A Lifetime of Sleepy Afternoons

Like most things that had ever happened, the encounter ran like clockwork, each step following another with clear and undeviating precision, like carefully etched dominoes falling in waves of inertia across a flat silver surface. First, he would call. In the midst of a sleepy afternoon, as I was laying on the light brown couch, reading a book about vagabonds and runaways, and the brave men who try to understand them.
Lorena ran towards the loud ringing sound that burst into the uneasy hot silence of my grandmother Graciela’s house. I looked straight at her as she picked up the red phone receiver, placing it against her brown cheek with the easy calm that comes from constant practice. Her wide round eyes looked straight at me with that half knowing smile that was always on her face. She nodded, in response to the trebly voice that I could barely hear coming out of the tiny speaker. She let the receiver drop slowly against her shoulder and she opened her mouth. No rush at all. Still looking at me, she said: “It’s for you…” and she pushed her lips towards me in the way that Salvadoreans do when they want to point without using their hands: lips pushed out in a simulated kiss, head pulled back in a quick sudden motion.
I stood up and walked to the phone and I immediately heard the nasal sadness of my Uncle’s voice on the other end. It sounded as if he was calling from deep in a dark forgotten well, lost and tired and hungry, his syllables echoing against the sides of the damp underground cylinder, bouncing back and forth as they crawled up to the surface, to travel up the spiral of the red cord and then all the way to the tiny speaker which was now pressed right up against my ear.
“Juan Carlos? It’s me… your Uncle…”
Earlier, my mother had called from San Francisco. She had mentioned that he would be calling me, which probably meant that she had told him that he should call me, and then she proceeded to tell me that I should see him. A sequence of artificial meetings prearranged to maintain the illusion of a happy family that never truly was, that never would be. At least not in my vicinity. Given my mother’s warning, I knew it was him, almost from the moment that the red phone rang. I maintained the sequence of the play as it was expected to proceed and I placed a touch of surprise in my voice when I answered.
“Uncle! How are you?” I could hear a slight layer of fakeness in my enthusiasm, and that made me feel embarrassed. It was too obvious, and yet I was sure that nobody would ever notice it. They were too busy faking their own enthusiasm, gliding through the predetermined scenes of their own film.
“Here, moving along, doing what we can, you know?” he said, in the only way I had ever heard him answer that question, maybe the only way he knew how. The tones of his words drooped down as the sentences progressed, as if he was sliding further down the well and the words came through weaker and weaker, and soon they would not come through at all.
“We want you to come and eat with us, we want you to come to the house,” he said in a rush, eager to complete his appointed part of the script so he could get back to the heavy silence of his bedroom.
“Yes, of course,” I said, and the impulse was to maintain the script exactly as it had been played so many times before, but I added a slight variation. I felt the resistance in my muscles as I pushed the words out, “I also want to take some pictures, I want to see the old apartment building, I want to see my grandmother’s house, maybe our old house as well…I just need to take some pictures.”
“Pictures?” he said, as if trying to locate a memory of this line in the script and coming up with nothing. Why pictures? I could sense the unspoken question in his inhale and the quick dismissal on the exhale. “Sure, that should be fine… let me see… yes, maybe on Thursday? I can pick you up on Thursday.”
“That would be perfect…can we go into the old apartment building?” I insisted. Usually I would have never asked anything of him, I would never have insisted on any request. But this was probably my one and only chance, at least for a long time, so I would have to make it count.
“Some of the apartments are rented… but the one in the back is empty, and my mom’s house… your grandmother’s house…that should be fine… your house is rented though… we can’t go in there.”
I nodded to myself. I had understood weeks before arriving here that I would not be able to achieve everything I wanted, not even a large fraction of it. There was too much to explore in this little land of smog and dirt and naked children. The more I looked upon the little country of my birth, the more it expanded to become a gigantic parallel universe that rotated slowly around the axis of my past. With every completed rotation, it became larger and larger, with a marked tendency towards the infinite. As much as I could trace, as much as I could photograph, as much I could videotape, with every placement of my attention on the details of a new chamber, of a new person, of a new corner of this vast zone of the endless labyrinth, the zone itself would become larger, El Salvador would grow right past the reach of my mind and leave me forever wanting more. So I surrendered quickly to the loss of one opportunity, having prepared for such sacrifices in advance.
“No problem. The apartment building and my grandma’s house, that would be great. Thursday is fine. I just want to take some pictures, some video…”
“Sure, sure… I’ll see you then.”
And the conversation was over before it really began. I could see Lorena’s deep black skirt and her dark brown legs moving up the stone steps that led to my Aunt’s apartment upstairs, which meant it had all taken less than a minute, maybe a little more. A car was sliding up the street outside, making the steep turn around the corner. I could hear the painful groaning of an old motor, the shaking of the doors, and all these metallic sounds were covered in a shower of bird songs and the distant sound of babies crying.

* * *

The bell rang, like a sudden buzzing explosion that echoed throughout the house and bounced from wall to wall, demanding attention. It was Thursday, around one in the afternoon. I could sense the stagnant heat of the tropical day making its way through the house, all the way up from the burning dark asphalt outside. I knew right away it was him, but I moved slowly enough to hear Ana calling me as her sandals slapped against the stone steps in quick recurrent rhythms.
“Don Juan Carlos, somebody out there is looking for you! It’s a senor.”
For Ana, men in the world were clearly and cleanly divided into two categories: “hombres”, which would wear old cheap clothes and old broken hats, and “senores” who wore expensive clothes and drove around in cars. The first kind she treated with disdain. With the second kind, she kept her disdain hidden, but it was still there, seething under the surface.
I knew already which "senor” was standing outside. I slowly got up off the little cot inside my father’s bedroom and I smiled at Ana and thanked her, letting her know that I was on my way. She nodded at me and immediately turned away. In her mind, she was already busy doing something else. I tucked my white shirt into my pants and quickly looked in the mirror to make sure my hair looked reasonably combed. I grabbed the two gifts I had for him and I walked slowly towards the front door, kissing my grandmother Graciela on the cheek on my way out. She asked me in a loud thin voice where I was going and I told her I was going out with my Uncle.
“What?” she said.
I repeated, “I’m going out with my Uncle.”
“What?” she said again.
“With my Uncle!” I said it one more time, in a voice much louder than I would have preferred to use but it was the only way that she could hear me.
She then nodded and rested her chin against her own soft neck and closed her eyes. “OK, with your Uncle. You will go to have lunch. OK. Be careful. Be very careful.” I nodded at her as well and walked up the wooden stairs.
As I stepped outside onto the terrace, I was immediately assaulted by the intense heat of the naked sunlight. There was no wind at all to compensate for the brutal rays that were pouring like invisible fire from the sky. I immediately started to sweat and I felt an intense urge to return to the cot in my father’s relatively cool bedroom. There I could lay down for the afternoon with a book and maybe sleep until the sun went down. This was just the kind of day I dreaded in El Salvador, just the kind of day that I had always tried to hide from, the kind of day that had always made me wish I could be somewhere else (and, of course, my childhood wish did come true, in ways I could never have expected.)
But even as I felt the sweat starting to slide down my forehead, I was somehow looking forward to the events of the afternoon. Not because I knew what they would be. I did know, in a vague and general way, what was going to happen, but I held onto a glimmer of hope that something, however slight, would change. I felt the taste of a game that you have played many times before, over and over, until you know each twist and turn along the way. You can see such a game coming from a distance. But maybe this time you will do something that steps outside of the pattern. Then there would be no way of knowing what would follow, no way of knowing where the game would go. That is what gave me a taste of excitement, and it was like the touch of a cool wind against the stagnant heat of endless repetition. I had no idea what this new step would be, but I felt the possibility and the possibility was enough to counteract the blazing sun against my forehead and the familiarity of the stone steps and the thin branches that extended from the tall tree in the corner all the way to a few inches from my face, and the bird songs that surrounded me and the sound of another car groaning around a steep curve further in the distance.
I slid open the heavy metal garage door with some effort, pushing with both hands as I listened to the loud piercing squeals of mechanical decay that flowed out of the rusty barrier. Then I took the final step into the vulnerable space of the outside world.
My Uncle was standing outside, leaning against his car which was diagonally parked across my grandmother’s short driveway. The first thing I noticed was that his car looked old and used. It only barely hinted at the brilliant flash of power that it once had carried. Somehow the same artifact that had once spoken of riches and class now spoke of the passing of time and the slow dispersion of all creations. Maybe time forced all masks to fall, even in the process of making new ones. I looked up at my Uncle, with his white hair and his thinning arms and his forced downward smile and it seemed that the car was his reflection, its smooth dusty surfaces held the secrets behind his tired drooping eyes.
His facial mask was deteriorating rapidly, but it still managed to cling to its place. He was wearing a white button up shirt, criss crossed with slender blue lines, and soft beige dress pants. It all seemed oddly familiar to me, as if these were the same clothes I had always seen him wear. He stepped towards me and hugged me lightly, maintaining a certain amount of distance even as he approached. I hugged him back, and very briefly I smelled his cologne which also seemed very familiar, the metallic smell carried memories of forgotten bars and meetings in noisy offices where stacks of papers waited in corners and a younger woman answered the phone with a soft voice that felt like an impersonal cold caress. He opened the passenger door of the old brown sedan and then he stepped around the front and got into the driver’s seat.
Before stepping inside myself, I waved a greeting at the guard across the street who waved back with genuine happiness, as if saying hello to an old friend, an old friend that he had only met a few hours earlier and with whom he had only spoken in short shouts from across the street. He held his black shotgun with one hand and waved with the other. I wondered if my life was as mysterious to him as the life of his employers was mysterious to me, all awash in the sound of glass shaking against blocks of ice and loud raspy laughter that smelled of alcohol and polarized Cherokees that drove up long concrete driveways into the unknown interior of opulent mansions. Maybe he saw me the same way. Maybe he wondered where I had been in the world and what I had seen in my travels, even as he smiled and waved with his thin brown arm, his teeth a thin strip of white brilliance in the midst of sweaty tanned flesh. I wished for a moment that I could simply invite him along with us, or, better yet, that I could deposit all my memories into him in one fell swoop, so that he would suddenly and irrevocably know what this strange bearded man’s life had been like, all the successes and failures, all the false starts and deceptive cadences, all the moments of clear understanding and all the deep wells of confusion, everything, all at once. Maybe then he would return the favor and I would intimately know the life of a young security guard that leaned onto the little tree across the street, smiling with sincere friendliness. Maybe it was just such a trade that held a kernel of understanding too simple to hide, too complex to speak out loud.
I turned my eyes away and I stepped into the car and looked at my Uncle with a big smile of my own. He returned the smile halfheartedly, and then he said:
“Aja, Juan Carlos… how is everything?”
It was such an open question, a question that tempted me to open it up like an old book and seek the corners that were not easily accessible, the linguistic dead ends and the trap doors that were hidden behind black walls. I looked at him before answering, at his wide wrist encased in a thick silver watch, at the thick rims of his glasses, at his permanently down turned eyes, at the thin layer of dust on the black vinyl of the car, at the security man still looking towards us and still visible to me behind my Uncle’s shoulder. I looked into my Uncle’s eyes and wondered what he would have to say if I told him how everything truly was, if I told him that I saw the sadness in him and the years of regret, that I saw the tremor of fear that hid beneath his smile. What would he say if I told him that the birds were singing strange melodies just now, a couple of meters above our heads, and that they would continue to do so long after we were gone, long after the walls of my grandmother’s house were broken down and lost to new tsunamis of life, death and uncontrollable desire. What would he say if I told him that these melodies carried as much music and intention within them as the wrinkled book on the back seat of his car, or the old tapes on his dashboard or any words that I could possibly utter, any tales that I could possibly weave. What if I told him that I felt a certain kind of sympathy for him that also had the edge of distance, that all the things I knew about him were small compared to the ones I imagined, and that they all combined to form a picture that never fully coalesced in my mind, like clouds of water and oil floating in a transparent bottle.
“Everything is good… how are you?” I said. I wondered then if he had already heard my words before I said them, heard them in his mind as the next words in the required script that we would now follow, the script that we had been following since as far as I could remember. I wondered if I would truly break away from the script or if it was too strong for me even now that I saw it, if the required sentences would be spoken and the required answers would be given and we would simply go through the motions even as the speaking mechanisms themselves slowly ground to a halt, mired in rust and biological decay. Then others would take up the job of endless repetition and the script itself would never die.
“How is your mother?” he asked as he started the car. I heard the rumble of the motor banishing the sound of the birds above me, the car shaking all around me as if it was ready to break apart into its constituent parts. I reached down to my brown backpack, simply to make sure that it was still there, on the dusty floor beneath my feet, next to a stack of old white typed papers and an empty can of Coca Cola. Then I looked out the window, at the curved slanted corner that had been the backdrop for so many of my memories, so many that were long gone, so distant and strange as to be beyond any hope of retrieval. So many that would simply keep on repeating, like the aching cries of the old car motors as they tried to make their way up the hill.
“She’s fine,” I said, knowing that he spoke with her over the phone once a week and he probably knew exactly how she was. Or at least he knew as much as he needed to know. The question was not really there to inquire for information. It was pure social gesture, a way to fill up the empty space with something other than heat and dust and slowly evaporating sweat. The car rolled back from the little driveway slowly, and then we slid down the steep incline that led to the crowded supermarket at the corner, right in front of the old presidential house.
“We’ll go to the apartments first, then to your grandmother’s…” he said and I felt that he was at a loss for words. I thought of the nature of communication, and how the linguistic contact that there could be between us was so limited, so strained, so lacking in any gracefulness or real curiosity. I sincerely felt the wish to say so much more to him but I also knew that it was not possible, it was simply beyond the scope of the options currently available. My illusory wish didn’t change the reality of these limitations anymore than it could change the corrugated texture of the tall protective walls that surrounded us. They were beyond my power. They were solid, ancient and cold. He wanted to follow the script, he had to, he had no other choice, and I needed to stay within its confines, if only to maintain the simple music of our encounter, if only to maintain the simple offer of sympathy and the repression of anger and regret. And yet our script was so restrained, so empty and flimsy, that it left us with big gaps of empty time, where only the sound of the motor or of other cars rolling by would intrude into our silence.
I looked then towards the corner supermarket with its red walls and its little crowded parking lot. A finely dressed middle aged woman with a round behind covered in expensive blue jeans was leading a couple of thin little dirty boys who were carrying her plastic shopping bags. Her movements demanded respect and held an atmosphere of arrogance around her as palpable as a dark cloud of smog. The little boys were sweating and smiling as they pulled up their arms to make sure that the white plastic bags didn’t fall. An old thin woman was sitting by a thick pillar loudly selling lottery tickets (“Loteria! Loteria! It runs tomorrow! Look at it now! Look at it!”) and a fat man with a thick black moustache was laughing at a joke a teenager had just said to him. The fat man was dressed in blue and black and held a large shotgun in his hands, and his belly was jiggling up and down under the strained buttons of his uniform. Across the street, the walls of the presidential house were as tall, old and imposing as I remembered, about three times the height of a regular house and much thicker, crowned at the top with razor sharp barbed wire and several layers of chain link fence. I could vaguely spot the light of vigilant eyes within a guard tower and the long cylinder of a sniper rifle pointing outwards from its resting place inside the darkness.
The car turned right at the corner and we moved past a Citibank and a Pizza Hut. Both buildings used to be something else but I couldn’t remember what. Now both franchises looked as if they had always been there. I could almost imagine that I was back in California, except that the sidewalks were too old and blackened and cracked like decomposing fruit, and an old fat brown woman was walking past the Pizza Hut with a wide wicker basket on her head and a little kid in her arms, her thick round belly forcing her dirty red dress up and out. There were thick and long sweat stains that ran down from her armpits to the edge of her waist. Her sandals clapped hard on the sidewalk, echoing even over the sound of all the cars and buses around us. She slipped past the uniformed men who delivered pizzas in their little black motorcycles. Their uniform was almost identical to the security guard’s, which made me realize that in San Salvador the two jobs were equivalent, requiring a similar low level of skill and a similar level of intense financial desperation. This made the security guards seem both more sympathetic and more dangerous. In El Salvador, the lines between guard and delivery man and thief were as thin as a cheap gray shirt.
“Aja Juan Carlos…” my Uncle said again, in the exact same tone that he had said it the first time, as if he had suddenly become aware that I was in the car with him. He turned slightly towards me with his downward smile full of hidden teeth, “So what have you been doing?”
“You know… the same stuff… music mostly…” I shrugged my shoulders, knowing that the fewer details I shared the better, and also knowing that there would be no further requests for details. The mention of music implied a world that my Uncle found alien and strange and beyond his comprehension, something to be left alone and looked at from afar. The only real question that could follow, in my Uncle’s world, would be “why?” But that would lead to a disturbance, which both of us knew it was better to avoid. My reasons were outside of his realm of sensibility and my own questions could only seem impertinent and rude. In any case, it was all outside the script and the script was the highest priority, overriding any glimmer of curiosity.
“Good… that’s good…” he said and nodded, letting out a breath in which I could almost taste the words “waste” and “senseless.” I could almost see them pop out from between his teeth like tiny colored bubbles floating lightly towards the windshield and breaking apart into the nothingness from which they came. Maybe it was just my imagination, just another assumption in a long chain of tiny assumptions that built a mountain of lies and illusions. But maybe it wasn’t.
We were driving past the old mansion that had been turned into a restaurant and was now an office space. Back in its days as a little vegetarian restaurant, my grandmother would bring me here so we could eat by the edge of the wide terrace and look at the cars passing by. Back then, there had been a script as well, but that script had been much broader. I could see my grandmother chewing slowly as I leaned back on a white metal chair and felt the breeze of the early afternoon on my naked arms. I could feel her smile upon me before she looked back at her plate and asked me if I wanted another drink. Now there was no restaurant, no breeze, no grandmother, no smile, no drink.
“How is your health these days?” I asked, knowing that every week when my mother talked to him, there were new complaints which were all variations of old complaints, and the only mystery to me was how he could possibly keep on piling illnesses and pains for so many years without actually dying. I thought then that my mother and him had their own script and sickness featured prominently within it. It was one thing they could discuss without fear of repercussions, a refuge from a world of contradictions and deeply held political beliefs.
“Terrible… I’m all messed up…” he said it and shook his head in a sign of self deprecating indignation. We were swinging around the great round park at the top of El Paseo, with its huge Salvadorean flag waving in the wind high up above our heads. This was the same park which had once been a great source of mystery to me, a maze of tiny corridors that promised more than they could deliver. Then it was a sanctuary when I needed solitude, when I needed a respite from the noise and curious eyes. Then a place to talk and watch and listen. Now it was only barely possible to cross the street on foot because the speeding cars never stopped flowing and they wouldn’t even think of stopping for a strange man on foot. Yet another limitation, yet another area of the maze which had been closed off.
“I thought you had started to feel better?” I asked, vaguely remembering some glimmer of good health news I had heard from my mother not too long ago, unsure of whether I was merely imagining it, or if the good news was already too old to mention, if they had already been superseded by a new batch of the bad. I could picture my mother sitting across from me at the dinner table, saying that my Uncle felt better, but this had happened so many times in almost exactly the same way, that a memory could easily be traded for a simply assumption about the future or the past. More scripts, more clockwork movement.
“When something gets better, then something gets worse… it just never stops…” he turned again towards me, nodding with his head and smiling with big round eyes that bulged like white marbles, “It’s messed up… this thing… it’s no joke…” and then he laughed with his peculiar laugh full of treble and a thick nose full of mucus.
I nodded back at him. “I bet. No joke at all…”
I looked at the pupuserias, the little dirty restaurants that lined the street around the curve that encircled the park. On the side of the road, a young woman in a deep blue skirt and striped green shirt was dumping a bucket of dirty water into the gutter. The water was splashing all over her sandaled feet, leaving little dots of moistness over her dark skin. As she tipped the wide plastic bucket, she called out to someone inside, in a very loud voice that trembled against the windows of the car and against my glasses. The woman was young and yet I had heard the same voice for decades, saying the same things, using the same melody. An older woman answered in a similar voice from behind the dark gray unpainted walls of the little building. She was giving clarifications, advice, commands. A few feet away, by a wooden post that made an attempt at holding back the large green bushes that surrounded the little establishment, a man was freely urinating. Even from the car I could see the wide arch of yellow urine as it traveled from the tip of his penis into the darkness of the tall thick bush. The man had a little leather case wrapped around his shoulder and a little white hat over his head. Maybe he was a bill collector, maybe he worked for the government. As he peed, he turned towards the young woman and leered at her, maybe he was hoping that she would turn to look at his display, but she was too busy to notice.
“We’re all in trouble, in one way or another, your cousin Roxana has some kind of problem in her jaw, your aunt has trouble with her heart and her pressure, I have my heart, my intestine, my depression… it just never stops… and it never really seems to get better…” The words flowed out of him with the easy fluency of years of rehearsal. This was almost word for word the same speech I had heard from him when he used to sit with my grandmother before lunch, laying back on the old green sofa with an unopened newspaper in his hands, the same speech he probably delivered to my mother during their weekly exchanges, maybe the same speech he told himself every night before going to sleep.
“I’m very sorry to hear that Uncle… I hope things will get better… truly better…” I said it and I knew they were just empty hopes. Something else was happening, something for which I didn’t have a word, but it was no less real for being nameless. Against that something I had no easy remedy, and even if I had had one, my Uncle would not take it from me. He would never accept any kind of advice from someone he considered an utter failure. First you make the money, then you can give the advice. Otherwise you better stay still and quiet and hope for the best. So all I could offer were words without meaning, wishes without a real intent.
“What about you? How are you doing?” he asked, once again turning towards me as we rolled down El Paseo, past the old pharmacy where I used to buy condoms by the box so we could quickly burn right through them with Dilcia, past the old Chinese restaurant where we used to sit and talk about the hidden nature of the world while chewing on large fried wontons, past the pharmacy where I used to buy comic books and little dollar novels that were not meant for little kids and that was precisely what made them so alluring.
“I’m doing good… you know, making music and things like that…” I said again, knowing that my words were as pointless as ever, that they were like seeds dropped in the ocean, floating forever outward, without ever finding a place to rest.
“Good… good… “ he nodded, once again, just as he had before, unable to find anything to add to his simple show of approval. “We’re going to go to the apartments first…”
I smiled at him with real warmth for a moment and then I acted like it was the first time he had said it. “Good! Thanks for doing this!”
“Of course man… of course…” he said and then he turned to me briefly, maybe imagining that we were old friends, imagining that we had shared a lifetime of sleepy afternoons and easy flowing camaraderie. Maybe we truly were friends, in a mysterious way that just didn’t fit my preconceived notions of friendship. Maybe there were simply different scripts for different friends and as long as you remained faithful to the particular script of your friendship, then your friend would sit next to you smiling, and the car would keep on rolling down El Paseo, forever on its way to an old abandoned house full of ghosts.

