Salveme El Salvador

“¿Por qué no me querés, hermano?” he screamed twice into the deaf muteness of the house, “Brother, why don't you love me?”  David had found Don José earlier, in the park, with tears rolling down his face and snot soaking his beard.  He thought at first that somebody had attacked the mago, but it turned out it was the same old story, the same old wounds opening up once again.  We took him back to the CIS, where we cleaned his face and refilled his water cup as he cried hysterically.  He was missing his son, whose name he could not remember.  His brother wouldn't let him into the house.  He hadn't slept all night.  After a time he and I left and walked the two blocks to the home he shares with his sibling.  I instructed José to sit down on the little wall where we sometimes read the newspaper together, and then proceeded to call inside the house.  Eventually the woman who does the cleaning crept out the front door and answered me.  She told me José's brother was sleeping, and she seemed afraid to raise her voice above a barely-audible whisper.  José arose, crying, and screamed and beat the gate with his cane.  He screamed until he was hoarse.  We sat back down on our little wall and smoked a half a pack of cigarettes as we tried to figure out what to do.  Finally, I helped him hoist his emaciated figure over the barbed wire-topped fence so that he could get inside and get some sleep.

* * *

In the Dominican Republic, on Christmas with my brother, I met a Cuban named Francisco who taught me to remove the filters from cigarettes using my teeth.  We talked about racism in the United States—he's lived for many years in New York and Georgia—and he argued that bigotry has been eradicated in his home country.  Then he asked my brother and I whether we believed in aliens.  Then he recommended thet I get on a medication to stop smoking.  

* * *

In the Centro Pastoral Monseñor Romero at the UCA, a fellow observer—a disabled Vietnam vet and recovering alcoholic—turns listlessly through the photos taken the morning after the assassination of the Jesuit martyrs.  I suspect he may have been party to worse carnage on one of his tours of duty, and I think I am beginning to understand how it is that he has come here.

* * *

It's 11:00 PM and the street youth I've seen so many times near Hospital Bloom in daylight is juggling oranges in the pitchy darkness of the Salvadoran night.

* * *

Three Testigos de Jehova tried to convert me one afternoon as I fixed to smoke a cigarette in front of the Tienda Beatriz.  There was only one at first.  A gentle man of humble disposition, he quietly read to me passages from the Bible and told me of the sins of the flesh of which we all need to repent.  He had me read aloud a passage from the story of Adam and Eve and told me how the serpent was a manifestation of Lucifer sent to draw humankind away from God's will.  I thought of that remarkable interpretation of the story—written (I think) by some Dominican author but retold to me by a friend of a friend as we bounced along in a bus early one morning—in which an inquisitive and intelligent Eve, in a conversation with the serpent, comes to agree that until she tastes the forbidden fruit, history can not begin.  The missionary's two companions showed up at some point—they had been evangelizing in different houses in the area—and were fixing to pray over me some iniciatory prayer when I told them to hold up and that I had already accepted Christ as my savior.  They sat back down and we began to argue.  I told them that salvation, in my conception, comes only within history and that to accept Christ into one's heart means to labor alongside the oppressed and the marginalized in their effort to create a more just world.  I said that it's all well and good to talk about personal sin but that the worst sins are the ones we are committing structurally.  One of the missionaries, who appeared the elder of the group and who eyed me closely and weighed his words carefully as he commented on my Election Observer t-shirt, told me that no, conversion is not in the first moment a historical act but rather a personal act of coming to believe that Jesus died so that we might go to heaven.  I said that I don't believe Jesus is in some other place but is here right now in the form of the humiliated and the marginalized, and that it is among those people that we have to look for him. The missionary submitted that it is not so much a question of poverty and wealth.  Just then, Esperanza called me to lunch. I got up and shook the hands of the three men as they implored me one last time to accept Christ as my savior.

* * *

“Ugh.  Aquí tenemos al gringo más feo del mundo,” exclaimed a man on the street corner in San Martín as I walked past.
“No.  Digale 'Soy Hermoso,'” said a passing woman in my defense.

* * *

It's Christmas in the D.R..  Iain is in the shower.  Daniela is cleaning; Marta and Lala are cooking.  Smoke pours out of the wood-fired stove and one of the in-laws fires his gun at the side of the mountain.  I read El Che's Bolivian Diary and wonder what it means to be a complete human being.  Last afternoon we drank at the house of one of my brother's friends, where the men played dominoes and argued in unintelligible euphemisms.  One after another they handed us cups full of Juanito Caminante mixed with 911 energy drink.  Just before, we had passed a long hour conversing with an ancient campesina with severe stomach pains caused, she told us, by parasites.  A neighbor came by to leave her plates of rice, beef, and vegetables.  She refused to eat  and kept on offering us coffee.

* * *

Uyo and Doña Lala are arguing out back of the house.  I wished a good night upon Willy, the Hatian farmworker, as he disappeared into the night.  I don't think he heard me.  In the kitchen there is an aluminum bowl containing one egg, one lime, one manzana de oro, one photograph and several pounds of beans.  Altitude: 100 meters.

* * *

I knew he was Jesus from early on in our encounter.  I knew from the alcohol on his breath and from the way each step pained him; I knew from the way people avoided him and by the kindness in his eyes.  He didn't tell me his name.  He told me that he had come passing through from the east, and that he had been shunned there for being “spiritual.”  Three days before, he recounted to me, the Lord had told him he would find a pearl, and so he went walking.  “I had expected to find a woman, or a child,” he confided, “but then I found you.”  I replied, “Here we are.”  He proceeded so speak in tongues.  The funny thing was that we didn't agree about God.  A woman, a worker with a gentle voice who had overheard us talking, approached us vending a metholated ointment and accused Jesus of hypocrisy.  First, though, he had accused her of selling a bum product.  “I'm a worker,” she said, “and I work to make my living.”  Then, invoking the image of Monseñor Romero looking out from my t-shirt, she spoke of all the work left to do tearing down unjust structures and building up the reign of God.  He waved her away as if all that were unimportant, but she was Jesus, too.  As she walked away, I leaned over to him and intoned “God is a liberating God.”  We embraced one last time and parted ways.  “Lo amo porque soy de Cristo,” was the last thing he said to me as I crossed the street to catch the bus out of San Martín, “I love you because I am of Christ.”