Wisps of War

By R. Z. Sheppard

SALVADOR by Joan Didion

Simon & Schuster; 108 pages; $12.95

Joan Didion's talent thrives in hot places: Southern California, Hawaii, Mexico and the Central America of her novel A Book of Common Prayer. She finds flowers of evil where most people see posies, and she can fix a place or a character with some of the sharpest prose in contemporary American writing.

Didion's timing is not bad either. Salvador, first published in the New York Review of Books, goes hardback and national just as full attention is turning again to the nation of only 8,260 sq. mi. The book is Didion's report on two weeks spent in El Salvador during 1982. Saul Bellow's To Jerusalem and Back comes to mind. Didion listens to experts on la situation, and one is reminded of Bellow's comment after a similar experience in the Middle East: "Such intelligent discussion hasn't always been wrong. What is wrong with it is that the discussants invariably impart their own intelligence to what they are discussing. Later, historical studies show that what actually happened was devoid of anything like such intelligence."

Didion finds nothing in El Salvador that would refute this dispiriting wisdom. Everything about the place offends and frightens her. Fear and loathing seem to have been part of her carry-on baggage. At the airport, her papers are checked in "a thicket of automatic weapons." Cherokee Chiefs, synonymous with family fun in the States, lurk about as the preferred vehicles of death squads that "disappear" people suspected of guerrilla activities or sympathies. She visits the body dumps of El Playon and Puerta del Diablo, where many of the disappeared turn up dead and disfigured. She peeks into the tallies of the weekly "grim-grams" that the U.S. embassy in San Salvador sends to Washington. She discovers that statistics and categories tend to be slippery in this part of the world.

In two weeks Didion neither gets nor expects to get to the bottom of who is doing what to whom and why. She is clearly unsympathetic toward the Salvadoran government and skeptical about a U.S. policy that would polarize the region into extreme leftists and rightists. But Didion is no pundit. Her strength is in conveying atmosphere and her own sense of horror, although this is not always completely convincing. Seated one night on the porch of a restaurant with her writer husband, John Gregory Dunne, Didion notices a shadowy figure in a truck and a man with a rifle at a gas station. "Nothing came of this," she says anticlimactically, "but I did not forget the sensation of having been in a single instant demoralized, undone, humiliated by fear, which is what I meant when I said that I came to understand in El Salvador the mechanism of terror."

Didion is more consistently effective when she puts faces with the numbers of the dead. The face of one corpse has been carved to look like a cross. Others have had their mouths filled with dirt or their own genitals. There are recountings of the killings of American Agricultural Advisers Mark Pearlman and Michael Hammer in the dining room of the Hotel Sheraton, the same place where Free lance Writer John Sullivan was last seen alive. She reminds us of the four North American churchwomen who were murdered in 1980, the 50 students killed when government troops attacked the National University, and the doctors and health workers who were shot down in the countryside.

Against such atrocities, civilized people with good prose styles reach for the requisite quote from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Didion repeats the line from Kurtz's report to the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs: "By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded." The U.S. embassy gives the author a more sophisticated version of this 19th century optimism. The exercise of will and power now reuires a public relations consultant. Says one embassy official: "We could come in militarily and shape the place up. That's an option, but it's not playable, because of public opinion."

To Didion, El Salvador is "less a 'story' than a true noche obscura. " The assessment is a bit melodramatic, yet her dark night is full of the sort of detail that Didion knows how to use so well: the beach towels at the San Salvador super market that are printed with maps of Manhattan that pinpoint Bloomingdale's; the local woman who gets out of a taxi in a provincial town and leaves behind the scent of Arpege; the dubbed television version of The Winning Team, starring Doris Day and Ronald Reagan, in which the now U.S. President exclaims in accented English, "Play ball!" The 1952 movie is about the pitcher Grover Cleveland Alexander, and the game is hardball. -- By R.Z. Sheppard This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.