* * *

I was sitting in the dining room of my home in California, going over a magazine while chewing on a cheese sandwich, when my mother came in with a worried look on her face.
“Your Uncle sounds more depressed than ever. He seems so low that I am afraid for him. He doesn’t want to take his pills, he doesn’t want to exercise, he doesn’t want to do anything at all. He just wants to lie down in the darkness without moving. It is very sad. I talk to him. I try to make him see that there are still things to live for. I try to get him to do something. But nothing seems to work.”
I looked at her and I could see the evident concern in her eyes. For some unexamined reason, it was always slightly strange for me to realize the caring that truly existed between them. In most ways that I could see, they were so different from each other that I found it hard to understand that they had come from the same species, much less from the same womb.
My mother I had always known as a proud and enthusiastic woman, always ready to work on a new project, always looking for new ways to get herself into new situations, new adventures, new experiences. She was idealistic in a way that I sometimes found to be sentimental, but still I could accept it and feel the trace of sincerity in her ideals. She was stubborn but she ultimately changed through time in ways that most people would have found surprising, unexpected. If I didn’t find these changes surprising it was only because I had grown used to them. They had become like the night and the day, like the bright blue sky and the afternoon of dark clouds and cold rain drops, changes that were to be expected, changes that simply formed the background for our lives. Once my mother had rebuilt our house every few months, adding rooms, creating new windows, tearing down old walls and building new ones. When she had no more houses to rebuild, she began to rebuild her ideas, her hopes, her dreams. One way or another, the rebuilding would continue.
My Uncle, on the other hand, was not enthusiastic at all, not for ideals, not for wishes, not for anything at all. He would clearly and emphatically state that the only thing he cared about, the only thing anyone should ever care about, no matter who they were or where they came from, was money. Money, signified in him by a simple muddhra: the thumb joined with the index finger and the hand then turned around, palm upwards. Add a little shake, and there it was: the true nature of life, the only thing worth fighting for, the only treasure worth acquiring.
For as long as I had been aware of him, he had been on an endless quest for this elusive prize, and, parallel to this constant goal, he had tried, as best he could, to present himself as one who had already attained it. He bought expensive cars, expensive watches, expensive dark glasses. He carried himself with the air of success and the people around him responded to the image. His various projects were always pointing towards that single bottom line.
He lacked the sentimental ideals of my mother. Moreover, he found them distasteful and contrary to his interests (“If the leftists come to power they will raise taxes! They will take away my houses! They will take away yours! Then what will you say?”) In the leftists that my mother admired, he saw an enduring dark threat. Given the chance, they might take away his image, they might take away his own limited power, they might take away the little sliver of color that he could still recognize as his life.
He was permanently enraged because the world itself refused to open up its inner gates and offer him the single thing he craved. He had never deviated from this single obsessive endeavor. His body had simply grown older and slower, and, as time seemed to mark itself by repeated failures, his enthusiasm for even this simple ideal had waned until he didn’t himself believe it was attainable anymore.
And yet, somehow, perhaps simply by their genetic closeness, or more likely because of the years of physical closeness that had marked their early childhood, my mother and my Uncle maintained a kind of love for each other that continuously escaped my grasp. If I didn’t purposefully place my attention on it, and then allow my mind to be invaded my visions of a brother and a sister playfully wrestling in a dusty patio of San Salvador, then I couldn’t see this love at all. When it suddenly made an appearance before me, when it suddenly sprang to life all over her face, like a bright red firefly buzzing up out of her eyes, it was always a kind of electric shock to my own sense of the possible. Yes, she loved him, in spite of or maybe because of his monotonous nature.
Here she was, standing in front of me, with a look of desperation in her eyes and it was all for him, for a man I had mostly dismissed from my thoughts since I was a teenager and yet here he was, alive and all over my mother’s face. I looked closely into her pronounced wrinkles of worry and sadness. In there, in the crevices that painted her emotions on the canvas of her flesh, I saw a question. Maybe it wasn’t there at all. Maybe it was just a mirage of my own mind, trying to find a place to grip tightly with my invisible hands. But I chose to see the question in her silent movements, and I proceeded to answer it, in a calm and systematic voice.
“He must do something then,” I said, “something truly different, something startling, something that really pulls him back out of the path that he is in.”
“Like what?” she asked me with more than a hint of curiosity, her eyes wide open, her hands pressing against the side of the kitchen counter.
“I don’t know… he could find a lover… a much younger girl that would really love him and remind him of the things he has forgotten.” When I said it, I pictured the men that used to drink with my Dad, the ones who would brag about the young girls they had on the side, hidden away in some dark apartment in the suburbs, “los culitos”, “the little “asses.” I could see that this made them very happy and I was just starting to understand that there might be more to it than first had met my eyes. I pictured the old apartment number three where the mysterious man would bring his women, eager young women with skin that was brown and sweaty and hidden by dark curtains. I pictured the lusty laughter of drunk men sifting through cigarette smoke and dancing to loud disco music that made the walls shake. I pictured a young girl in a faded brown skirt looking up at my Uncle and maybe seeing in him that which I myself could not see. Just because I couldn’t see it, it surely didn’t mean that it wasn’t there. Maybe it just needed to find its way back to the surface.
“Or he could start smoking pot… that might shake aside the cobwebs in his mind and let him look upon the world again in a fresh manner.” I pictured my Uncle leaning back in the darkness of his room, sucking on a thick white joint. I could see that at first he wouldn’t like it, at first it would just be like a strange idea that had taken shape in his hands and was now slowly burning away and turning into smoke as he sucked it into his lungs. But then a certain smile would crawl across his face, and then the smile would grow bigger, and maybe he would then start to laugh in a way I had never heard, in a way that none of us had ever heard, and his chest would shake with the laughter and my Aunt would come in and ask if he was alright, for surely it couldn’t be a normal thing to laugh so much and so hard.
“Or he could start to work…maybe on some kind of artwork, something he could do with his hands…” and I pictured him then with pieces of wood of many colors, arranging them all over my grandmother’s backyard, combining them in different structures that made no sense and served no purpose, placing them against each other and then nailing them together, creating little buildings that housed nothing other than a thirst that had never been quenched. I could see him sitting on the grass staring at them, letting his eyes wander over the smooth surfaces and the sharp corners.
Even as I saw these images I knew they would never come to pass. They simply would not, could not, touch the realm of the possible with their weak fingers of gauze. My Uncle would not ever sit on the grass and smile, observing a useless structure he had carefully created. My Uncle would not hold a young brown girl in his arms and kiss her, tasting salt and tortillas on her long wet tongue. My Uncle would not sit in the shade of his elegant house and smoke on a marijuana joint, his eyes growing large and red and full of nonsensical wisdom. These things were so remote as to be almost inconceivable, and they faded into oblivion as soon as I tried to hold them in my mind.
My mother looked directly at me with an air of seriousness. I could tell that she was not angry at my pronunciations, even if she found them inherently ludicrous (as maybe they were.) She could tell that, as patently absurd as they were, there was some truth in them, like a tiny spoonful of sugar in a pot full of black coffee.
“You mean some kind of handcraft?” she said in a voice that seemed to hold some curiosity.
“Sure, something with his hands, something he can build…”
She shook her head then, and the concern reappeared after the brief interruption. “He will never do such things… even if he wanted to do them, his wife, your Aunt… your cousins… they would laugh at him if he tried to work on something, it can never happen…they just wouldn’t let him do it…”
I shrugged my shoulders, letting her know that I ultimately was not really concerned with what happened. I was only trying to offer the best advice I could give. My Uncle was a figure too distant and too fixed, more like a strange tale that we, my mother and I, ran over when we found some time to talk. Something to peruse over dinner and then dismiss. Something to forget until there was nothing else to dream about. He was not real enough for me to feel the pain that radiated from his dark and lonely room. But I had never wrestled with him, I had never seen him strong and young and proud, I had never laughed at his jokes and he had never laughed at mine.
“It would definitely be weird… very weird for him to do anything like this… but whatever he does, it has to be weird…it has to very weird and strange if it’s going to work…it has to stand markedly outside of what is expected of him… of what he expects from himself… as long as he continues to do what he has always done, the results will be the same. As long as the same things happen, the same things will happen in return. The same causes will lead to the same effects will lead to the same causes. As simple as that.”
I pictured an old wooden wheel turning over and over in the wind, slowly getting destroyed by the rain, cracking here and there, but still spinning, turning and turning until the shape had withered to a soft cracked consistency full of worms, smelling of shit, death and forgetfulness. Then it would not turn anymore. Then there would only be the wind and a decomposing shape that had once been a wooden wheel.
She laughed, shaking her head, pleased at the irreverence of my suggestions.
“A young lover… marijuana… artwork…I will tell him some day that those are your prescriptions for him!”
I laughed with her, picturing how they would laugh, how they would all say: “ah Juan Carlos… he is so crazy…”
“Yeah, tell him… at least tell him…that’s the least we can do, right?” I said it in the midst of my own laughter.
And she did tell him, about six months later. As she described it to me, they all laughed together as expected, loud exhalations going around in circles all over the old dining room table where we used to eat dark turkey and rice with cheese and green peas. They all said, one after the other:
“Ah Juan Carlos… so crazy!”
Just as we had expected, in fact, so close to our expectations that it had a touch of the eternal within it, a touch of the perpetual motion machine that produced our destiny within its secret rusty grinding wheels. After the laughter died down, the conversation changed and it was all soon forgotten. But there was something in my Uncle’s reaction that was not as expected at all. Something small and yet worth noting. Something that carried the breeze of other worlds in its flash of life.
She told me that he looked at her, without laughing or smiling, and he said:
“That’s what Juan Carlos says? Is that what he says?”
And she nodded.
“I have thought many times of doing something with my hands…” he said.
And she nodded again. But everyone was laughing, so their conversation couldn’t continue and that single moment of curiosity was carried away in the wings of derisive laughter to a place where it could no longer be reached. It was all as expected, like a little piece of clockwork theater following its programmed steps along its well used grooves, grinding its way to one final stop.
When I heard of all this, I felt a pang of sadness, a certain kind of empathy for someone I was supposed to love but I could only barely imagine. I wondered if there was some way I could truly help him. But I knew that there truly wasn’t any way to reach him. He was as distant from me as the farthest star. Nonetheless, maybe suffering from the same kind of idealistic sentimentality I had often observed in my mother, I truly wished that there was.

