I had a wonderful friend that I made there, Margarita Herrera.
And she worked at la UCA, the Jesuit university
in the capital, the university at which the Jesuit
priests taught, who were murdered
by the Salvadoran Army in 1989, six
Jesuit priests, their housekeeper, and her daughter.
But at the time, they were alive.
And one of them was Padre Ellacuría, and he was very,
very, very intelligent.
As Margarita would say, nobody understands him.
He was from Spain, and he was an intellectual.
And Margarita would take me over there
to talk to him and the other priests,
and she would do her work.
And this is what happened one night.
"It was growing dark by the time we left the grounds.
But we felt light-hearted as we walked to the car.
Margarita playfully teased me about what I had understood
and not understood about Ellacuría's ideas.
He's a genius, she said.
No one understands him.
Does Leonel know where we are?
I remember asking.
But I don't remember what her answer was.
I remember that she rolled the window down,
lit two cigarettes, and handed one to me.
Her lipstick was on the filter.
We now felt that we were practically sisters.
That evening, we'd planned to meet
with some of Margarita's friends and a few European journalists
who had arrived in the country several weeks earlier.
We would listen to reports of what they had seen,
and we would tell them what we knew.
There would be Coca-Cola and potato chips.
We were still in the clothes we had chosen that morning,
so yes, we did look bourgeois.
But I would never have been able to run in those shoes.
I could barely walk in them.
Margarita pulled out of the parking lot
onto what I would call a slip road, narrow and unlit, a road
that wound around la UCA.
She was still laughing and teasing me
when, suddenly and in a grave voice, she said my name.
And the car was flooded with light.
She pressed the accelerator to the floor.
The vehicle behind us was following
so closely that a person could have leaped from one roof
to the other.
Margarita sped into a tunnel of darkness ahead,
and the vehicle behind us sped too.
Escuadrón de la muerte, she said.
It is the death squad, Carolyn.
They are going to capture us.
I turned around to watch the other car
but couldn't see for the light.
Margarita, I remember calling out, can you go faster?
No, Carolyn, I cannot.
This is as fast as I can go, and I think I'm lost.
There's the city ahead of us.
Drive toward the lights.
We sped.
The other car sped too.
This was going to be it, I thought.
Now, when it wasn't expected, after a day of talking
about philosophy, and god, and the practice of liberation,
I wanted to be brave.
I did not feel brave.
I had no weapon.
It would not have helped.
There was no last chance to do anything over again.
Are you afraid, Margarita?
Yes.
They were still behind us when we
reached a heavier-trafficked road, behind us
when we got to the roundabout.
And that was where the honking began.
Other cars whose drivers saw what was happening,
other cars pulling into the roundabout,
slowing down, blocking the way of those who followed us.
And all the while, horns honking,
and even some cars stopping and people getting out of the cars.
And then there was an opening, and we took it.
All the way to the house of the friends of Margarita,
we didn't breathe.
And then the door was opening, and we ran through it
from the front of the house to the garden in the back,
where the journalists were standing around in the dark.
I sank to the floor, pressing my back against the wall while
trying to catch my breath.
There was a Bird of Paradise growing there,
where the terrace ended and the wet lawn began.
Would you like to drink some water? a woman asked.
Everyone else was standing off to the side
when she knelt and gave me the cold glass that
slipped through my hands to the tiles and fell to pieces.
Margarita lifted her arms in the air
in a gesture of asking everyone to please leave us alone, just
for a minute.
Just a minute, while we catch our breath.
They want to know what happened, she whispered.
Tell them nothing happened.
You can tell them this because nothing did.
We are all right.