding. And we draped ourselves in such a sad air of failure that our hunters apparently were properly confused.