* * *

The car came to a stop in front of the closed sliding garage door, white and light green and heavy like the hot air that surrounded it. My Uncle pushed it open, heaving slightly with the effort. The house was like any other house in the middle class suburbs. Two floors, a little yard in front that had now been turned into an apartment, a tall white wall that covered the facade in its whiteness but didn’t manage to quite hide it all, a triangled roof that peeked over the wall in a last desperate attempt to establish its presence. The same as any other, the same as all of them.
If I had simply been driving down this little side street on my way to some other place, maybe listening to music, maybe talking to my father or a friend, maybe dreaming of possibilities that ran like spider webs over the shifting canvas of my mind, maybe trying to peer through the unbreakable barrier of otherness that was taller than any wall and much heavier than any metal gate, if I had been just passing by while dreaming of these or other things, I would probably not have given this one house more than a passing thought. Just another middle class house, in another little suburb of San Salvador. Somewhere around the corner there would be the sound of kids playing, screaming as they ran after a plastic ball or after each other, and a TV blaring with the sounds of soccer, and a ranchera celebrating ultimate sadness and desperation, and a loud dog barking away at his own existence and the sound of cars starting and turning off, and buses in the distance groaning under their human load, and nothing else. The questions would be so many that there might as well be none. The answers would be slow in coming. And so my eyes would turn away quickly, on to the next house, which would be just the same as the last.
But this particular driveway, as covered as it now was by the markings of time and the false safety of a tall wall and a metal gateway, this driveway summoned deep visions within me.
Dreams of sitting on the little wall by the front lawn, lighting firecrackers with my younger cousin, Juan Antonio, passing the wick over a candle and watching it start its frenzied run towards explosive death, and then running ourselves towards the street to throw them, gyrating head over heels into the center of the asphalt expanse, where they would swiftly transform into ripples of newspaper covered in soot, all in the midst of a loud pop and a cloud of grayish smoke.
Dreams of my older cousin lighting huge fire cracker machine guns, all wrapped in red cellophane which somehow made them more frightening, as if the redness invoked the blood of true destruction and the real death of the black machine guns which were being fired not too far away in the depths of the mountains and the “quebradas.” He would light them up with a lit cigarette in the middle of the street and then he would run towards us laughing in high nasal squeaks, and the red and black snakes exploded in terrifying sequences of burning white and rapid violet fire.
Dreams of my father coming to get me in the middle of dinner. My aunt would walk towards the door and then his voice and her voice mingled into a single message that was hidden from me by fear and false hopes, and finally the words “Juan Carlos, your father is here to get you” would break through my last flimsy sanctuary. He was mad already at the forced imposition of having to come all the way here in the middle of the Christmas celebration, all the way to the house of the family that saw him as the villain in a story they couldn’t begin to understand, coming all the way here in the middle of clouds of firecracker explosions and cars driving wildly to reach yet another place where happiness could finally be found, coming all the way here so that I could spend midnight with him and his family, for midnight was the only moment that truly mattered, and all the celebrations and all the music and all the drinking and all the laughing, it all led to that one moment, when the firecrackers would be so loud that they would make the walls shake and everybody would stand up and say “Merry Christmas!” and they would all hug each other. For a moment time appeared to stop, framed in loud explosions and tight hugs, only to begin again with a sense of confusion and uneasiness about what step to take next. How would this merriness be accomplished? Or was it already over and its death had been sealed with a hug?
Standing here brought me the taste of my own quiet tears when my father came to get me, for as much as I disliked to be in my Uncle’s house, I disliked my father’s family even more (not through any fault of their own, simply because in the great spectrum that separated the truly mine that lived within my chest and the truly Other that was hiding behind so many walls and dark nights of shining stars, my father’s family was much, much further away. That, in and of itself, made them more strange and frightening.)
Dreams of grasping at my mother’s sleeve and then meeting her look of helplessness. A deal had been made between them and I had to go, there was no other recourse, no other solution, no place to hide. So I would stand up and walk away, to light firecrackers in another driveway, to listen to different jokes, to be hugged by stranger’s arms when midnight came along.
We stepped around the half open garage door together and then he closed it behind us. He had in his hands the two pictures I had brought him as gifts, square portraits of him and my Aunt, processed to become shiny and colorful, to hint at the pure brightness in life that they had apparently lost. I was certain that they would be completely forgotten within a few hours, maybe even sooner, misplaced among all the other debris that embodied their trail of disjointed memories.
We walked up the walkway, covered in narrow red bricks with sharp edges that sank into gray concrete. Then I spotted the old bronze statue, the same one that had sat in my grandmother’s house for so many years. A nude black woman, leaning back completely exposed, unafraid to show every detail of her alluring physical presence. The bronze flesh was now wounded and marked. White lines and splotches covered the dirty bronze I had once admired, as if the transfer from one chamber to another had been too much for the naked beauty and now her body showed the wounds of the shock. I pointed her out to my Uncle, checking to make sure that it was in fact the same one and not just a copy.
“Yes, it is the same one. Your mother was going to sell her… and she would have gotten a lot of money for it… you understand me? A lot of money! But the damned artist forgot to sign it, and without his signature, the thing is worthless… and so now, here it is. The same one indeed.“
I nodded, realizing that where I saw a naked bronze beauty reclining in an eternal moment of gentle pleasure and fearless vulnerability, he saw riches and rewards, or, in this case, the lack of them.
As we stepped towards the front door of the house, I could hear the familiar slapping of sandals against the smooth white bricks that covered the lower floor.
“Aja Juan Carlos!” my Aunt said, coming to greet me with a big smile that stretched so far towards her nose that it threatened to swallow it in one sudden lethal attack of merriment. “How are you? Huh? You’re getting very fat, huh?” and then she hugged me lightly. I kissed her cheek which puffed out like a little ping pong ball covered in skin colored elastic and I said:
“Good, I’m good…”
“Good!” she said and laughed with the loud aggressive sound that I felt within me as an integral element of this house, as integral as the bricks and the walls and the long dining room table. If the house were to be abandoned some day, somebody who walked through its empty rooms would probably still hear the echo of her laughter bouncing off of the dilapidated walls. The laughter indeed echoed through the house now as I stepped inside, just as I smiled back at her, looking at the mural of family pictures behind her, and more pictures all over an upright brown piano that had gone to seed because nobody here had ever learned to play it. (Once I pressed my fingers on it, and the keys shivered under my touch, shaking left and right, and the sounds that came out where like little whimpers, not strong enough to be calls for help, not weak enough to be simply pathetic.)
My Uncle walked in ahead of me and headed straight for the little living room by the glass doors in the back that led to the backyard and the pool. I followed and immediately was overwhelmed by a strong smell of urine. My aunt was already walking back towards the kitchen where she was always hard at work, at least whenever I came here which had almost always been at lunchtime. My uncle, suddenly assaulted by the same pungent aroma that assaulted me, called out to her:
“Gladis! You didn’t clean up after the dog?”
“It’s not my dog! He pees over and over… as soon as you clean up one mess, there’s two more! You try it! You clean up after him! I give up!”
Her response came with the ameliorating tones of a joke, but also with an undercurrent of real anger. I looked over towards her by the door of the kitchen and I saw her shaking her head in disbelief, then she looked at me and shook her head some more, spreading open her mouth in the same broad smile as always.
I looked down at the shiny white floor and narrowly avoided a nearly transparent puddle of urine that was still slowly spreading over the flat surface. A few feet away was the culprit: a tiny white dog that was so old that his legs no longer worked. Every time he tried to stand up, the legs would flatten out underneath him, and he would whimper with frustration and shame.
His fur was like bubbles of cotton, only slightly marked by dirt. His eyes were dark and bulging. His nose was pink and it would flare out slightly as he whimpered. Even as I looked at him in his helpless situation, another puddle of urine was forming underneath him. The little dog looked up at me sideways in a perfect simulation of embarrassment. My Uncle switched routes and came back to where the dog was, stepping slowly and lazily around the puddles.
“Look at him… he’s fifteen years old… he’s barely alive anymore…” As he talked, he picked the dog up and held him with a tenderness that I had never seen in him, certainly not towards me, not even for his own wife or children. He held the little white dog closely in his arms and smiled at me, pressing his cheek against the dirty white cotton fur. He raised it higher and pushed it slightly towards me, as if he was showing me the most precious thing in the world that was slowly fading away in his hands. I smiled at him and at the little dog and I reached out to run my hand over its head. It whimpered back at me with big scared round eyes.
“He can’t walk anymore…”
My aunt was coming back towards us. She laughed again, and added her own commentary:
“That dog is the worst! He can’t stop peeing! He can’t walk! He’s not good for anything! But that’s the thing he loves most of in the world! Can you believe it Juan Carlos? You won’t see him hugging me! You won’t see him hugging his own sons even! But look at him with that dammed dog! Can you believe it?” And she laughed again, as loud as ever.
I nodded and kept on petting the little dog’s head. I looked up at my Uncle and his eyes were fixed on the treasure in his arms. His face was down turned with a mixture of love and sadness that sent shivers through my body, a kind of empathy that I couldn’t quite place, a raw sadness that seemed to bubble up from deep within me and spread through my chest and down my body, all the way to the tips of my fingers. As I looked at him, the sensations grew stronger and I barely resisted the urge to look away. Maybe realizing that he was showing too much of himself, he put the dog down, almost right on top of the transparent puddle that was still spreading over the white bricks. Then he turned around.
“Come and sit down for a moment. I’ll show you the pictures in a few minutes.”
I nodded and followed, still trying to not breathe too hard because the smell of urine was overwhelming. I could see that they, my Uncle and my Aunt, had already grown used to it, just like they had grown used to each other, to a life which was mostly an endless cycle of sun and shade, stress and sleep, boredom and terror, despair and fake dreams. I sat on the large comfortable brown couch that faced the large glass doors, looking at the reflection of the little pool in the back, light blue water swaying under the light of the sun. I exhaled loudly. The smell wasn’t as strong here and I felt a bit relieved.
“Aja Juan Carlos…” my Uncle said and I smiled back at him as I had done already so many times in the last hour. The house was beautiful, a construction of individual chambers full of possibilities. I couldn’t stop myself from thinking of all the things that I could do with a house like this, how I would organize it, how I would find the people that would discover within these walls a new place to work. The thought was soon dispersed by a new wave of strong urine smell coming over me from behind my back.
My Uncle raised the newspaper and looked at it while I looked once again at the little pool behind the glass doors. Tiny waves rolled across the calm surface as large green leaves danced lazily against a backdrop of gray and white. He scanned the headlines of the newspaper quickly. It was more like a reflexive movement than actual reading. I listened to the birds that scampered over the mossy back wall, calling to each other in quick songs that flashed into my mind like tiny complex spirals of invisible light. The pool was a bright blue color in the midst of the light green of the leaves and the bright yellows and oranges of the flowers. Again I thought that the house offered so many possibilities, and yet my Uncle wouldn’t even look outside, his head was turned towards the newspaper without truly reading anything inside. Maybe all he could see across the headlines was bad news and, since they were all bad news, the newspaper was only there as a daily reminder that more bad news were on the way. I turned my attention back towards him and he smiled at me, as if noticing that I was there for the first time.
“You want to read the newspaper?” he said, and I shook my head.
“No, not really…”, I placed my backpack on the floor in front of me and took out my camera. “But I do want to take some pictures…”
He nodded. By this point, he was very aware of my penchant for taking pictures of things that should have remained forgotten, things that he had walked by for years without ever giving them a second thought. And yet maybe it struck him as even stranger that my curiosity would apply even to his own house.
“Do you want to see the pictures of my mom?”
“Yes, “ I said, with eager enthusiasm as I snapped a quick picture of him looking at me, “I would like that very much.”
He set the newspaper aside and stood up, with a loud painful exhalation. I inhaled as well, but soon regretted it as I felt my lungs fill up with the stench of dog urine. I stood up and followed him to the darker living room just a few steps away. A memory of my cousin Roxana dancing to “Night Fever” with two of her friends flashed across my mind. I could see their little skinny arms gyrating in unison, red cheeked faces mouthing the words of the song. I wondered how long had it been since anyone danced on these shiny white bricks.

