The Last Love Song (73 page)

Didion: A reporter in Washington “is not going to have sources unless [he] write[s] the kinds of stories [the sources] want to see written.” (Of Bob Woodward's books, in which he merely repeated the stories insiders wanted public in order to advance their agendas, Didion said that “these are books in which measurable cerebral activity is virtually absent.”)

Didion: The “critical reading faculty” in this country “atrophied” around the time Reagan took office. She said this was not a coincidence.

2

In
Salvador,
and even more forcefully in
Miami,
published thirteen and seventeen years, respectively, after
Play It As It Lays,
Didion reconsidered the intelligibility of narrative.

Salvador
opens with an image of abandoned American-owned hotels—“ghost resorts”—on El Salvador's Pacific beaches. To land at the airport built to service these shells, she says, “is to plunge directly into a state where no ground is solid, no depth of field reliable, no perception so definite that it might not dissolve into its reverse. The only logic is that of acquiescence.”

So much for narrative, we think.

As she has done so often, Didion foregrounds her nervous personality in the book, her ache for solidity and depth in a place where nothing fits. She has left her California valley, entered the chaos of civil war in a brutal foreign land. Why? As her grandfather taught her, California has long historical ties to Latin America; it emerged from, and much of its vitality still depends on, Latin cultures. A fifth-generation Californian still trying to write a definitive history of the West, Didion hopes to cast back beyond childhood stories and uncover the actual nature of her soil.

Ultimately, then, the subject of her reporting in El Salvador is the United States—once upon a time and now under Reagan, as it settles more deeply into what she perceives to be unjustifiable belligerence around the globe.

With the publication of
Salvador
in 1983
,
Didion insisted the surest way to understand this country was to leave it—to adopt, toward it, a different point of view. America's affairs around the world caged the nation's domestic politics. The confusions she experienced at home might be at least partially relieved by a broader perspective. In the end, her frustration with a national story that never seemed clear—a frustration painstakingly expressed in earlier books—did not force her to reject narrative; it led her to believe that
how we live
could not be described in the usual manner, or discovered in the usual places. But that didn't mean the story didn't exist.

How could it be tracked? The princess needed to escape the trap of her castle, her ranch house, her nice new shopping mall. She had to visit the consulate, the foreign hotel (where other traps awaited, no doubt). The story would no longer be found, or at least it would not be completed, in a domestic setting.
That
vision was too narrow.

The narrative shards of the tale—the madness of contemporary American life, both at home and abroad—lay strewn across public squares: archives, libraries, battle sites, forgotten museums. The princess had to camp in the Hall of Records, and study every paper trail she could find.

*   *   *

Before sinking fully into
Salvador,
let's dolly back for a moment.

Typically, we speak of “scenes” in a narrative. Increasingly, in the 1980s, Didion's writing discovered the
real
American stories not
in
the scenes, but
behind
them, in obscure rooms in queer places with unpronounceable names, where our government's military and economic interests coiled in dank corners. The scenes were all surface, illusion, advertising and propaganda, impenetrable jargon: an apparently arbitrary mix where nothing fit; a glut of information so loud and rapid-fire, we ceased to believe in any coherent story.

Behind
the scenes, in the outposts and archives, in the safe houses and bunkers, a logical, continuous, and traceable—if findable—narrative was unfolding all along.

Who would have imagined that, after the American hostages were freed in Tehran, when President Reagan inscribed a Bible to an Iranian official, it might have some connection to TOW missiles, half a world away, sold to the Nicaraguan Contras? Who would have suspected that the Nicaraguan rebels might have something to do with a rash of cocaine deaths on the streets of Los Angeles?

As it turned out, the narrative ties were there. It wasn't that the premises of our national story weren't valid, as Didion had once feared; it was that the premises were different from what we'd been led to expect.

*   *   *

“I'm not sure that I have a social conscience,” she averred at the time. “It's more an insistence that people tell the truth. The decision to go to El Salvador came one morning at the breakfast table. I was reading the newspaper and it just didn't make sense.”

