Murder in a Remote Neighborhood : ASHES OF IZALCO <i> by Claribel Alegria and Darwin J. Flakoll translated by Darwin J. Flakoll (Curbstone Press: $17.95, cloth; 0-915306-83-2; $9.95</i> ,<i> paper</i> ; <i> 173 pp.; 0-915206-84-0) </i>

Born in Nicaragua but reared in El Salvador, Claribel Alegria is the author of the prose poem, “Luisa in Realityland,” about the intrusion of war into the life of the Salvadoran upper class, and the co-editor of the bilingual poetry collection, “On the Front Line: Guerrilla Poems of El Salvador.” If she is something less than the poetess laureate of the FMLN rebels, her sympathies are clear from her bibliography.

They would seem to be equally clear from the title of her latest work, co-authored in 1966 with her husband, Darwin J. Flakoll, but only now released in English. Izalco is a Salvadoran town near the Guatemala border, named for a nearby volcano. It was there in 1932 that the most infamous mass murder of la matanza, the decade-long Salvadoran slaughter of the 1930s, took place. Hundreds of disarmed Indians, their thumbs bound together, were herded into the central plaza to hear an address by Gen. Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez. But the truck that was to have brought the general brought, instead, an army death squad. The captives were machine-gunned to the last man and boy.

Against this background, the title, “Ashes of Izalco,” would seem to announce a phoenix, the guerrillas of yesterday arising as today’s Frente Farabundo Marti de Liberacion Nacional. The epigraph to the book, from Francisco de Quevedo, only reinforces the initial impression. Translated, it reads:

They will be dust,

but the dust will have feeling .

Ash, but the ash

will be in love.

Quevedo was a satirist, however, and there is something inverted, if scarcely satirical, about “Ashes of Izalco.” Which is to say that, quite deliberately, it does not keep its opening promise. Though it is set during the Salvadoran civil war of the 1930s, and though all its characters know that a war is under way, no major character ever speaks a line for either of the contending sides. Neither the rebels nor those who are beating them back are granted much personal or ideological space in its pages. Here are no Marxist guerrilla voices, no North American imperialist voices, and only rarely, even in a culturally conservative, upper-class setting, anything approaching a foursquare authoritarian or militaristic voice.

The novella is, instead, a visit to Graham Greeneland in which the usual roles of observer and observed have been exchanged. There are, in the Greene manner: a dissolute American writer, fleeing his past; an earnest Seventh-Day-Adventist missionary whom he knew as a boy and has sought out in his extremity; a hot, dusty, isolated tropical town, its ancient upper class smug, its primeval lower class numb; and one beautiful, restless woman, reading French novels and yearning for someone to talk to, the wife of the chess-playing, patriarchal, conventionally macho town physician. What makes the result decidedly un-Greene-like is that the observing, interpreting, organizing intelligence is local and often female rather than foreign and male.

The novella opens just after the death of Isabel, the doctor’s wife. Carmen, her daughter, having returned home for the funeral, has found, among her mother’s papers, the diary of Frank, the American writer, whom she remembers only vaguely. What she learns from the diary is that Frank and her mother had a brief, passionate affair--they slept together just once--and then parted. To Frank, the Salvadoran beauty was a last chance at a new beginning. To Isabel, the American was a beginning that could only entail a dozen cruel endings. He had already cut all his ties. After her night with him, she discovered the power of hers--and chose them over him.

As Carmen’s thoughts interrupt and interpret her reading of Frank’s diary, the novella becomes, for all its brevity, two kinds of story: the love story of Isabel and Frank; and a middle passage for Carmen, who, married to a passionless American and living in the United States, measures her distance both from Santa Ana and from her husband by the depth of her mother’s unsuspected pain.

Why then the title and the epigraph? What has this intensely personal melodrama to do with the ashes of Izalco?

The answer is not at all obvious, but what the book has to do with Izalco may be what America has to do with El Salvador. The United States as a political power is absent from this novella: No diplomat or soldier ever makes an appearance. American culture, people and products, however, are omnipresent. Virgil, the missionary, exhorts his peasants to reform their agriculture as they reform their lives (he dies with them at Izalco). Frank implores Isabel to abandon her life in Santa Ana and share his. A Santa Ana dowager, gossiping about a recent wedding, notes approvingly that all the gifts were imported from the United States. Finally, the narrator herself--reading a stranger’s diary and discovering her own mother--is married to an American and residing in Washington, D.C. Like so many of her countrymen, she has made our country hers.

It is this cultural traffic, the novella hints, that has made it possible for the ruling class of El Salvador to regard that country’s civil war rather as Beverly Hills might regard the drug wars of South Central Los Angeles; that is, as trouble in a remote neighborhood. (El Salvador is no larger in area than Los Angeles, Orange and San Diego Counties combined.) Mulholland Drive doesn’t know and isn’t eager to learn what the LAPD or the FBI or the DEA is doing on Martin Luther King Boulevard. Whatever it is, it’s probably necessary. In “Ashes of Izalco,” the upper class of Santa Ana regards most of El Salvador just that way. In innumerable ways, the United States is far more vividly present to the upper-class mind (as Manhattan might be to Mulholland) than the local rebels are.

The Izalco massacre, as described in Frank’s penultimate letter to Isabel, comes thus as a late and monstrous intrusion rather than a true climax. Frank Wolff does not interpret the atrocity. Neither does Carmen Rojas as she reads his diary, decades later. If the reader is invited to interpret it, the invitation is severely muted.

Not least for that muting, “Ashes for Izalco” is an unsatisfying book. Isabel, provocatively personal with Frank without departing from the propriety of her station, is an intriguing character. Frank, whose debauched past is attributed rather than evoked, is a good deal less intriguing; and unfortunately, Frank, through his diary and letters, does most of the talking. For its brevity, moreover, the novella is overcrowded with minor characters.

And yet it is often interesting and always alive. Farabundo Marti, an offstage presence, is described as Augusto Sandino’s secretary. Other details offered in passing provide--against the authors’ transparent determination not to write a conventional political novel--background information on the long-running civil war. More important, the central subject--Isabel’s refusal to escape and Frank’s ensuing despair (chronicled in his last letters to her)--grows in power when joined to the memory of the Izalco massacre. Alegria and Flakoll may decline every opportunity to draw parallels. We are left wondering, nonetheless, whether the ashes of Izalco are not of at least two kinds.