* * *

“I’m sure you’ll recognize this painting…”
It was one that I knew well, the same one that had hung over my grandmother’s head for decades, like a secret djinn of the past trapped in a cage of flattened oil. It dominated the main wall of her elegant living room, placed precisely over the dark green sofa where she sat down to go through her mail and talk to her many visitors. In the landscape of colors that was its surface, she was younger than I remembered her, maybe younger than I had ever known her. She was wearing a dark blue dress and a long elegant necklace that reached like a dead snake towards her chest. Her hair was pushed up into a black ball that faded into the nondescript background. She looked towards me with soft eyes that managed a perfect combination of dignified restraint and warm tenderness.
I looked at her as she stood before me, magical in her defiance of death, embraced by the static touch of eternal youth. I could feel her reaching out towards me. Maybe here was the woman that first saw me as a bubbling package of soft flesh and warm spit, crying and gurgling my way into her reality. Maybe, just as she was in the painting, with the same hands and arms that bore the mark of a paintbrush where I had once seen wrinkles, she had once cradled me in her arms and talked to me in nonsensical syllables, maybe she had opened her hidden inner sanctum to me in a mysterious way that neither of us could understand as it happened, and yet we both felt it, warm and burning, like a cord of transparent light stretched firmly between our hearts. I stared into the painting, feeling it move slightly around the corners of my eyes, feeling time dissolve just a little around the edges of its frame.
My Uncle stood aside in silence, maybe wondering what I saw in the old painting, maybe just staring at it himself. Maybe other pictures flashed through his mind, glimpses of forgotten chambers that I would never be able to explore, people and places that had vanished without leaving an oil painting behind.

* * *

I moved on to the next painting, which was of a much younger woman, red lips pursed forward in a slight nod to seduction, a dress so white and light that it faded away into the background, like the afterglow of memories that rapidly slipped away.
I imagined, only for a moment, that this woman was my grandmother as well. I imagined that this is how my grandfather had once seen her, back when he was young and strong and full of dreams. Back then, he had taken her for his own, in the only way that he knew of, the only way he had been shown, the only way that seemed to be available. Maybe this was how he had seen her as she woke up between his arms one lazy afternoon. Her lips would have been pursed just like in the painting, and they would have reached eagerly towards his thick sweaty neck. Even then, in the arms of the woman he loved, my grandfather would have been already resenting the constant heat of El Salvador, the loneliness of being away from the centers of lights and sounds and crowds and history. Even then he was already sinking into the certainty that somewhere, somehow, real things did indeed happen and he would find his way there, sooner than later. Maybe her little kiss on his sweaty dark neck could make it all vanish for a moment, and maybe for that one moment, he could look down at her and pull her into his arms. Right then he would know that this girl did indeed love him, and that this was happening right here and now, as much as it could ever happen anywhere. In that tiny bubble of perception, he would know that there was nowhere else to go, nowhere to escape to, no place to search for, no higher land to explore. But soon, little kisses and other gifts would not be enough and my grandmother would be left to find the dignity that there was in loneliness, the kind of loneliness that comes with two little crying babies and letters that jump across oceans only to say nothing. My grandfather would then have to find the pain that there was in utter defeat, in cold nights when your whole life comes crashing down around you and everything disappears into a swirling vortex of raindrops and lightning, and yet you find that you are still alive to feel it and you desperately wish that you weren’t, you desperately wish that you could yourself disappear.
But all of that would happen much later. By then her lips would not be so small and thin and seductive, and she wouldn’t be so young, and he wouldn’t allow his weak heart to fall into the hands of voracious dreams, tempered as it was by the shadow of great disappointment.
In fact, it was all only a moment of confusion and extrapolated memories from broken phrases and slight allusions. The picture was not of my grandmother at all. It was my aunt, the same one that called from the kitchen just now, the same one that held reign over this house of decaying luxury with her loud bursts of hungry laughter. Maybe her lips had kissed a sweaty neck in an afternoon that slowly descended into a night full of mosquitoes and the barking of distant dogs, but that neck that she had kissed had belonged to my uncle. And my uncle had not fallen for dreams of faraway lands and hidden centers of light and sound and history. He had remained with her, eager to fulfill whispered promises that quickly dwindled into ribbons of regret and blank sadness. Now they were alone together, slowly swimming their way into the fading future amidst clouds of dog urine and unspoken disappointment.
Two sides of the same coin. My grandfather and my Uncle. The one who left and the one who stayed. Neither had been pleased with the final result. They both made their choices and found out that both roads led to a dark room without windows, where the clock slowly ticked away the remaining rays of light.
I turned towards the stairway, trying to avoid the multiplying puddles of urine as I could still hear the little white dog whimpering close by. His little white body reminded me of the little dog of the Tarot, the one that tries to warn the Fool that he is about to jump off a cliff only to be ignored. Forever barking at the heels of impetuous youthfulness, forever unable to make his barking heard about the glowing sounds of the landscape that spread beyond the Fool’s upturned face. This dog couldn’t follow the Fool in his adventure, this dog was too old and weak and battered. The Fool would be left alone in his dangerous journey or he would simply have no journey at all, and he would have to stay and clean after a little creature who had failed in his one and only mission.

* * *

I focused on the stairway which was covered in elegantly framed paintings. Many of them were nudes that my mother had painted many years ago. I could vaguely remember seeing her pack them up as gifts for when she came to visit.
“They like nudes… that’s all they like… they like to have nudes all over the house… so that’s what I bring them…”
I looked at the skinny woman sitting on a stool, her naked back towards me, her left arm awkwardly bent, maybe to hold her own heart in place. I looked at the bold woman in pink and green moving forward like a strong warrior with solid limbs like tree trunks and eyes of burning pride. They were like windows into worlds that the inhabitants of this house would never touch again. Maybe that’s what they saw in them, windows into distant sealed chambers where desire was still vibrant, chambers traced in careful pencil strokes and dashes of watercolor.
I looked at the steps themselves, and I could vaguely remember running up to find a place of safety in my cousin’s room, where I could dig through his pile of comic books, a treasure trove of wrinkled adventure. Unlike my own, his comics were all mixed together, cartoons with superheroes, cowboys with horror, old mangled coverless books with shiny new ones. It was clear to me that he didn’t love them in the way that I did. His heart didn’t beat with expectation as he ran his fingers over their shiny covers, trying to ingest their contents through the smooth pink tips. These were forgotten artifacts of an afternoon heavy with boredom, they had been forgotten before they were ever remembered, and now they were piled onto each other like garbage that refused to finally leave the house. I would roam through them nonetheless, eager to find that which I had never encountered, that shiny thread of promise that hid behind every new cover, behind big letters that proclaimed a new problem for Superman to solve, a new horror for The Specter to avenge, a new conundrum for Spider Man to untangle. It was precisely in the randomness of my cousin’s choices that I found hope and an alluring sense of excited wonder.
I would spend the main part of those rare afternoons here, sitting on Juan Antonio’s bed, slowly making my way through his huge pile of comics. Every once in a while, we would go out on the terrace and play with his own plastic men, or act out some story that I would invent on the spot, directing him in his movements like another plastic man made of darkened flesh and rolling eyes. But these stories were always shorter and simpler than the wars in the dark garden, as I knew that soon there would come a loud honking from the street and it would be time for me to go. As I left, I would be certain that I had been just about to discover the one comic book that I had been searching for, the one that left all the others far behind, the fragment of knowledge which could be a solid foundation for all the other fragments that I had already found. The rock upon which the temple could be built, all crowded with pink and green nude women, staring at me with eyes that dared me to uncover their mystery.

* * *

The steps looked solid and dark as always, but the taste of their promise was different now. My Uncle passed by me and indicated that I should follow. He had things to show me and he knew exactly what they were. As I walked up, I could hear my Aunt moving around in the kitchen below, shifting pots around, banging them against each other like a tiny percussion orchestra. And I could hear the little dog whimpering desperately because his little white legs would not do what they were supposed to do and he had an urgent need to pee once again.
My Uncle moved quickly up the steps and I followed right behind. He led me straight to a framed newspaper page where I could see my grandmother, much older and thinner than I remembered her, accepting a large scroll printed with golden letters. My Uncle pointed at the photograph and said:
“Look, that’s an award she received on the year before she left us…”
The man offering the award was dressed in an elegant dark blue suit and he was looking at my grandmother with an air of precious seriousness. There were other men behind her and around her, all dressed just as elegantly, all shining with the power and brilliance that comes with newly pressed clothes and bright lights. In the middle of them, my grandmother looked even smaller and weaker than she was. I could sense the great effort that had brought her out in public, even at that late stage. I could sense how much pain she had gone through to arrange her hair and her makeup just the way she liked them. I could sense how desperate she had been, as she stood on that stage, and listened to various speeches that clacked like the sound of an old typewriter, to simply be back home, back in her living room, going through new and old letters, bills, photographs, calling for Manuel (or the new security guard that might as well have been Manuel) to get her some more bread or fruit, how desperate to give her gentle advice to my Uncle who was depressed once again, how desperate to talk to her faraway daughter on her old large white phone that was longer than her own head, desperate to simply read slowly from another fundamentalist christian book, and dream with the pleasures of an eternal heaven where her faith would finally be rewarded, trying to swiftly set all her own recurrent doubts aside.
And yet she had made the effort, and they had all been pleased to see her and maybe even listen to her for a few moments (as she certainly wrote out a short speech in her nearly unreadable shaky handwriting in preparation for this event and maybe she read it out loud, in a thin loving voice that required no clarity to carry its message.) My Uncle had been pleased enough with the whole event to keep and frame the newspaper page, a reminder that so many years after she left public life, the public still remembered her fondly, or at least fondly enough to go through the process of staging a big event like this one.
My grandmother, as always, had come through for all those that needed her. And when the lights were finally turned off, and the men in elegant suits had finally turned into just another memory, one more among thousands, and the noise had finally dwindled down, and the applause had dissipated into restless silence, and when she was home and alone once again, then she would finally rest and feel pleased herself for completing one more effort among many, one more act before the curtain came crashing down.

* * *

The next picture was the centerpiece of a little altar, a compendium of photographs carefully places together upon a small table covered in a white tablecloth. Here she was more like my grandmother than I even remembered, more like the grandmother of my oldest memories, the raw image that fleshed out the word “grandmother” within me and made it come alive. In faded black and white, the color of the true past before my eyes bathed the world in rainbow colors through tears without reason, she looked to the side with a big smile that spoke of calm tenderness and a sense of overarching pride.
This was the time of being “La Madrecita”, the little mother to so many through the radiating language of radio. I could see her sitting behind a large silver microphone, telling her little stories and her little poems to thousands of kids that would idealize her as the mother that they wished they had, the Platonic ideal of a mother who was always patient, always loving, always right. Maybe nobody truly had such a mother, for it was easy to be perfect in short bursts of modulated frequency, but such a high wire act was impossible to maintain for long. Not even my mother and my uncle had such a mother, and certainly not my grandmother herself. Her own mother had spent half her life away from her and the other half in constant struggle with her, chafing at her need for decorum, laughing at her fear of failure, dismissing her learning as a transparent screen made of lies.
Maybe it was precisely this recurring absence that made my grandmother become that perfect mother of the ethers, the very same mother that once was buried under little dirt mounds, naked and pregnant and faceless, the mother that we dream of when we are afraid in the darkness, the mother that never looks away and whose smile never wavers, always in black and white, always slightly diffused in the soft light of a lost afternoon, always perfect, always ideal, always the centerpiece of a little altar, surrounded by pictures of her grandchildren and her great grandchildren, all of whom, at one point or another, saw the archetypal “madrecita” in her, the one eternal mother of all.