In fact, Robert Silvers had “expressed interest in having one or both of us [she or Dunne] write something about it,” she told Hilton Als in 2004. For several months, they'd considered a Latin American trip: The newsman Tom Brokaw had made them “desperate to go.” One night at a dinner, he'd told them “he'd been in Beirut, but El Salvador was the only place where he'd ever been scared.” Sent in March 1982 to cover the “elections”—a performance staged to suggest that the Salvadoran government was “making a concerted and significant effort to comply with internationally recognized human rights,” giving Reagan cover for military aid—he “woke up in the middle of the night and the fear came over him.” He took his mattress off his bed and put it in the window, he said, afraid of getting shot.

Could be a hell of a story, the couple agreed. Besides, Didion was wrestling with the early drafts of a novel (the manuscripts that would eventually coalesce into
Democracy
). She worried she'd never finish. She needed a break.

“What's
she
doing here? Wearing those big dark sunglasses,” Paul VanDevelder remembered thinking on June 15, 1982, the day Didion stepped off a LACSA flight from LAX and walked across the patio of the Sheraton Hotel in San Salvador, chaperoned by Christopher Dickey, the Central American bureau chief for
The Washington Post.
VanDevelder was a photojournalist working for United Press International. John Newhagen, UPI's bureau chief, was also struck by Didion's “large sunglasses and sun hat”: The press corps knew who she was and she had not arrived unnoticed. Many of the veteran journalists considered her an “effete literati” who'd hang around for two weeks, make notes for a book on the war, and “split” (which is pretty much what she did). They were wary of her because they spent much of their time drinking beer around the pool at the Sheraton or the Camino Real, recounting how they'd broken this story or that and some
other
writer had seized their reporting to become famous. The more sauced they got, the more the journalists fired one another's distrust. So Didion and Dunne—who tended to keep their distance—were sources of bitter bemusement. VanDevelder: “I remember over drinks one night at the Camino Real, someone looking at John Gregory Dunne across the room and saying, ‘What a bummer to be John Gregory Dunne, the second-best writer married to the first-best writer.'”

“We all wore T-shirts that said across the back ‘
Periodiste! No disparate!
' (‘Journalist! Don't shoot'),” VanDevelder explained. “It was a scary time. Four Dutch journalists had just been killed—one of them was the boyfriend of Sue Meiselas,” the well-known Magnum photographer.

A year and six months before Didion went to El Salvador, four American Maryknoll nuns had been murdered on the road to the San Salvador airport. Not quite a year before that, Archbishop Oscar Romero had been shot to death while preaching a sermon. And then in December 1981, evidence surfaced—including several photographs taken by Susan Meiselas—suggesting that a massacre of mostly children, adolescents, and pregnant women had occurred at the hands of government troops in a village called El Mozote. The Salvadoran leadership's “concerted and significant effort to comply with internationally recognized human rights” appeared meager at best, but this did not deter the Reagan administration, which was determined to fund the troops in order to beat back Communism (Reagan's bugaboo since his days as president of the Screen Actors Guild) and to “revise” America's failed counterinsurgency efforts in Vietnam.

In response to what had occurred at El Mozote, American embassy officials worried only about crafting a report that would “have credibility among people” in Washington “whose priorities were definitely not necessarily about getting at exactly what happened.”

“Consider the political implications of both the reliance on and the distrust of abstract words.” … “The consciousness of the human organism is carried in its grammar.”

In spite of Susan Meiselas's photographs of mass burials, charred skulls, and children's decomposing bodies in the mud, in spite of detailed accounts of El Mozote by Raymond Bonner in
The New York Times
and Alma Guillermoprieto in
The Washington Post,
the Reagan administration insisted there was no credible evidence of a massacre; no credible evidence that the Salvadoran army's Atlacatl Battalion, trained by U.S. Special Forces and armed with M16s firing ammunition manufactured at Lake City, Missouri, had committed any such atrocity.

