Lima Explores the Meaning of Macho

When he was growing up, Rafael Lima wanted to be just like Ernest Hemingway.

“He was my only idol,” said the Cuban-born playwright, whose journalistic experiences in Latin America are the setting for “El Salvador” (at the Gnu Theatre). “It got me into trouble, because the behavior it led me into wasn’t me.

“(The images) were caricatures of what a man should be: tough guy, hard drinking, womanizer--which Hemingway was. But it was a veneer he used to cover a very fragile ego and very fragile sexuality. A very fragile man, period.”

Nevertheless, in 1980 Lima pursued the macho myth, leaving Florida (where his family had moved when he was 7) to cover the war in El Salvador as a free-lance reporter for AP and UPI.

“When I got to San Salvador, it was morning,” he recalled. “Every morning, there’d be bodies lying on the side of the road; they had been executed the night before. On the way to my hotel, we ran over what looked like a bloody rope which was tied to this guy on the road. The driver said, ‘We better stop, get this thing off the road and see if the guy’s OK’--because it looked like he might not be dead. So we got out of the van and walked toward the rope. But it wasn’t a rope. It was his guts. That was my initiation to El Salvador.”

It was not an isolated experience. “In 1980, political executions in the capital were rampant,” Lima said. “Leaving bodies on the road was a billboard; it was (the army’s) way of saying that subversivos would not be tolerated. Their thumbs would be tied together with electric tie-wraps and they’d be shot in the back of the head. Sometimes their genitals would be cut off and stuffed in their mouths. If it was a peasant and the dispute was over land reform, they’d stuff dirt in the person’s mouth and shoot him.”

Somehow, Lima, 34, says he managed not to take sides.

“Once you arrive there, you realize how complicated the situation is. Yes, the guerrillas are fighting for just and true causes--but they also kill people indiscriminately. They also torture, and they rape young girls. And yes, the army is brutal, and they torture and rape--but when you have opposing armies, you have brutality; that’s the nature of war.” Some are addicted to it. “There was this reporter,” he noted, “who’d been to Vietnam--covered it till it fell, went to Rhodesia, then to Guatemala. Now he’s in Beirut.”

Lima’s own feelings are mixed: “It was the most real, exciting, vivid time I ever had in my life.”

Of his apparent absence of horror: “Of course it affects you. You come back and have nightmares. But the strangest part was when I was going back and forth (during fighting lulls). You’d get to Miami and everything was normal. People were dancing and smiling and laughing. I couldn’t relate to it; I had no connection to that innocence. But slowly you’d begin to adjust to it--smiling for no reason--and at that point, you’d be thrust back into the other thing.”

After Lima returned to the United States for good in 1982, he started a novel about his experiences. Dissatisfied with the results, he began writing plays. The first, “Wintering Manhattan,” was a romantic comedy about his post-college modeling days in New York (“such a silly way to make a living,” he said apologetically).

The play was staged at a 24-seat theater in Miami--a spare room in the office of a theater-loving dentist: “Wardrobe changes were made in his examining room: (the actors) put their clothes on his drills and waited for cues sitting in the dentist’s chair.”

Although Lima’s first play got a good review, his second one did not. “At that point, I thought the only other person who could tell me if I was a writer was another writer,” he said. He sent the second piece to playwright Lanford Wilson, whom he’d met casually years before. Wilson’s verdict: “Pretty good, not great.” But he loved “El Salvador.” After a reading at New York’s Circle Repertory, it opened the theater’s season last fall, receiving mixed to good reviews.

How does his play compare to Oliver Stone’s 1986 film “Salvador”? Said Lima, “James Woods is a wonderful actor and Oliver Stone is a wonderful writer. But the body dump in the movie bears no relation to the real live--or real dead--thing. There are grotesque things that you just can’t mimic. And I think the movie was a bit removed from reality. What I like about my play is that it all takes place in a hotel room. So you use your imagination about what goes on outside--which works better than having to create it.”

Also, he added, “My story is not so much about El Salvador as the personal lives of these six reporters--who’ve left their families, their loved ones, failed relationships; some just heard about the war and wanted to see what it was like.” Which was he? “All of them. And the bond you develop with those guys is something you never have again. You live life so fully--everything you see is burned into your head: seeing soldiers dressed in new vinyl Israeli helmets with modern machine guns and radios climbing over Mayan ruins, where 3,000 years ago the Spanish fought the Mayans. . . . “

Is that historical evidence that man--or more correctly, men --are biologically destined to war?

“I have to think so,” Lima said quickly. “I never saw a woman be as brutal as a man down there. There seems to be something in the makeup of the male, an innate aggressiveness. All the rules change there. There is no ‘You can’t hit women.’ If you can do it, you get away with it. And there is no frame of reference for judging good or evil. Shooting someone is not good or evil--it’s just done.”

For him, the life-or-death setting helped answer questions about his own bravery. “Now I know,” he said, “that there are other things I want to write about.”

With a propensity for autobiographical material (“I don’t think I’m one of those writers who can invent a lot of stuff”), he’s begun work on “Pages,” a life-inspired story of a young screenwriter in love with a destructive but beautiful woman composer. And this summer, South Coast Repertory will present a reading of his “Everything in Its Place,” also highly autobiographical, in which a mother and son trade memories--and false images--of the estranged father on the day of his funeral. “There’s just one thing,” Lima said, grinning. “My father’s not dead. I invented that to raise the stakes.”