The Death of a Journalist
(Page 6 of 11)
September/October 1996
Lynda Schuster, Granta (www.granta.com)
Then I got what seemed to be another break: The Journal's Mexico correspondent asked to be transferred to New York -- his pregnant wife couldn't tolerate the smog -- and I was chosen to replace him. My beat now comprised only Mexico, a story of great importance to the Journal because of the country's huge foreign debt. It was also a sedate story, and I soon found myself missing the adventure of Central America's wars. Worst of all, I actually saw less of Dial than before, because he had to stay in El Salvador and Honduras much of the time. But we did, at last, have a home together: a spacious, airy apartment in the downtown district of Colonia Juarez. And, as Dial liked to say, what really counted was that we could keep our underwear in the same chest of drawers.
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Dial managed to come home the last weekend of his life. We had two days together. In a raggedy salmon-colored T-shirt and baseball cap emblazoned with the word BEETHOVEN, he assembled and painted bookshelves we had ordered from the States; I brought him cold beers and planted kisses on the back of his neck. Dial and I talked a lot that weekend about when I might become pregnant. He adored Chris and Jordy and yearned to have more children; I was worried about taking time off from my career; we talked without resolution. I left first; I had to file a story on Mexican labor unions from my office. He set off for Tegucigalpa later that afternoon. It was the only time that I didn't walk him to his taxi.
I might have been one of the last people on the planet to learn of Dial's death. By the time I found out, evening television programs in the States had been interrupted; my Aunt Blanche in Chicago had called my mother in Detroit; Dial's kids had heard it on the radio.
All this happened while I was in a hideously touristic nightclub, sitting through two performances of Mexico's oldest mariachi performer so I could interview him afterwards. I didn't get back to the apartment until about 12:30 a.m.; as was our custom, I called Dial to say goodnight. The hotel receptionist in Tegucigalpa let the telephone in his room ring several times, then came on the line to say that Señor Torgerson must be out. I was not concerned. The previous night, Dial had said he was going down to the Nicaraguan border for a day or two and would leave his things at the hotel. I asked the receptionist to put a message in his box saying I had called.
Then I poured myself a glass of grape juice and settled down to read a relatively recent New York Times, a real luxury. The telephone rang. It was Eloy Aguilar, the Associated Press bureau chief. His voice was choked almost beyond recognition. It prompted an odd reaction in me. In a freeze-framed instant, my brain said, Hang up the phone. It's one o'clock in the morning, the AP bureau chief is on the line, and he's crying. You know exactly what he's going to tell you. But if you don't hear it, nothing will have happened. So hang up.
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