Buying the Night Flight (6 page)

I was so exhausted from lack of sleep that I knew neither Henry nor I could do it, so I went over and sat down next to Cesar on the ground. "We've got to get out," I said. He looked at me--a long, harsh look--and shook his head.

"It will be very hard right now," he said thoughtfully, his eyes narrowed. "But do you really think you must?" I argued forcefully. After talking with some of the others, he returned to tell me, "We'll send two scouts back to see if we can get your car for two o'clock tomorrow morning. That means --
if we can do it
-- that you'll have to start out about eight. We'll have to get you to the car so our men can get back here before dawn. It means ... " He paused, and gave me another one of those looks. "It means going through the army lines twice."

Suddenly I awoke from the torpor and from the relative safety of those three strange days. Suddenly everything was again deadly serious. I realized that part of me feared going back, that in only those few days the side of that hill had come to be home, a protection, roots. Leaving was a new uprooting, a ripping up of a strange new security. There were no farewells; we shook hands with a hushed gravity. We all knew we would never see one another again, and I knew that for all the days of talk and interviewing I would also never really know who or what these young men really were or would be or do.

The walk out was even more grueling than the walk in. Once we had to pass within sixty feet of the outskirts of a village, Gallo, where we knew army troops were entrenched. As our little group of twelve passed by, a mangy horde of dogs in the village set up a resonant cacophony of baying. "Down," someone whispered, and the word traveled like a stone thrown through the column. For five or six minutes we all lay on our stomachs in the mud and waited. Although I had lost faith in any protective God some years before, I whispered a fervent prayer. We are all basically so weak.

No one came, and we crept by, phantoms in the charged night.

An hour later, after we had been pulling ourselves up the steep, often nearly vertical mountainsides by grabbing the dried, bristling stalks of the corn, the boy leading us admitted,
"Miren, compañeros
... look, comrades, I must be honest... we've lost our way."

He didn't need to say it. We had literally been going around in circles in the mountain; we were all exhausted, and the time for getting us out and getting them back was rapidly running out. At one point Henry was so worn out he sat down and said, "I'm staying here until morning."

I told him, "If you do that, the guerrillas will kill you. And if they don't, I will."

Gasping for breath and feeling our legs would not hold us, for four more hours we wandered on the stark, fall-away sides of that damnable mountain. More times than I care to recall, I asked myself, "Can I make it?" Could I even take another step? By the end when we finally got back in that opaque blackness to the "path" (whatever in God's name that was), one of the bigger guerrillas was literally pulling me up and over the rocks and another was pulling Henry, who, however, doggedly refused to let them carry his beloved cameras!

My heart was pumping so hard that my breath came in spasms. Time after time I thought I could not take another breath. Occasionally we would stop and our guide would make a strange birdcall in the endless darkness of this hostile universe we had entered, to be sure we were not lost also from the rest of the group. Luckily, they always answered in the same call. Occasionally we would overhear someone in the darkness giving the code words:
"Guerra del Pueblo
-- People's War."

Some ancient Mayan god must have led us, not much before 2:00 a.m., back to the same little road and to our little Salvadorean Volkswagen. I nearly cried for joy when I saw the squat, practical little car standing there, waiting, with that Germanic deliberation. Two well-dressed students were waiting there, and they drove us back to Guatemala City. It was over. The next day we drove out to El Salvador.

***

What came out of it all? Was it really all worth it?

Professionally the whole series was an incomparable success. It was printed all over the world, even in the Rumanian paper
Scinteia,
and I felt enormously gratified by the journalistic recognition. It also laid the basis for doing many other such things.

But I understood clearly the limit of our work. Ethically I was disturbed by the sheer impossibility of reporting the entire situation; I simply had to accept the fact that there was very little I could do about this. Of course I had found out a good deal about the Guatemalan government and military forces beforehand, but there was no further way, once I had been to the mountains, to report directly on activities of that side. I was a marked woman so far as they were concerned, and I still remain so.

The episode also taught me that you never really
can
outgrow your image. Roy Fisher, the
Daily News
editor and a man I admired immensely, wrote in his column at the time, "Hollywood couldn't imagine a foreign correspondent like Georgie Anne Geyer, our man in Havana. She would be better cast as a pretty school teacher than as a cool, nerveless foreign correspondent who thrives on hazardous assignments."
Editor & Publisher
did an article on "Gee Gee Finds a Revolution," and repeated the schoolteacher part; they cast me as "your child's seventh grade teacher."

All my life I had tried to outlive my image as wholesome, blond, smiling girl next door. What more could I do than I now had done? I guess it all just goes to show that one is eternally stuck with oneself.

I did not return to Guatemala for several years. When I did, I contacted no one in the government and was very, very careful. Then I went back on vacation with my mother and some friends. By then I thought I had been forgotten and I gained what in retrospect was a foolish confidence. So I went back a third time, in 1972. That was the mistake.

One evening I was returning to the Camino Real Hotel after dining with one of my closest and dearest friends, the former Bolivian diplomat, Julio Sanjines. Julio is a unique spirit. He
is
a tall man of fine features and matching manners and intelligence whose aristocratic Spanish-Bolivian family had large land holdings in Bolivia before the revolution there in 1952. "We thought that by giving them the land right off, we could save the machinery," Julio used to joke. "But they took the machinery, too."

Julio and I had and have a special friendship that has prevailed across the years. We have always helped each other whenever one of us was in trouble. Each called the other and something just always happened to make things right again. It is an enormously precious thing.

