What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance

by Carolyn Forché

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? Jess. 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.