Salvador by Joan Didion Read Free Book Online

while in the United States, at the San Diego campus of the University of California, and he spoke perfect unaccented English, with the slightly formal constructions of the foreign speaker, in a fluted, melodic voice that seemed always to suggest a higher reasonableness. The general had been, he said, sometimes misunderstood. Very strong men often were. Certain excesses had been inevitable. Someone had to take charge. “It was sometimes strange going to school with boys whose fathers my grandfather had ordered shot,” he allowed, but he remembered his grandfather mainly as a “forceful” man, a man “capable of inspiring great loyalty,” a theosophist from whom it had been possible to learn an appreciation of “the classics,” “a sense of history,” “the Germans.” The Germans especially had influenced Victor Barriere’s sense of history. “When you’ve read Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, what’s happened here, what’s happening here, well …”
    Victor Barriere had shrugged, and the subject changed, although only fractionally, since El Salvador is one of those places in the world where there is just one subject, the situation, the problema , its various facets presented over and over again, as on a stereopticon. One turn, and the facet was former ambassador Robert White: “A real jerk.” Another, the murder in March of 1980 of Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero: “A real bigot.” At first I thought he meant whoever stood outside an open door of the chapel in which the Archbishop was saying mass and drilled him through the heart with a .22-caliber dumdum bullet, but he did not: “Listening to that man on the radio every Sunday,” he said, “was like listening to Adolf Hitler or Benito Mussolini.” In any case: “We don’t really know who killed him, do we? It could have been the right …” He drew the words out, cantabile . “Or … it could have been the left. We have to ask ourselves, who gained? Think about it, Joan.”
    I said nothing. I wanted only for dinner to end. Victor Barriere had brought a friend along, a young man from Chalatenango whom he was teaching to paint, and the friend brightened visibly when we stood up. He was eighteen years old and spoke no English and had sat through the dinner in polite misery. “He can’t even speak Spanish properly,” Victor Barriere said, in front of him. “However. If he were cutting cane in Chalatenango, he’d be taken by the Army and killed. If he were out on the street here he’d be killed. So. He comes every day to my studio, he learns to be a primitive painter, and I keep him from getting killed. It’s better for him, don’t you agree?”
    I said that I agreed. The two of them were going back to the house Victor Barriere shared with his mother, a diminutive woman he addressed as “Mommy,” the daughter of General Martínez, and after I dropped them there it occurred to me that this was the first time in my life that I had been in the presence of obvious “material” and felt no professional exhilaration at all, only personal dread. One of the most active death squads now operating in El Salvador calls itself the Maximiliano Hernández Martínez Brigade, but I had not asked the grandson about that.
    In spite of or perhaps because of the fact that San Salvador had been for more than two years under an almost constant state of siege, a city in which arbitrary detention had been legalized (Revolutionary Governing Junta Decree 507), curfew violations had been known to end in death, and many people did not leave their houses after dark, a certain limited frivolity still obtained. When I got back to the Camino Real after dinner with Victor Barriere that Friday night there was for example a private party at the pool, with live music, dancing, an actual conga line.
    There were also a number of people in the bar, many of them watching, on television monitors, “Señorita El Salvador 1982,” the selection of El Salvador’s entry in “Señorita