This night, after a lovely dinner, he bade me farewell at the door and I crossed the elegant lobby, headed toward the elevator. At that moment a very tall, strung-out, dark man with the gaunt cheeks and sunken eyes of an El Greco character was headed toward the bar. Seeing him, I remembered clearly that he had been watching me that afternoon in the lobby. Now when he saw me, he made a swift, 180-degree turn and walked rapidly after me to the elevator. To my relief--the breath suddenly caught in my throat--the doors closed, seconds before he would have entered. On my floor, I ran from the elevator and opened my door as quickly as possible. As I rushed into the room, I heard the click of the elevator, signaling its opening, and the sound of his footsteps
running
down the hall toward me. Inside, I swiftly closed the door and somehow thought to secure the special bolt lock. Within seconds I heard him outside and saw the lock turning and turning -- he had a key to the room! I stood there, utterly frozen, hearing the turning as though it were something deep in the furthest corridors of my mind. Only because I had secured the special lock was he unable to get in.

Then suddenly I could move again. I ran to the phone and told the desk to send some men up immediately, because someone was trying to break in. Within minutes they had sent a bellman. The El Greco man had evaporated. I also called Julio and he did something with the government -- he never told me what, precisely--and came immediately to the hotel.

The man, ironically, was now in the bar. We dragged him out and confronted him at the desk. "But I am just a German businessman," he said, looking at me from behind those sunken cold eyes. "I got off on the wrong floor by mistake. My room is just above yours and I thought it was mine."

Julio took care of things. But that night, I half lay, half sat up against the wall of the room, trembling with fright. I knew that the Mano Blanca had tried finally to fulfill the portent of the old letter. But it was thwarted -- Julio and a special lock had saved my life.

***

The bigger story of Guatemala and young guerrillas and American involvement will certainly not end in our lifetime -- all of Central America was in flames by 1981 and eighty thousand by then had died in Guatemala alone--but the Guatemalan story continued for me in the summer of 1974, when I spent a fruitful week at the U.S. Army War College as a civilian guest at its annual defense seminar.

At one of the cocktail parties, on a glorious spring day on the perfectly manicured lawns, I noticed one of the young colonels studying me rather carefully. Finally he came over and asked, "Aren't you Georgie Anne Geyer?" When I nodded, puzzled, he laughed and said, "Well, I know you, but you don't know me."

The colonel turned out to be the officer who in 1966 had been the Special Forces adviser to the Guatemalan military at the brigade at Zacapa, the town nearest to where we were. This brigade was the one that eventually sent out every sort of military and civilian killer it could find to wipe out the guerrillas. The only trouble was that they were rather indiscriminate about the whole business: they managed to wipe out not only a few hundred guerrillas, but even by conservative embassy estimates at least ten thousand peasants just like the ones we had met.

It turned out that the American military officers on the scene, whom we identified in the stories by numbers if not by name, knew we were with the guerrillas. In fact, I learned that night, they were after us.

It was one of the stranger experiences of my life, but not untypical of our times, to sit there in a neat, pleasant, orderly American house on the army base at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, calmly discussing with this decent and thoughtful chap how he was encouraging and advising part of an army that was out to kill me. Not only was I being stalked by the Guatemalan military, I was being stalked by my own. And it was all too typical of the manner in which all too many Americans of my generation were to become so often angrily divided and alienated from our government.

At the end of the evening, after several drinks and a warming dinner and excellent conversation, he leaned forward and said, "You know, I was never sure that you weren't the one who was on the right side."

Starting on the South Side

"Women have a much better time than men in this world; there are far more things forbidden them."
--
OSCAR WILDE

Like so many things, it all started with a small obsession. When I was only seven or eight, I used to lie in my comfortable old German bed at night, in every respect a most loved and blessed child, and think about it. What, I would wonder for reasons I have never totally understood, if only one person had the truth and that person was a woman? She would not voice it because the women I knew did not speak out; and so the world would be denied this crucial truth.

Years later a famous Chicago architect told me that when he was about the same age, he was tuning in to the same waves when he also wondered, "If I knew the truth, would I tell it to a woman?" Even to his mother? The male answer: "No."
The life I started with was circumscribed to create the perfect young wife and mother. The expectations were clear, and until I was well into adulthood, I never knew anyone who questioned them. In the forties and fifties, there was no women's movement, and the old feminist movement of the twenties had left little residue for our type of world. Too, World War II had left the United States with men who craved the hearth and women who craved their men.

My future seemed engraved in stone. I would be the first generation of our family to receive a college education. I might work for no more than two or three years (but only as an "experience" in life, certainly not to support myself or for the joy of some desired work), and then I would marry some stable, nonabrasive, amiable, boy-next-door "good provider" with whom I would settle down (nearby) and raise no more than two children. They, in turn, would then proceed to replace
my
life just as I had replaced my parents' lives.

When I was a young teenager -- interested in all sorts of young men -- my aunts and cousins would assure me, with that intense certainty of women throughout history, that this brief time would pass and I, too, would be accepted as a wife in the world of men. "You will be married before you are eighteen," they repeated solemnly. It was a promise and at the same time a benediction; it was one's entire and only reason for living.

I remember with absolute clarity how I would look them straight in the eye and say, quietly and respectfully but slowly and stubbornly,
"I will not!"

But then I had always been extremely willful and often blindly determined. When I was a baby, I in effect named myself. They would say to me, "Georgie ..." and I would say back, "Gee Gee," and that was the name that always stayed with me.