Sparsely, Sage and Timely
A friend and a pen from 20 years ago
By David V. Mitchell
After The Point Reyes Light won its Pulitzer Prize back in 1979, my former wife Cathy and I bought several dozen commemorative ballpoint pens as inexpensive souvenirs of the occasion. When she and I went our separate ways in 1981, we temporarily sold The Light, and I went to work for the Hearst-owned San Francisco Examiner for two years, taking a few boxes of leftover pens with me. More about them in a moment.
While at The Examiner I spent almost four months covering the civil wars then raging in El Salvador and Guatemala. While in Guatemala, I met an attractive young woman named Ana Carolina Monterroso, who is my houseguest this fall, along with her three daughters.
Ana Carolina, who speaks Spanish, English, and German, works in Guatemala as an interpreter. When I first met her 20 years ago, however, she was working for a private international-aid program. Since my Spanish was only slightly better then than now, Ana Carolina volunteered to be my interpreter for several interviews, two of which were daring although in different ways.
When an Examiner editor showed up in Guatemala City to check on my progress, he also dropped by the Associated Press office, where he was told that Central America’s best-known bordello, Club 45, was just around the corner. It was located in a Moorish building that reputedly had once held some country’s embassy. Its prominence, however, was largely the result of advertising itself on Guatemalan radio as "the master of the night."
My editor was intrigued, and I was immediately assigned to write a feature story on the place. I asked Ana Carolina to be my interpreter, and although she comes from a very proper family (her father helped found the Central Bank of Guatemala), she was amused at the prospect. Neither of us knew what to expect when we showed up at Club 45 unannounced one night, but we were warmly welcomed by the women. It was a slow night because of the war, and they were bored.
La directora explained the laws that allow prostitution in Guatemala while seemingly prohibiting it, and the prostitutes told us who their best customers were. The women had compliments for French and American men, but the best lovers by far, they all agreed, were men from neighboring El Salvador. "They give you dreams," said one woman. "They make your eyes roll back," said another.
(I have no idea what the secret of Salvadoran lovemaking is, but somebody could probably make a fortune writing a how-to book explaining it.)
Ana Carolina’s and my other "daring" interviews were as sad as the Club 45 interviews had been jolly. We one day received a tip that the previous night soldiers had shown up in the aldea of Chipiacul and massacred about 40 Cakchiquel Indian men in their homes and in the hamlet’s community center.
When Ana Carolina and I arrived the next day, the surviving villagers were still in shock and had no idea why their aldea had come under attack. The soldiers had tried to burn some of the bodies by starting a fire with the aldea’s "library," a bookcase in the community center. As the villagers saw it, the destruction was merely a gratuitous insult on top of the killing.
Chipiacul had been on the verge of at long last getting a modern water system, and in the community center, there was a stack of pipes, their white plastic and the window behind them splattered with dried blood.
Initially, the villagers were too frightened to be interviewed, but finally we convinced them they would be safer if the world knew what was happening. A village elder, who stood less than feet tall with his straw hat on, was chosen to speak for the group.
Occasionally, he would consult with the other survivors before answering a question, and his voice would jump about an octave when he switched from Spanish to Cakchiquel. His story was of soldiers gunning down males who ranged in age from 13 to 80 was horrific, and I stood behind Ana Carolina with my arms around her waist as she translated my questions into Spanish.
My report on the massacre ran in Hearst newspapers nationwide, and I naively hoped this would bring international pressure to bear on the Guatemalan military. In fact, the day after the report was published, it was forgotten. The victims were too far away and too different to receive much sympathy in the US. I felt as if I had betrayed the villagers by encouraging them to tell their story.
Now back to the ballpoint pens. In 1982, El Salvador held its first honest presidential election in decades. Nobody won a clear majority, so a compromise candidate, Alvaro Magaña, was chosen. Magaña was a US-educated economist, a political moderate, and was acceptable to the all-powerful military because, as a banker, he had approved mortgages for many of its top officers.
When I lined up an interview with Magaña, Ana Carolina joined me in traveling from Guatemala to El Salvador for the meeting even though the new president spoke English. The interview itself was interesting but hardly earthshaking. Magaña described being on the Andrea Doria in 1956 when it collided with the Swedish liner Stockholm off Nantucket Island and sank. The president also said he usually bought his suits at Roos Atkins in San Francisco and was sorry to hear the store had closed.
When our interview ended, I expressed my appreciation in a modest way. I gave Magaña a commemorative ballpoint, and one of the president’s aides took this improbable picture of Ana Carolina and me with El Salvador’s head of state as he showed off his new Point Reyes Light pen.