Salveme El Salvador

Don José looked smaller with his beard cut close.  He spotted me from the steps leading up to the little store where he buys his Cokes and his smokes and called me over.  He put a dollar and a half a pack of cigarettes in my hands; my protests, as usual, were useless.  We went walking.  We said little for a great while.  He gave his Coke to a homeless man in the park near the comedor and we made our way south; he said he wanted to show me something.  The last time I had seen him, he eventually confided, they were taking him to the psychiatric hospital.  They held him there for three days.  He told me about how they had placed a tourniquet on his arm to draw his blood; it was only later that he told me how they'd bound his hands and feet and showed me the wounds on his forearms.  At the sorbetería he said something I couldn't understand to the woman at the counter, and she told him to come back when her brother was there.  We headed west on Antonio Abad and, a couple of blocks down, a middle-aged woman stopped José and sang him a love song as she danced and touched his old frame with tender hands.  She smiled at me as I looked on.  He smiled, too, a toothless smile of warm surprise.  Outside the Taberna, a man working for Cervecería La Constancia tipped over a dolly loaded with crates of empty bottles.  The glass rolled into the street and the busses came to a halt.

* * *

A few blocks down the road from Parque San Luís, just before the Shell gasolinera, a smiling man with a donation box under his arm stopped me and stabbed a headphone into my right ear.  Its partner remained in his left.  It was genuine Cuban Bachata, he explained to me, and I told him I enjoyed the music.  The band was going to come and play, he said, “en un día de estos.”  Then, leaning a little closer and whispering into my free ear, he asserted with a burning insistence in his voice that the rich have everything and don't want to share with the poor.  Then he told me that, “en un día de estos,” the guerrillas are coming to take the money from the rich and give it to the poor.  I told him I hoped to see the Cuban band when it comes.  We shook hands and parted ways.  He didn't ask me to contribute to his donation campaign.

* * *

Whispering in the semidarkness in front of a tiendita, a campesino compañero confides that he would write a book retelling his experience in the struggle for justice, were it that he knew how to write.

* * *

I spotted him from a ways down, crushing plastic bottles with his bare feet and placing them in a plastic bag.  I was standing on side of the road leading north to Suchitoto; for some reason the busses weren't passing through the center of San Martín.  “Yo reciclo,” he announced as he came closer, “I recycle.”  We shook hands, his sticky with soda bottle sweetness, mine gunky with bus handrail grime.

* * *

“How long have you been smoking?” Herbert asked me.
“About four years,” I responded.
“I started smoking when I was ten.”
“You managed to quit, then.”
“It was out of necessity that I started.”  In the guerrilla, before combat, they would give the young fighters a cigarette for lighting the fuses of their home-made grenades.

* * *

“Sí se pudo,” Hortensia beamed.  Her companions continued to celebrate under the electric lights of the school-turned-voting center in Antiguo Cuscatlán.
“Ya vamos a ver,” I responded, not really able to believe it.  But they did do it.  After 30 years of struggle, armed and electoral, the FMLN has taken control of the executive branch of the government.

* * *

In the hours between 1:00 and 6:00 AM, in the parque central in Suchitoto, I read the second half of an Isabel Allende novel and spoke for one and one-half hours with the vigilante who guards central Suchi in the small hours of the night.  “Se dice que somos dichosos los que vivimos en Suchitoto,” he introduced himself, “They say that we are blessed, those of us who live in Suchitoto.”  After finishing up his night in the parque central, he was going to work all the following day selling vegetables in a stall in the market.

* * *

They were burying his grandmother, Fernando and his friends, and a classic track by Los Guaraguao was playing on somebody's cell-phone mp3 player.  The friends were doing the digging because that, Fernando affirmed, is what friends do.  The abuela was 78 years old when she died.  She'd had a series of complications related to a botched hernia operation, years ago, but when they took her in to the Hospital ProFamilia this last time they found she was having lung, kidney and heart problems.  The stay in the private medical center (some ten or twelve days) cost the family $8,000, and they had her moved to the public hospital in Zacamil.  After three days in a cold, overly-air-conditioned room she died.  Fernando believes it was the icy air that finished her off.  He asked me to take some photos as they dug deeper into the crowded family plot, and after a few minutes one of the friends gestured to me, saying “Get a photo of this.”  Reaching into a plastic garbage bag perched on the edge of the open grave, he pulled out a human skull and set it on the tomb behind him.  I'm no expert in forensic medicine, but the large and regular hole near the right temple made me think the deceased may have suffered a violent death, years ago.  As they were digging in order to bury the abuela they had unearthed the earlier occupant.  At the bottom and to one side of the new grave, they respectfully re-interred the bag of bones.

* * *

One night, as two police officers drove me across half the city in their patrol car looking for the Centro Cultural de España, I professed my faith in Christ the savior before an evangelical cop worrying for my soul.

* * *

“I smoke too much,” I said to don José as I lit up another cigarette and turned to light his.
“My father used to smoke a lot,” he replied, “too much.  Once I asked him why he smoked so much, and he told me he was 'playing with God.'”
“I like that,” I said, laughing.
It was the last time I would ever see don José.  He died the week after the elections.

* * *

The rains have come back, and the sound of the fat drops drowns out the sound of my fingers tapping on the keyboard.