* * *

A picture of a couple in the middle of sexual intercourse, a slight blonde woman sat on a black haired man’s lap, her legs were thin and wide open as she pressed her crotch down upon his. Her face was twisted to the side, towards my curious gaze, and his face looked away from me, forever hiding his features from unknown spectators, forever invisible, anonymous, blank. In her eyes I could imagine pleasure, but it was a pleasure so vague that it might as well have been pain (for the two apparent opposites do meet in the twilight regions of animal lust, away from the judgment of fat American ladies with black Bibles under their arms.)
This was another nude portrait of the many that my mother had sent as gifts, an unconscious reminder of the need for creative fertility, perhaps, a silent acknowledgment of hidden origins lathered in sweat and blood and groans of desire. In this thin young woman with open legs, I could also see the eternal mother, the same ancient mother I had glimpsed in the ghostly black and white portrait that sat in the middle of a little altar. I could see that, at its most fundamental root, at a level hidden by dirt and shame and forgetfulness, to be a mother was to open up to the will of the Other, to the roughness of a man, to let his desire invade her, to let it push deep within her, so that her own desire could embrace it and transform it into a new bundle of tears and hopes. This is how Universes were made, and this is how women turned into mothers, good and bad, careful and careless, intelligent and dumb, all mothers, open and wet at a clear and distinct moment of origin when their surrender was so complete that their final and most secret defenses could not stop a foreign seed from flowering within them and becoming a new being, a new sequence of lit chambers in the endless void of the night, a vulnerable creature with only a mother to guide them, this mother, this slim little blond woman with a face twisted in what could be both pain and pleasure, requesting the intrusion of alien presence and yet somehow still trying to resist, still trying to postpone a final defeat, a final step beyond the gateway of her existence as a simple woman.
For as the slim little blond woman came to an end, a mother would come to take her place, and the mother would never see herself again in the way that she once had. There had been an interruption that could never be forgotten, a wound that could never be healed.
My Uncle would never want to stare too closely into this not so secret origin, most people wouldn’t. It struck too close to a basic contradiction that festered in the depths of their private caverns. And yet that angelic face I had just seen, glimmering in black and white, and transmitting a gentleness that could dig into the roughest heart, that angelic being who was my grandmother, she also had to surrender to the desire of a common man in order to come into full manifestation. This was the required visa to a world of sacrifice and self negation, of recurring postponements that ended in a closed door and an empty room without rewards. My own grandmother had crossed that threshold, more than once. That was true. Everything else could be a lie.

* * *

A picture of my grandmother shaking hands with Franco, the man who wrestled Spain from the hands of sentimental idealists and placed it back in the hands of obsessive compulsives who wished to change the world from above to conform to their own wishes and desires. (But don’t we all?)
She was bending forward in her dress which had been made to look like a man’s suit, except it still left her chins and her ankles vulnerable. She was covered enough to function in a masculine role but revealing enough to remind everyone present, including herself, that she was still a woman. Franco was old and bald and straight as a stone statue, dressed in full military elegance, barely reaching out with his right hand, his eyes lost somewhere else, maybe in a hill full of corpses or a city bursting with bombs and screams of pain, or maybe he was simply looking forward to a night of sleep that would allow him to forget yet another social function, and here was another diplomat, a woman no less, who wanted to shake his hand. He obliged, by barely reaching out with his right hand and looking elsewhere while my grandmother bent forward, in a clear sign of humility and respect, smiling with the honor of the occasion, pleased to shake his hand and bask in the glory that certainly surrounded such a powerful and infamous man.
Behind them both, a fat man in a black suit smiled with contentment, pleased that this exchange of pleasantries was taking place. Looking at him in the shade of the passing of decades, I believed that he had orchestrated it, I believed that this man with his round cheeks and his thin little mustache and his shiny bald head that even now reflected the light from a yellow light bulb behind my back, was the one who had brought them together, and I believed that he had done it all so that this picture could exist, as a symbol of the union between faraway countries, a kind of brief symbolic marriage between dignitaries of separate kingdoms, a picture that would show that indeed Spain cared for little people, Spain cared so much, even for tiny little countries on the other side of the ocean which it had lost to rebellions and negligence so long ago that the memory could no longer be brought up in polite company. Here was Franco, with his arm barely making an effort, and yet it was enough. The powerful man of Spain was shaking hands with the female diplomat of a banana country somewhere in South America… “Which country did you say you were from again?”
(While I waited for my grandmother and my mother to return from their trip through Europe, I could imagine that in fact El Salvador was the center of the world and that all the countries and the Universe itself gyrated around the utmost beauty and power that was El Salvador… where the best people lived, the strongest, the smartest, the richest, the most divine. I would throw a ball up in the air and know that when El Salvador did it, when the champions of El Salvador threw plastic balls up in the air for the international competitions of plastic ball throwing, it would be the best throw that there could ever be, the best throw that there ever was. Maybe Franco’s thoughts were not so different, but he never thought of El Salvador at all.)
Far in the distance, almost obscured by shadows, another tall man looked straight into the camera. He was also dressed in a black suit, but on him it looked like a true sign of elegance. His hair was dark and short and his eyes were as focused and piercing as a laser. He looked right into the lens as if he could stare through the abyss of forty years into my own lens as I leaned forward to take a picture of a picture. Maybe someday another picture would be taken of the picture I myself was taking, and this tall man in a black suit would just keep on staring into infinity, reaching deep into a place that I couldn’t myself see. His role then was to be the spirit of a final presence that all others in the room would simply do their best to ignore.

* * *

My Uncle raised a small picture in a golden frame and he pointed at it with his fat and trembling index finger.
“Here, look at this one… your mother surely remembers this one…look at us… look at how young we were!” He laughed with the simulated spitting motion of his lips that passed for laughter in him, too lazy to truly laugh, too restricted by social codes to simply remain in silence.
I looked at the picture he was holding in his hands and I saw them together, as I had never really known them. My uncle and my mother, in their twenties, full of energy and a raging hunger to explore the world that was painted across both their faces like colored lines of war.
He was thin and smiling. In his old smile I could recognize a touch of the smile that sometimes crossed his lips these days, but it was so much simpler then, so much more direct. His eyes were so much stronger, they lacked the sense of defeat that he now seemed to carry like a leather sack full of heavy stones tied around his neck. Here, in the picture, he was light and airy, covered only in a simple white shirt, his ears sticking out from under his short traditional haircut which plastered his short hair against his skull. He looked sideways towards something or someone that was outside of the frame, as if he was unable to look at the strong white light that was bursting out before him, choosing to avoid it by sensibly placing his attention elsewhere. Maybe that simple gesture contained within it the essence of all Salvadorean afternoons: a light that is too bright and eyes that turn to avoid it. The sound of birds singing and buses shaking and honking would simply complete the picture and make it come alive.
Next to him was my mother. She stared straight ahead, right into the future, right into the eyes of her son who hadn’t yet been born when she decided to look straight at him. The girl who looked at me then through the wide gap of time was younger than I was now, much younger. She was pretty and seductive in a way that was different from the girls of my own time. She had a sincere innocence that carried with it a sense of inherent dignity, much like my grandmother’s but with a touch of insolence that rested on unearned success. In her eyes glowed a barely visible glimpse of purple and red that signified a need to explore the edges (and this I recognized within me as well, except my edges were so far outside of what this young black and white girl could imagine that, from her perspective, they might as well not be edges at all.) A pretty girl with an air of sophistication, with a sense of experience that was mostly imaginary and yet carried some weight.
It was clear to me that all the boys in her school would want her, they would all dream about her during restless nights of silent desire, and they would wish that she was all theirs, in all her many facets, in all the ways that they could then visualize. (And they were constantly busy making up more.) I knew that I would have wanted the same if had met her then, if I had been there to meet her. The truth is that I had been there, but back then my name was Hugo. I was younger than I was now (maybe younger than I ever was) and I shared her world of black and white. I had just as many walls between me and Universe as I have now, but the walls themselves had a different texture. I spoke different words and I even swam in a different ocean of thoughts when all was quiet around me, but it was still me, a young boy knotted up in caves of fantasy, anxious to possess the object of his dark desire.
Somehow I had managed to take this beautiful girl away from the grasp of all the others, I had managed to hold her and dive recklessly into the mysteries of her inner landscape. I had then built a home for myself deep within the hidden valleys of her most secret thoughts. From this lost sanctuary, I had emerged once again, newly reborn, covered in blood and shit and tears, crying at the sight of a brand new world that once again attacked me from all sides, now in color, in loud sounds and bright lights that would not give me the space to rest and sleep at ease until I once again built a sanctuary for myself. Here. With her. Somewhere behind the beautiful eyes that stared at me from another world through an old gray picture.

* * *

We sat in my grandmother’s living room on a gentle afternoon of bright sun and light breeze that made the long green leaves outside scratch against the windows like little thin black creatures asking to be let in. A few mosquitoes buzzed around our ears as we talked in light sentences that slipped out of our mouths and into the air like fragile bubbles about to burst, each one cradled in tentativeness and a sense of deep underlying doubt.
I sat on the far corner of the room, closest to the heavy glass door that led to the terrace. I was leaning back on the sofa, my back bent sideways, my legs extended outwards in a living statement of easy presence, a relaxed sense of ownership that came through me without my conscious bidding. I knew I belonged here and I showed it with my body without any further need of words.
Dilcia sat closest to me. Her knees were pressed together in her short multicolored dress and her eyes darted back and forth among the various occupants of the living room. Her main job this afternoon was to be concerned about possible outcomes, without having any ability to stop them. Her small body recurrently compressed into a ball of worry, anticipating the moment when things would go badly, and she could only wonder at where the badness would come from, from where the poisonous words would emerge.
Leti, her stepmother, was sitting next to her, with her purse across her thighs which were encased in tight dark blue jeans in an effort to appear younger than she was. Her lips were permanently pressed together in a mask of suspicion. Her eyes opened wider and then wider as various sentences spilled over her brown upright ears.
Finally there was Fanci sitting at the very end of the sofa, closest to the side table. His back was straight and his legs were open and his eyes were pulled up and sideways, in a unique mixture of worry and arrogance, certainty and ignorance, confusion and light. He would sometimes lean forward and press his forearms onto his thighs, only to then return to a full upright position. His words came in bursts of practiced dialogue, jokes and anecdotes that betrayed their years of use.
All four of us were lined up in the narrow green sofa that ran along the wall, under the long narrow window against which the branches were scratching. I sat sideways looking towards my grandmother who sat on her own green sofa which formed an “L” with the one where we sat. She was made up perfectly, as she always was whenever people came to visit. Her white hair was covered in a thin net, her smile was the one I recognized from pictures of official functions. A distance showed through her features that wasn’t there when she was alone with me, an invisible barrier that came to her without any need of effort, a result of long years of practice. Fanci wore a beige shirt with short sleeves, a clear contrast with the elegance that radiated from every bit of clothing and makeup on my grandmother. I didn’t notice then but I’m sure my grandmother did and maybe she judged him for it, even if she let her judgment slide into the darkness where dreams are formed and violence is safely kept away from daylight.
They talked of the weather and of politics, the kind of political talk that only skims along the surface so as to not make any waves, just enough statements to show that a mind contained knowledge, not so much as to risk any form of rational commitment. Things were ultimately as they were and they were certainly not about to change because of some small talk in a dark living room of a middle class Salvadorean home. Leti would laugh lightly when necessary and I would follow her cue. Dilcia, the last in line, would follow me, so there was a delayed echo of laughter that would bounce in little circles around the living room, leaving a slight scent of fakeness behind as it faded away.
My grandmother was the most at ease. This was her antechamber, this is where she met with old governmental figures, old students that would come to give their respects and once again reiterate the great love and gratitude that they still held for their old teacher (some of these old students had gone on to become new powerful figures), fundamentalist christians with sweaty palms and forced smiles, writers and poets from another era when such skills were highly respected, rich women with fancy hairdos and high pitched fake laughter that slid upwards to heaven in a sign of semi conscious disdain. Every possible kind of person had sat there, on the same green sofa where the four of us now sat, and my grandmother had faced them all, without any sign of fear, nervousness or effacement, and they had all properly knelt at the altar of the living symbol that she embodied (for she was a symbol more than a woman to a vast section of the population, even if she was only my grandmother to me.)
Fanci seemed to measure his words appropriately, more so than he did in any other occasion where I had been able to observe him. Maybe later, when they were back home, he would point out the things that my grandmother had said that were tangential to the truly important issues of our time, or the things that were just plain wrong and misguided. Maybe he would point out the waste of so much wealth on this single old woman who, compared to them, lived like a queen, with enough space for two or three families and enough art to fill a couple of small museums. Maybe he would simply point out the things he had said himself, the subtle statements that solidified his status as a wise man and clarified his superiority. But all of these things would come much later. While he was sitting here, on the long green sofa, he was soft spoken and sweet and extremely respectful, and my grandmother responded to this show of respect in kind. It was a dance they both knew from memory and Leti and Dilcia and me, it was simply our place to follow their lead.
Dilcia was very nervous and continuously revealed her nervousness through tiny movements that only she herself thought were invisible or subtle. We all knew what she was feeling even if we all perceived it in slightly different ways. She was afraid of the things I might say, of the horrendous blasphemies that may come out of my loose lips in a moment of abandon. She had reason to be afraid, for I could say terrible things at the drop of a hat, just to see what the reactions would be, just to see where that thorny road would take us. But on this day I merely observed carefully and allowed them to do their dance of social diplomacy, while I interjected every once in a while with an affirmation or a very soft laugh.
At one point, my grandmother left us alone in her living room for a very short amount of time. We heard her steps walking up the stairway and a momentary silence descended upon all of us. Fanci looked around with his intense eyes that seemed to record every detail as if they were tiny video cameras embedded into the white skin of his face. After flying through the many little mementos that were scattered all around the room and the great vase in the middle of the square brown table in the center, which overflowed with color and shape and aroma in the form of fresh flowers, and after scanning the large paintings along the farthest wall, the anguished white face, the road of trees, the surrealist opening of the journey, his eyes finally came to rest on a picture in the farthest corner away from him, a black and white message that was quietly waiting in the dark.
“What is that picture of Dilcia doing over there?” he asked out loud, without turning towards us.
I was confused for a moment. I thought that maybe I had left some picture of her laying around out here, although I couldn’t think of an occasion when that could have happened.
“Over there… in the corner… it’s Dilcia…”
Dilcia giggled nervously, sensing that there was double meaning in her father’s words. Maybe his double meaning always came with a certain inflection in his voice, an inflection that had left a clear mark on the tender flesh of her unconscious. Leti pushed herself up and looked over the centerpiece vase.
“Oh yes…” she said, as she was bound to, “it’s her alright…”
I stood up from where I was and walked towards the corner, now very curious as to what they were looking at. I saw then a picture of my mother, in black and white, with long curly hair and intense black eyes. I had seen the picture many times and I had never seen any particular resemblance to the little brown girl that I felt that I loved above all others. And yet, looking at it just then, the two images blurred against each other in a haze that made me slightly dizzy. I smiled and turned to Fanci.
“Right…” I said and I walked back to the corner where I had been sitting.
“Right…” Fanci said, and he sat back on the green sofa, content with his labors.
Dilcia looked at me and blushed. I shook my head to let her know that it was fine, that everything was fine and that she had nothing to worry about. She exhaled loudly and leaned back on the tight green surface of the sofa. I could hear my grandmother’s footsteps coming back down the stairs.
Grandmother. Mother. Wife.
A photo of the past and of the future. The double image was still glowing out from the dark corner of the living room that I couldn’t see directly. A mosquito buzzed by my ear as I heard the trees rustling outside the window once again. A bus honked loudly in the distance.