The facts on the ground disappeared. Didion wrote, “El Mozote entered the thin air of policy.”

Just change the script.

Trust me.

*   *   *

Didion was uncomfortably aware that these events were occurring “only six years” after Gerald Ford had cheered America's renewed pride, and “most of us [had] watched the helicopters lift off the roof of the Saigon embassy and get pushed off the flight decks of the U.S. fleet into the South China Sea.”

On their first day in El Salvador, the Dunnes rented a car. “I was just panicked about driving,” Didion recalled. “There were a lot of roadblocks, and if it got difficult, if it got beyond the range of my rather limited Spanish, it could have been really unpleasant.”

“But it's the only way you can really see a country,” Dunne insisted.

Back home in Brentwood, they had recently hired a housekeeper from El Salvador, a woman named Maria Ynez Camacho. Before the Dunnes boarded the plane in Los Angeles, Camacho had given Didion “repeated instructions about what we must and must not do,” Didion said. But on the ground, amid pervasive threats of violence, one's choices were severely confined—if they were really choices at all.

“[W]e went out to the body dump,” Dunne said: Puerto del Diablo, craggy slabs of moss-covered stone, just south of San Salvador.

“It was like throwing a child in a swimming pool. The idea of getting over my fear by going to a body dump!” Didion said. Standing on the edge of a large open pit, sweating, aware of the silence, hearing only the shriek of cicadas, she experienced a “cumulative impact” as she viewed the “pecked and maggoty masses of flesh, bone, hair.” “You just switch into another gear,” she recalled. “You don't remain yourself, quite. You perform.”

“Nothing fresh, I hear?” an embassy officer said to her when she returned to the city. It took her a moment to realize he meant that there were no new bodies on the pile.

Dunne tried to keep her spirits high, to distract her, telling her funny stories and pointing out odd details wherever they went. One day, in the military zone in San Miguel, he called Didion's attention to a young soldier wearing fatigues and a baseball cap, standing against a chain link fence surrounding an army base, his AR-16 slung upside down on his shoulder; through the fence, he was getting a blow job from a woman on her knees on the other side of the perimeter.

Didion's pocket notebook from the trip, housed now in the Bancroft Library at Berkeley, is marked “Restricted,” but the day I visited the archives, I discovered a broken seal. A previous researcher must have cut it. I opened the notebook's blue cardboard cover and saw Didion's precise, tiny handwriting pinning quick impressions to the page.

Guards everywhere.

Translucent corrugated plastic windows.

An embassy officer at a party one night saying there was no more
bang bang
in the Falklands now, so the journalists would probably all come scurrying back.

Little blond children in the streets.

Where were the birds? (Circling the dumps, plucking the eyes of the corpses?)

A taxi driver crossing himself as he passed through an intersection.

The Restaurant Gran Bonanza.

What of the future?

On certain pages of the notebook, the handwriting began calmly, legibly, and then devolved into large, hurried loops, as if Didion were sprinting for her life.

*   *   *

She chose several lines from Conrad's
Heart of Darkness
as an epigraph to
Salvador
. Across the pages of Kurtz's report on the “Suppression of Savage Customs”—a compendium of “noble words” expressing “civilization's” work in underdeveloped countries—the
real
story explodes in a fevered hand: “Exterminate all the brutes!”

*   *   *

Time and again, in her published reflections on El Salvador, Didion portrays herself venturing from her hotel room into gruesome sites of murder, rape, and other violations of the human. In a world under siege, a person learns to focus only on what's in front of her—a strategy for steadying herself, of calling no attention her way—“the models and colors of armored vehicles, the makes and calibers of weapons, the particular methods of dismemberment and decapitation used in particular instances.” These are the details “on which the visitor to Salvador learns immediately to concentrate, to the exclusion of past or future concerns”—that is, to the exclusion of narrative—“as in a prolonged amnesiac fugue.”