A Broken Candle in the Night

I was seeking the pastor of a poor Catholic parish located somewhere on the outskirts of San Salvador. It had been a laborious search. Nobody in El Salvador, not even the most faithful of churchgoers, will tell you the name of their pastor. Not that they don't know. It is just that handing over a name to a stranger is treason in El Salvador.

But I did nail down the right pastor after a week of asking. And after he pulled his pick-up truck into the rectory, which was really a garage, we had some time to talk. We would never know last names. That was an unspoken rule. We agreed to a Tuesday morning meeting to discuss the work of the church in El Salvador. He promised to have church workers with him. I promised not to ask their names.

We had set our Tuesday appointment for 8 a.m., but when I arrived at the rectory, the assistant pastor was there alone, reading the book of Isaiah and chain-smoking non-filtered cigarettes. His first words were an offer of breakfast. His eyes were weary and his face drawn. "Something terrible happened here last night," he began. "They killed one of our people—a catechist of the children. The cadaver is in the street. Father's gone to find someone to take the body away."

He didn't know where the body was. "I'm new here (in El Salvador)," he continued. "It isn't a good idea for me to go to the cadaver. I have got to say Mass for the Mothers of the Disappeared at 10 a.m. And now this ..." His voice trailed off. He ran his fingers down his face. Then he lit another cigarette.

There was no need for him to explain further. The Committee of the Mothers of the Disappeared—a group started by Archbishop Oscar Romero—was considered subversive by the Salvadoran military. I knew that first hand. The week before I had been picked up by the National Police for carrying subversive material—documents of the Mother's Committee—in my pack.

I decided to search out the body myself. At the first street corner, I met a young boy selling newspapers. I asked him where the body was. He ignored me. I asked again, this time adding that I was a friend of the pastor. Without looking at me, he finally whispered, "Straight ahead."

I followed a dirt road. Houses lined one side, an empty lot with garbage on the other side. In the middle of the street, people were gathered around a station wagon.

SHE WAS THERE in the midst of them, lying in the back of the car. Her face was calm and relaxed. Her features were like those of the indigenous people, with soft, mocha-colored skin and thick black hair pulled back, much like my own hair. She had bled from a bullet wound above the right eye, and the blood had trickled down the side of her face. Her cotton pants had been torn from the knee down. Whether she had been macheted or machine-gunned in the knee was difficult to tell; I couldn't find the knee in the midst of this sea of blood. The crowd backed away quietly as, between my own heartbeats, I took photos of the body. Then the station wagon drove her away.

Who was this young woman of 15 years? Was she a David who tried to slay Goliath and was met with machine-gun fire? Was she Judith trying to enter the enemy camp under cover of darkness, caught in her act? Yet this was not the ground of the enemy. This street was her barrio.

Back at the rectory, with the testimony of unnamed witnesses and church workers, a story begins to unfold. She taught communion class to the parish children. Last night the lights went out at 6 p.m. in this barrio. A squad of 12 members of the Civil Defense, a division of the Armed Forces, was patrolling the streets. At 7:30 p.m., a barrage of machine-gun fire was heard. A witness recounted that then the squad of soldiers turned the corner from the street where her body lay. There the body remained, unclaimed for 13 hours. No one touches the body of someone slain by the military in El Salvador.

And her name. No one would say her name. But in the rectory hung a memorial of those church workers slain by the military. Some of the names are familiar to us—Oscar Romero, Ita Ford, Maura Clarke, Dorothy Kazel, Jean Donovan. But many names were unfamiliar. And somehow I felt that this unspoken name had already taken its place among them.

That afternoon only one of the newspapers reported the death: "Idalia -------- appeared dead of bullets that were fired last night at 7:30 p.m. in Barrio --------, when there were no lights. The death of the youth, it is said, was reported to the parochial church, anonymously."

Idalia never had a funeral. She was buried in secret, far away from her family and church. This is the fate of those murdered by the military: marked in death, as she was in life.

Neither President Reagan, nor the members of Congress who voted to continue this madness, will ever meet her. But I met Idalia in the back of a station wagon. And I know the truth that her death tells. A broken candle in the night, she was. And what in God's name are we?

Terry Troia was a doctoral candidate at Union Theological Seminary at the time this article appeared. She spent six months in 1984 traveling throughout Central America and spoke at universities and churches after her return.