* * *

The French explorer saw the pieces fall apart and he saw them come back together again, spreading like organic legos over a land of dirt and green and death and life, spreading like thoughts that dance in flashing spirals, spreading like melodies that never settle on a final note. He saw the great dance and he held the pieces in his hands and he yearned to find the patterns, the repeating motifs that made the whole symphony come together as a solid unified statement, the locks and binds that kept the structure in place.
He saw that A was to B as C is to D, even though A was not C and was not like C and B was not D and was not like D, and still the equation held, the relationship was true in its mysterious absence and difference. He then postulated that the letters could hold so much more than he had previously suspected, they were like giant golden bowls that could hold the sprawling midnight visions of an entire race, the slippery tentacled creatures of the oceans as seen through young curious eyes, the trail of wind and song that follows the birds in the summer, the lost fangs of creatures that left no mark and yet they were still somehow remembered.
Within the letters was the bedrock of twilight thought and of cloaked desire. In the letters themselves he would find the solace of knowledge that has no foundation, knowledge that slides around the edges of your fingers like tiny black snakes full of poison, knowledge that resists all covenants and transcends all statements, and yet knowledge nonetheless, a kind of knowledge that rests in ephemeral relations and eternal equations, a kind of knowledge that was so old as to be completely unreachable and yet so new as to become invisible to eyes that had seen everything.
The French explorer roamed this land of formless questions and brought forth hermeneutic creations that claimed no finality, so they traveled to darker depths than thoughts that yearned for an end.
As I allowed my eyes to wander over his writings, over his musings on the nature of ancient stories, I came upon an idea that struck me as strange and truthful in its strangeness. The relationship of a son to his maternal uncle is equivalent to the relation between a man and his wife, father and mother. As the connection is defined between man and wife, thus it will be between son and maternal Uncle. For the son is to the Uncle as the man is to the wife, and the Uncle is to the son as the wife is to her husband. Simple and pristine, as simple as the gentle singing of branches in the breeze or the sound of a car passing slowly down a sun baked street, as old as men and women, as new as a phone ringing and a brown hand picking it up.
My maternal uncle was the man who now guided me through his house showing me pictures of a time that most others had forgotten, a time that would soon be as lost as the ancient pyramids beneath the waves of titanic blue oceans and thick layers of rock and sand. In him, I saw my wife, the one who left, her and the other one, the one who I left behind, her and all the ones who may have left me through the corridors of time, all turning sideways, all unable to say goodbye in a way that would close the door with gentleness, all lashed in black hair and the shadows of missed opportunities, and the ones that had waited for decades, clinging to a letter or a postcard and reading through a veil of sliding tears, and the ones that had simply been forgotten, the ones that I could only touch in dreams and the ones who could never touch me. In me, he saw his husband, the one who was no good, the one who was a monster, the one who was intrinsically evil and beyond the pale, the pale which was further than any color and yet still could be described with a single word, and yet he was beyond that. I was beyond that. In me, he saw the strangeness of the Other, in him I saw the blandness of the norm.
It was no accident then that our contact would be so minimal, it was no pure trick of chance that our words would bounce off each other like billiard balls rolling over the green carpet of the Salvadorean jungle, without ever finding a wet pocket in which to rest. As my father and my mother could not live together, as they could not look into each others’ eyes to find solace or peace, as they flew away from each other like quantum particles that have been flung apart by an explosion of subatomic fury, so he was away from me, and so I would always be away from him, distant, removed, alien, Other. I embodied the creature that should have been forgotten, he embodied the worldliness that I would never want to become.
And yet these qualities did not define us. I was nothing, truly nothing, beyond qualities or any sign of distinction, as he was nothing, white and empty and shining. We could never be otherwise. In being nothing together, we were the same. But our relation to each other persisted, and so my sentences would be short and brief whenever my mouth opened around him, and his questions would be muted, and the silence would extend further and further until a time would come when there would be no words between us at all. By that time, others would have come to take our place.
A is to B as C is to D and the dance would continue forever, as pointless as it was full of meaning. Color, light, form, sound. And my Uncle looking at the floor, and me, looking away.

* * *

The next picture was the strangest picture of all, it was my grandmother as I had never seen her. Within the final enclosure of this two dimensional cage, she was thin and frail and sick, slipping quickly into invisibility like the final frames of a short and sad film. Her eyes were sunken into her face like pools of black oil, and her cheeks had vanished, dead flesh pressing against dead bone. Her wrinkled skin had drooped off the sides of her skull, leaving a mask of curious death staring expressionless into the camera. Her white hair was short and undone, it appeared disheveled, it showed none of the utmost care she would usually take to make sure that nobody saw her with even a single white strand out of place. Here she was finally past caring about such things, that meant she was simply past caring at all. Her ears stood out from the sides of her thin face and they seemed very large since everything else in her had shrunken, they were like blobs of loose skin hanging from a raw piece of meat that is quickly approaching its expiration date. She was propped up against a mountain of little pillows and she was covered in a yellow striped sheet that only reached up to her stomach, weak and yellow and thing, like her. A light yellow and white robe covered her frail body, but she still seemed to be cold and tired, ready to slide again into oblivion once the camera had done its job.
My Uncle was laying next to her, propped up on his right arm, holding her thin little weak hand in his, offering support as much as receiving it. He was smiling at the camera, and his smile betrayed a fading hope that if they only smiled together enough, for a long enough time, then she would recover from this strange state that she had fallen into and everything would eventually be fine, just as fine as she had always said that things would be. But this time she would not say it, she would not try to cheer him up or pull him out of his chronic despair. Instead, she had become the personification of this all encompassing despair and he could only weakly make an attempt to counteract this new haunting manifestation of the ancient Mother, a final fearsome statement wrapped in drying flesh and old faded clothing. It was a role he was not used to, a role he had never performed for others and so he couldn’t do it well. But he was trying, I could see it through the picture, across the gap of time and space that separated us. I could see him making an attempt as he was lying there next to her, in his white and blue striped shirt, with his large eye glasses that reflected the light of the camera flash and made it seem as if his very eyes had caught on fire, his head pressed against his folded arm, his lips pulling up towards his cheekbones, attempting to enliven a room that already seemed like a morgue.
I looked at my grandmother through the glass of the picture frame and tried to recognize the woman I had known and loved so many years ago. She was still in there somewhere, but disease and pain and decay had taken their toll, and she was ready to go away, ready to leave us, now more than ever, now even more than when she had said it too me so many years ago, back when she was still being careful about the specific arrangement of her white hair, back when she still examined her bills and letters under her royal portrait. “It’s time for me to go,” she had said. Looking at her picture I could respond, “Yes, it is grandma, yes it is.”

* * *

We stepped into what was now my Uncle’s room, the same room that used to belong to my cousin Roxana, back in the days of weekend visits and fuzzy dreams that went sliding off balconies while I was looking elsewhere. As we stepped inside, I could only faintly visualize the room as it once had been: a pink chamber of secrets that only young women could embrace, a strange place that I had only visited on a couple of occasions, and then only briefly, a place which probably still resonated within my cousin as much as my dark garden resonated within me.
But now this room had changed. Now there were photographs of my grandmother everywhere, a barrage of smiling faces of all ages, the same being scattered about many different chambers, or maybe they were many different people only tentatively connected by our mutual imagination, by our collective wish for reason and progressive change. Grandmother, mother, wife, all the same, repeated endlessly, with only a few incidental exceptions.
My Uncle pointed to a tall armoire and to the mountain of pill bottles that were scattered over the dark brown surface. I raised my camera towards it but he said:
“No, don’t take a picture of that!”
I lowered my camera and turned sideways. This was the one truth that would have to remain secret, even if it was evident in his eyes, his hands, the inner movements of his pupils.
“But look… can you understand? These are all the things I have to take every day! All of these! This is very serious. This thing… it’s no joke! No joke at all!”
I nodded, in just the same way as I had nodded when he said it in the car.
“I’m sure it’s no joke…”
He pointed to his bed which was covered in a flowery bedsheet and more pill bottles, little orange and white cylinders with tiny text messages wrapped around them, and little pieces of paper, and many loose photographs of my grandmother, all propped up against the wall with nothing but hope to hold them up. I realized that here, on his little bed, were the papers that my grandmother had always kept in the little table by her side, on the old living room where I had always talked to her. Here is where they had come to rest. They no longer meant what they had meant to her, for now they had transmuted into sacred objects, holy elements in a fragile altar that shook and shifted each time my Uncle pressed himself against the bed or sat upon it.
The many pictures, in a long line along the wall, were all leaning at an angle. All of them seemed ready to fall, they seemed as weak and inefficient as my grandmother had looked in that final picture. They seemed to hold within them all the desperation that my Uncle must have felt as the months went by and my grandmother got progressively worse, and the doctors could not come up with any good news to give him.
I pictured my Uncle sleeping in this little bed, fully clothed and laying on his side, permanently staring at all these pictures and pieces of paper, and old medicine bottles, vainly hoping that somehow this action could bring some of her back. Maybe he only hoped for one more gentle kiss or a kind phrase or a shaky hand holding his own hand, maybe even just a hint of her footsteps coming down the old stairway, maybe her perfume, maybe a distant sigh.
He clearly no longer slept with his wife, my aunt. He probably hadn’t slept with her in many years. Instead he slept with a fragile altar of old pictures and little bits of memory that my grandmother had left behind and, throughout the day and night, he constantly reached out to prevent one or another picture from falling. Instead he slept with the one woman to whom his whole life had been devoted. Instead he tried to find his way back to a place he would never find again.
He probably wept quietly in the darkness, while the little white dog whined desperately underneath the bed, trying to keep himself upright by pushing his little frail body against the side of the wall. Two creatures unable to hold themselves up any longer, two creatures rapidly sliding into oblivion, scared and unprepared.
“That is where I keep her things. I look at them and I talk to her,” he told me, pointing to the scattered pictures and pieces of paper.
“Does she answer you when you talk to her?”
“No, she never answers. But I still talk. I tell her everything. I just talk and talk.”

* * *

Another old black and white picture of my grandmother, here with short black hair and elegant earrings that slid like tear drops of shining brilliance off the slope of her soft white neck. There was a tiny cross at the end of a thin necklace. Her eyes here were deep and strong, framed by thick black eyelashes.
Here, in this one picture, I could clearly see what I had never seen before. I could see my mother in my grandmother, living like a flame within an old gas lamp, and I could see my Uncle as well, like a black anchor that holds the structure together, that keeps the metal columns in place. I could perceive them here as a single being that came from nothingness and stretched out over more than one body, here an ambitious man stumbling through life with a sack of broken hopes upon his shoulders, weighing him down so that he could barely walk anymore; here an idealistic woman hoping to alter the course of the river of the world which seemed to her to be flowing in the wrong direction, always in the wrong direction, a woman with large black open eyes adjusting her ideals slowly over the slow passing of the years, so that they became smaller and smaller as she realized the limits of her own strength; here a strong woman that managed to navigate through the treacherous corridors of the eternal palace, finding the right people to talk to, at the right moment, at the right time, finding the right papers to sign and the right people to compliment, and lifting herself up into a space of cool air and soft shadows that I came to know as her home. All three as one, and one that dispersed into three that were not the same but were not so different.
I could then ask myself how far back this being went and how far did it extend into the future. I could see that I carried it and them within me, and they carried me within themselves. This old picture made me see my Uncle as an extension of myself, and so I saw myself in him, deep within the folds of his aging eyes. Me, sad and alone, trying to maintain the last bits of memory that my mother had left behind and holding them so tightly to my chest that the force of my grip would quickly ruin them. I saw myself falling ever deeper into a kind of despair that had no passion but was instead built on complacence, on negligence, on afternoons of intense sunlight that never let up or allowed me a moment to simply breathe and rest in the shadows. Here I was, pointing out these things to myself, and here I was, myself, unable to listen.
I sensed the kind of gentle pain that I had come to recognize through years of reckless exploration. I felt that pain as I raised my eyes from the picture to see my grandmother as a man, standing before me, waiting quietly as I stared at the picture of his mother. I felt the need to say something even as I knew that there was nothing at all for me to say.
“She is beautiful here…”
“Yes, she is very beautiful there,“ he paused and stared at the old black and white picture as if he hadn’t seen it in a long time, “very beautiful.”
Maybe even back then, in those careless days of youth, which for her were not as careless as for others, maybe she had sometimes dreamed at night of becoming a sad man or a headstrong woman, or maybe she already contained both entities within her and she simply needed to live out the dreams that she could not remember upon waking up.
What kind of dream was it to become a ghost that came to survey the remains of past lifetimes? Lifetimes soaked in sweat and sunlight and mosquitoes, drifting like dead leaves upon a drying creek. What kind of dream was I, and who had first dreamt me? As much as they had fulfilled her hidden stories, I could only try to find the clues for the midnight tales that I had come to manifest. I was possibly an afterthought of a being that was currently fading in the lands that extend past the world of matter, and I was lightly running my fingers over a long stretch of dreams that were vainly held in fragile little pictures, all pressed up against an old concrete wall.

* * *

And when he was young, very young, so young that he had not yet grown bitter, the future had seemed wide open, as open as a fresh cold bottle of beer or whiskey, with all the radiant intensity that came with it, all the swirling lights of nighttime and the glowing bright colors of noon, all circling from far away and sliding deep into his mind floating in the burning melodies of the tempting alcohol, deep within him, where he would not question them at all, and he would simply shine with them, and laugh, deep hard laughs that went nowhere, the kind of laugh that was now so remote from him as to seem impossible, as distant as metal dragons flying through the skies and young pretty women looking up at him with curious eyes, tilting forward at the edge of a cauldron of lust and about to fall all the way inside.
Back then, in a noisy bar full of trumpets and guitars, all his friends would laugh as well, all of them sharing in the radiance that came from the transformed matter contained in the fire made liquid, the liquid made songs, the songs made tears, the tears made laughter, the laughter made fire. He was strong then, solid and full of momentum, and all of them were strong with him, all his many friends whose names he had now forgotten. He would drink and drink and drink and, through the constant swallowing of fire, he would allow the world to shine through him, in a furious golden spiral that went on forever, flashing through the essence of the many men and women who drank and laughed around him, and it went on and on for it was endless, as endless as a night of debauchery when all rules go out the window, and love can be encountered as easily as death, both entangling their fingers around each other without any reason for doubt or hesitation.
I could see him now, driving in an old red Volkswagen down Roosevelt avenue, laughing at every light which he didn’t need to recognize (for this was a time before rules became laws, before the laws were needed to maintain appearances, this was a time when things were simply what they were and disagreements were settled forever as easily as a meeting on a late afternoon and a few drops of blood), driving right through all intersections, knowing that this was his city and the rules didn’t apply to him, certainly not to him or to any of his kind, and certainly not at this time, when the sun had been gone for ages and the moon was beginning to recede.
Here he was, driving recklessly and laughing and signaling to the peasants who were still out even this late at night, letting them know that here he was, him whom they should recognize even if they didn’t know him, him whom they would recognize some day when the things that should happen would finally happen and then they would remember having seen him, driving recklessly like a demented demigod, on this one vibrant night. His laughter carried with it the knowledge of his high place in the world and of their own which was much lower. He was raising his left arm in salute as he held onto the wheel with his right hand, his thick strong fingers squeezing the thin circular steering wheel as he pulled it left and right, sliding all the way through the grimy downtown of San Salvador, a long tunnel of dirty awnings and tiny puddles of cold spit, a downtown which maybe wasn’t so grimy in those days, for the future dirt was just then forming all along the long tall gutters, it was just settling on the rectangular signs which said “we fix shoes” or “we do repairs”, most of them handwritten and misspelled. He would laugh again when he saw these signs for everything was very funny at this hour, and he pressed harder onto the accelerator, sinking his foot all the way to the floor and feeling the trembling heavy metal machinery under his toes. The Volkswagen would try to respond as mightily as it could, all within the limits of its own mechanical apparatus which wasn’t as perfect, precise or efficient as he imagined that it was, for his imagination truly ran deep in this one moment of glory.
He drove right through the avenue of the whores, where semi deformed brown women in ripped skirts and stained T-shirts would call out to him from within little receptacles full of smelly sheets and puddles of old sperm slowly drying on the dirty greenish floor, all of them behind old rusty metal bars and lit by dangling yellow light bulbs. They would say “Hey, where are you going sweetie? I have what you need right here! Right here I have it!” and they would reach down to point at their smelly crotch, vibrant between their thick vein covered sweaty thighs, and he would look towards them and then he would shake his head, for his intention was to keep on driving forward, ever forward, until there was nowhere else to go, and he would just hear their calls off the side of his pressing and vibrant attention which was now fixed on the flower clock up ahead.
Seeing it now for the first time, he just had to push the accelerator harder, for it looked just then like the crown at the end of a long life of fighting and he couldn’t wait to reach it after such a long struggle. The little car rumbled even more than it had been rumbling already, shaking as if in the last throes of mechanical death, as if it was about to scatter apart into all its component pieces. It slid down the last bit of asphalt, and he shouted, knowing he was finally approaching his destination (which was truly not his destination at all.) Soon he would turn, all around the little round park that held the giant clock made of flowers, but not yet, not just yet. The clock of flowers was so close and it was a sign of true pleasure for him, deep incomprehensible pleasure which was that much more enjoyable because it lacked any sense or reason, it was a beacon of joy and it was rising so tall ahead of him, like a giant volcano sputtering many colored flowers out of its deepest entrails. The car just needed to slip a little closer, just a little closer, and then he would turn.
There was a loud bang, like the firing of a gun but louder. He felt the thin steering wheel pushing hard against his ribs, like a knife without an edge trying to find a path into his inner sanctum, and then there was no clock and no flowers and there was only a dark sky full of stars. The car flew through the air, and he was flying within it, and maybe for a moment he thought that there must be some mistake, for these little cars were not meant to fly and yet here it was flying, freely and openly, while the stars were shining down upon him. Just then, he still held on to a sense of impending victory, even as a shadow of doom seemed to loom in the horizon, coming up towards him from the depths of the wide open mouth laced with flowers. The car flipped once, like an Olympic athlete in search of a gold medal, tumbling like a little red marble over the carefully arranged clock display, seeking its goal in the heart of time which was hidden at the core of the spinning arms, and then it landed right where it had wanted to go, at the center, the center of the clock where there was no time at all for there could be no movement, no future and no past.
As it landed with a loud metallic crash, he heard a dry thud, not as loud as the first one but much more painful, as his head collided against the hard roof of the tiny car. That hurt almost as much as his ribs hurt, and he tried to laugh, but his laughter tasted of blood. He called for help but his voice was drenched in the same blood, and it was all dripping down his chin and over his shirt. He tried to move but the little car was on top of him, and as little as it was, it was still too heavy for him to push away. So he leaned back and took a deep breath and realized that he might be about to die, that he might be about leave this strange world of dirty streets and fiery liquids forever, and his mother would be very sad, for she had placed on him the hope that he would replace the man that once had left her even if she didn’t know it, and his sister might even be sad as well, for once they had wrestled together and in a certain way they had cared for each other and loved each other past all the small insults and rebukes, and he would never get to do all the things he had dreamed of doing, even if his dreams were vague and tasted of harsh liquor. A tiny tear slipped from the side of his one opened eye, because he had been so happy just then, as he had slipped past lights and corners, triumphant in his reckless ride, and now it was all about to end, and it lacked any glory, any great understanding, any sense of final arrival, there was just pain and blood and a heavy sense of too many mistakes compacted together into the little soft ball that had been his short life.
People came from the gaps between buildings, running and whispering to each other, saying “el senor…. He’s inside the car…” Some of them were only half dressed for they had been sleeping when they were awakened by the loud crash. Some of them were still rubbing their eyes and trying to confirm that something indeed had happened and that they weren’t just continuing to dream. They pulled open the doors and they helped to bring him out, several men gasping with effort because the man was heavy and they were thin and brittle and half asleep. By that time he was completely unconscious and perhaps he was dreaming of wives and sons and daughters, and times when adventures such as these would not be possible, even in dreams. As sorry as he had just been for his imminent death, he would be equally sorry that such things would never happen again. And that time, that time when risk would be like a gray cloud that hangs over your head without ever delivering a storm, that time he called death. He thought that he had arrived at that doorstep just then, he thought that he was close enough to simply push through. But he was wrong. There were still many years to come. Many years to forget. Many years to remember.

* * *

He showed me a collage that his granddaughter, my niece whom I had never really met, had made for his birthday. It was a rectangular piece of dark brown cardboard, about two by three feet, covered in photos and little colorful phrases, like “happy birthday!”, “love” and “you are the best!” The photos were scattered somewhat haphazardly over the thin surface, and yet they formed a clear composition, a kind of secret message that I knew I would not have the time to decipher, for it was written in a language that wasn’t yet touched by the curse of intelligibility and logic.
My Uncle held it up with a smile, saying, “this is what she did for me…” and he made that noise with his puckered lips that in his code passed for laughter and which, to me, resembled a dry spit.
There were several photos of my grandmother, much as I remembered her from the last time I saw her, although maybe a bit thinner, maybe already taking the necessary steps that would take her all the way to the emaciated death mask I had seen earlier.
There was a picture of my Uncle and my Aunt sitting on a sofa, with my cousin Juan Antonio standing tall behind them, wearing a light green T-shirt and a white cap, fulfilling the role of hesitant guardian and overseer over these people that he had once seen as strong and wise.
There was a picture of a tiny brown girl sitting between my grandmother and my Uncle, and she was smiling intensely, staring with big brown eyes into the camera. These two people, for her, were her great grandmother, as incomprehensible and distant for her as the mountains of the Sierra Nevada were to me, and her grandfather, who might have seemed simply soft and caring and constantly eager to please, a bundle of easy love wrapped in harsh wrinkles and unsteady eyes. Seeing the three of them together, vaguely perceiving what she saw in them, made me question what I saw in them myself.
Who were these people really? Who was my Uncle? Who was my grandmother? What was their true nature in this chaotic maelstrom that we all found ourselves swimming in?
I couldn’t truly determine what they were, for as much as I was swimming in the same pool of black ink, I could not observe them from an outside vantage point that would allow me to determine their shape and nature. But I could say that they were together, and they had always been together, through years upon years of sleepy afternoons on my grandmother’s green sofa, together through so many endless tragedies and a few brief moments of comedy and bliss.
In a sudden flash, I saw that my Uncle had devoted his life to doing what his father could not do. My grandfather left my grandmother crying and alone, my Uncle took care of her until the bitter pathetic end. That is why my mother could leave her. That is why she could roam the world and be welcomed with open arms whenever she decided to step back into my grandmother’s home. But my Uncle could never leave. On his shoulders rested a weight that he could never even begin to comprehend. He would spend those long afternoons complaining, leaning back in my grandmother’s sofa, and she would listen intently, as if allowing for his short sightedness, secretly thankful for his one clear goal. My Uncle then had come to replace my grandfather, to complete the duty that he had refused.
I would never know who my grandfather had come to replace, and why he had felt it necessary to take such a long journey and never come back. Maybe such journeys were inscribed on his brown in letters so tiny that no human eye could ever read them. Maybe he was the product of one such journey and so he was biologically bound to repeat the process that created him. Unknown promises and secret curses, cosmic codes and whispers from empty mouths without teeth or lips, all swirling like colored ribbons over a land of open questions.
I looked at the little brown girl again. What curse was now pressing upon her little head full of innocence? What broken debt was she now supposed to repay?
Next to her little face was a cutout picture of the little white dog that was the dying spirit of the household. Bark, bark, bark. Danger ahead. A cliff lies just ahead of you. Jump but be careful. There are monsters waiting. Dark spells and invisible binds. The little white dog looked right into the camera with his tiny eyes of warning, eyes that would soon shut forever just like my grandmother’s already had. With his canine sense of smell could he detect the old curses, like the smell of putrid old wounds covered with infection and disease? And if he could, would he ever be successful in warning one of these many characters in time?
In time to change it. In time to let it happen. In time to watch it come, like a favorite scene in a movie we have seen so many times before and enjoy even more because we have already seen it, because we already know how it ends. In time to hope that it might be otherwise. In time to live it once again.
“You are the best!” You have done what you did because there was nothing else to do. How could you do otherwise? Did you ever truly have a choice?

* * *

The family photo contained the entire decade of the seventies within the confines of its slender golden frame. There was something about the lighting, about the clothes, the colors, the contrasts. I couldn’t fully place it and yet I could recognize it, like recognizing my friend’s voice in an old broken tape recording, even if the timbre had changed, even if the hints of innocence had left and been replaced by a false sense of absolute and final knowledge.
There was my Uncle, thin and handsome, in a white button up shirt that opened up to reveal the upper part of his chest. His hair was combed back, plastered tightly onto his head, probably held down with large quantities of Vaseline. He looked confident and secure, ready to show the world what he was capable of doing.
He was standing next to my Aunt, who looked young and proud, maybe even still in love with him. Although, if it was love, it was not so evident, it was more a substance that was made of equal parts contentment and arrogance and it slipped out of her orifices and colored the air around her past.
In front of them were their children, my cousins: Roxana front and center, directly in front of my Uncle who held onto her behind her back, then little Juan Antonio, who in this instance was the one who needed protecting (and who would grow up to stand behind his parents in much the same pose that my Uncle here took) and off to the side, cut off from the picture as if he was a simply something that didn’t need to be remembered, was my oldest cousin, Robertito (forever “little Roberto” no matter how much he grew.) Only the leftmost side of his face was visible and he stood away from the hands of either parent, already staking his claim to a kind of tentative independence, the lonely pedestal of the good older brother who can never truly do wrong, who can never quite do right.
Behind them I could see the outline of my grandmother’s house, I could even imagine that my grandmother stood behind the cameraman, smiling proudly at her fresh young family, already planning a weekend outing or a trip to the movies with the kids.
But my eyes went back to my Uncle, for here was a clear sighting of the man that once was, the man that now was lost beyond recovery. I wondered if the choices had already been set in motion even then, and the course of little steps had been so systematic that there was never a point where the path might have been changed. Or had there been a singular day, a singular moment, when two paths opened up before his clear brown eyes, and the paths didn’t fully reveal their ultimate destination and yet their aromas held little clues, clues too subtle to decipher, differences too tenuous to pin down. If there was such a single moment, I wondered what my Uncle thought then when he started walking on this broad path lined with dancing flowers, the one that led here, to this large house covered in urine, to this small bed with old pictures and papers lined up against a faded wall.
Maybe the singular moments were many, maybe they came at him, at me, at us, day after day, week after week, year after year, and yet we always managed to make the same choice. If we had always done it, then it must be right, and if we had never looked elsewhere, there must be a reason.
I looked deeply into those lost eyes of strength and then again at the fading eyes of the man that stood beside me. It was him and yet it wasn’t. He looked at me and wondered what I was looking for. I could see the question in his face, and yet he never asked me.

* * *

It was a warm afternoon, as most of them were. But there was a soft wind that traveled right through the open structure of the big rancho, and it made the whiskers of straw dance on the edges of the roof, and it made my hair flicker lightly and it made the hours pass so slowly that they didn’t seem to pass at all. There were several wooden tables scattered across the red bricks of the simple establishment. The only enclosed space in the open restaurant was for the kitchen, the bar and the bathroom, and it was very small, so small that you could almost not see it at all and believe you were simply sitting in an open rancho in the middle of nowhere and not a hundred meters from one of the main roads of San Salvador. That imaginary sense of isolation was amplified by the raw empty lot which surrounded it. It had been cleared to function as a parking lot but not cleared enough to forget its origins as raw jungle. There were green bushes scattered everywhere and even a few palm trees and a little skinny young man with a machete walked slowly around the perimeter letting us know that he was on guard. The jungle in the midst of the city, and unspoken violence at the heart of the jungle.
I was seated at a table with all my Dad’s friends, and they were all very drunk after many hours of continuous drinking. They had slowly risen to the point where almost any combination of words could be hilariously funny, and all statements carried the weight of searing truth within them, they all engendered wide open eyes followed by knowing smiles. It was a space that I myself enjoyed even if I was the only one there that wasn’t drinking. By virtue of my relative clarity, and the relatively unclouded attention that it allowed me, I became the preferred audience for everyone that was there. I was the one that would listen. I was the one that would understand.
As the afternoon slowly moved towards that point when the sun is still out but the night is already whispering at the edges of the sky, I found myself sitting across from the Old Drunk Man. His name was Roberto, like my Uncle, but I simply thought of him as the Old Drunk Man. He had already drank a copious amount of beer (he counted the amount in plastic boxes of bottles and he was very proud of how many sat next to the table, high enough to reach his arm) and his eyes were bulging out and red. He was sweating in a particular way that told me he was going past a secret threshold, but I also knew that he had crossed it many times before and there was no fear in him, no surprise. He had gone from quiet and thoughtful to loud and happy in a matter of a few hours, and now he had descended into a special kind of gloom. He stared into my eyes as if trying to find answers to questions he couldn’t focus enough to pose. He leaned onto the table and signaled for me to come closer.
“Let me tell you something,” he said, and then he paused to take another sip from the cold dark brown bottle of beer, all covered in tiny transparent bubbles that slowly dripped like the ghosts of worms onto his old brown hands. “I think it’s something you should know.”
I nodded and leaned forward towards him and then I said, “Yes, please tell me. I would like to hear it.”
“Do you know about your Uncle…your Uncle Roberto… the brother of your mother…” he said it and his eyes seemed redder than ever, almost shining with drunken intensity.
I nodded once again and pressed my eyes together slightly, surprised to hear him mentioned here, in this place, in the mouth of the Old Drunk Man. My father was seated at the other end of the table and he couldn’t hear what we were saying. I wondered what had crossed the Old Man’s mind just then, what had made him want to tell me something about my Uncle. Whatever that thought had been, my role in this chamber was to listen and that is what I did.
“You know he is not an engineer, right? He’s not an engineer. Your Dad… your Dad is an engineer. Your Uncle… he’s not an engineer at all.”
I nodded and smiled slightly. Of course he was an engineer. Everyone I had ever known had referred to him as an engineer. Maybe the Old Drunk Man was simply making some kind of drunken leap into the philosophical meaning of true engineering, but I knew for certain that he was an engineer. There was no doubt about it.
“Sure he is…” I said, in a soft friendly tone, letting him know I was not offended by his statement but also letting him know that I was certain he was wrong.
“No, he is not… it was published in the paper… there was a clear announcement on the paper that said he was not an engineer at all… he never graduated…he didn’t even make it to his final year…”
I looked at him and wondered. What he said had some kind of ring of truth, the distinct shadings of it were glowing from its edges. It didn’t sound like the fantastic rumblings of a drunk man in a little rancho restaurant in the middle of San Salvador. And yet someone, somewhere, must have made a mistake. My Uncle was an engineer. I knew this. It was a fact.
I leaned in closer. “Of course he is…he has built houses… I’ve been inside of them…”
The Old Drunk Man shook his head violently and stared at me. “Listen to me. He never graduated. The announcement on the paper said that he has been passing himself off as one… just like several others…there are many like him in this city of liars…they say they are something and they act as if they are and they get paid as if they are but they are nothing… he is not what he says he is… he never was…he just learned enough to fool others…most people can’t tell the difference…most people don’t care enough to try…”
A car slipped inside the dirt parking lot, lifting a small cloud of thick dust as it moved. It slowly came to rest by the side of a small green bush. As the driver opened the door, the guard with the machete walked around it and saluted lightly, moving his thin hand against his forehead and lowering his eyes.
Something started clicking within me. I could hear the mechanical wheels sliding into place. I knew my Uncle through tiny gaps of time spent at his dinner table, surrounded by my cousins and my grandmother, or seated on his light brown sofa that forced you to lie all the way back, as if you were sinking into quick sand that smelled like leather. I knew his office and his secretary, and I had seen them talking from the doorway of my room in the days of little gray jackets and simple careless friendship. I knew his voice as he talked to my grandmother in her living room. I knew his strange laughter that simulated spitting. I knew the sound of his car as it rode up my grandmother’s driveway. I knew he was an engineer. I knew he always said so. I knew nobody had ever said otherwise.
“Listen to me… he was part of a group of young men…they all went to Mexico to study… they were all set… the world was theirs… they would study and come back professionals…they had no obstacles before them… but they never made it… they went on great drunken sprees and they messed with the young girls of the town… and they did it so much that they were kicked out and they came back here without ever having finished…they came back disgraced…”
I nodded. The illusion of fact within me started to crumble little by little, like a great cliff that slowly starts to shake under the invisible waves of an earthquake, dropping tiny pebbles and rivers of dust down its side as it prepares to split wide open. My certainty was not so solid. What did I really know? I knew his striped button up shirts. I knew his thick silver watches. I knew his loud commanding voice as he talked to his workers. I knew his tales of sorrow. What did I really know?
“The people of that Mexican town still remember the Salvadoreans that lived there… they hate all Salvadoreans… they have hated them since that time… it is true… listen to me…it is something you should know!”
As I stared into his bloodshot eyes, and his brown wrinkled skin covered in sweat, I wondered why he wanted me to know this, why it was so important to him that I should hear this. What was hiding within him? What was his own secret purpose? What did I really know about my Uncle? What did I really know about the Old Drunk Man?
“He’s not an engineer. Your father, he’s an engineer. Your Uncle isn’t anything.”
I smiled slightly and leaned back, as if trying to find the necessary empty space to find my bearings. It was not a problem for him not to graduate, at least not in my eyes. I didn’t place such a high value on formal schooling of any kind. It was simply the sense of other waves of experience going on unnoticed underneath the thin veneer of calm that I called my memories.
I looked around the table. My Dad was arguing politics with another drunken man while a red car was slowly sliding into another open parking space. He gestured with his arms and the drunken man shook his head violently. There was loud laughter coming from another table, and the sound of a loud toast from yet another, a man standing up among many, slurring his words as he raised his beer glass up in the air.
How many secrets were being revealed as I sat there? How many were still locked safely away, untouched by the seductive openness of alcohol? How many would never emerge to see the light of day? How many would remain sealed away and forbidden? How much of what I saw as solid and stable was just waiting to slide into the sea when the right earthquake would finally come to dislodge it? How much was just waiting for an afternoon of drinking and loose tongues to fully break apart?
Another time, the Old Drunk Man looked at me through bloodshot eyes and said:
“Of my childhood, I remember a long dirty mattress. It was stained with urine and it had been placed against a wall to dry, a wall next to a blue garage door,” he then stared at me to make sure that I was listening, “ A mattress stained with urine, that’s all I remember. A mattress.” And his eyes were filled with a deep sadness that reached across the gap to squeeze my heart. When the mask came tumbling down, all that was left was an old dirty mattress slowly drying in the sun.

* * *

There was a picture I immediately recognized. I had kept it among my belongings for years, I had examined it many times while browsing through my old photo albums, alone in my room or exploring them through a stranger’s eyes. But here, in my Uncle’s room, with the smell of old clothes, and old tears, and the red plastic bottles and the scraps of paper strewn on the bed, and the smell of dog urine and the sound of the little white dog whimpering in some other room not too far away, the old picture seemed to acquire a completely different nature, the context transforming its inner essence until it seemed as if I had never seen it before. It was like looking at the same picture in negative, where the parts that previously have been lit are now black and the parts that were once black are not pushed to the foreground, outlined in radiant light that makes them become new figures, new symbols, new tales.
I saw all of us, my cousins and me, surrounding my grandmother, standing in the dark early evening of a day long past, standing on the moist grass of her backyard, standing all together one last time for a flashing moment that would stay forever silent and still, living on in two dimensions and some dashes of color.
I remembered that day clearly because my grandmother had been very involved in its realization. She had made it clear to all of us that she wanted this to happen and she used all her powers to make sure that it did: “Be here on time. Dress well. Make sure to have your hair combed. This is important. Be here on time!” And I was on time. When I arrived, I saw that she had put on a shiny new dress of many colors: blue and orange and purple and red, like a complex abstract painting splashed upon her small old body, a painting recurrently repeating in mathematical perfection. And my cousins were there: Roberto in an elegant jacket, with a tie wrapped uncomfortably around his neck, Roxana in a kind of white business suit with large round dark buttons and right angled shoulders that stuck out like epaulets; and Juan Antonio, in a dark jacket and no tie, quietly confident in his own sense of youthful style.
I wore a white button up shirt, and black jeans that hung loosely around my waist. In my pocket I carried a small wrinkled notebook and a small bag of Kleenex, which made for an unseemly bulge over my heart. My beard happened to be short and trimmed at the time, and my hair was short as well. I was probably as elegant as I would ever be and my grandmother gave me a look of approval.
My Uncle and my Aunt were there as well, both dressed in the best clothes they could find, but they were not in this picture that I now looked at. My grandmother wanted only her grandchildren in this one, the kids that she loved so much, the ones that she took to the movies every weekend for years that now coalesced into a handful of memories, the ones that stayed in her room every Saturday and didn’t let her sleep through the night. She wanted one last moment when we would all be together and we gave that moment to her.
Maybe for years afterward, my grandmother looked at that picture with a mixture of happiness and nostalgia, a memory of a day when we had all pleased her, a memory only marred by the uncomfortable fact that it would never be repeated.
The only person missing that day was my mother, so it was my duty to represent both her and myself, and in my way maybe I did, cracking a left field joke every so often and then returning to the silence that they mostly expected from a strange artifact such as myself. Maybe that is what my mother had been once, in her own way. So they expected it from me and I delivered. When it was time for the picture, we were told where to stand and where to look and then there were some bright flashes. My grandmother said “Mis nietos! Mis nietos! (my grandchildren!)” a few times and then the job was done.
Looking at the picture now, it seemed to be a picture of three siblings and their grandmother and someone else standing in their midst. Who was this stranger to them? Was I then as strange and foreign to them as they seemed to me? How did they explain this picture to themselves when they saw it out of the corner of their eyes?
Maybe it was part of my own strangeness that I would ask such questions and think of such things when looking at old pictures. Maybe they would only walk by and see another old picture before going on to do the actual business of the world, the business of always moving forward and never looking back, not until it was too late. Maybe they wouldn’t even see it at all.
Before looking away myself, I looked into my grandmother’s eyes which seemed to shine with happiness through the sharp contrasted colors of the photo. Yes, she had been happy that day. For one final moment, we were all together as a family, even if we really weren’t, even if we had never been, even if we never would be.

* * *

We were inside an elegant white car, with its dark blue interior and its smell that combined the old and the new into a single chamber of shade and unsettled expectations. My grandmother was driving, as slowly and calmly as she always did. She would stop at every corner, and cars would honk loudly behind her. Upon hearing the impatient sounds coming from the other cars, she responded with irritated surprise.
“Can you believe them? Can’t they wait for a moment? Look at how people are!”
She would shake her head and let out a single burst of air through pursed lips. Then she would push her wrinkled foot slowly into the accelerator and the car would very gently move forward, all while the loud honking continued, coming at us like invisible rocks flying with the weight of real anger through the heavy hot air of the afternoon. Sometimes they would drive around the car and stare at us with distinct violent intentions in their eyes, letting us know that we had done something terrible and that we better learn to drive or bad things would happen. My grandmother would shake her head again and say:
“Bad mannered people! Hurtful! This young people today… they don’t know how to behave! It’s just terrible… the things they do!”
We would then drive a few more blocks, get to another intersection and there would be more honking and the whole process would repeat all over again. Each time my grandmother would act surprised and incredulous. Each time, I would worry for her. Each time ended with a single shake of the head and a gentle acceleration. Maybe each time the car moved, she was back in an age when cars didn’t move any faster than twenty miles per hour. Maybe she could almost see, around the edges of her eyes, the old cars coming around the corner, the people waving in genteel salute, maybe she could even see my grandfather as he was when he was young and strong, maybe she saw him walking towards her, ready to salute her with a single tip of his hat. Then there would be more honking and her dream would dissolve into the sour realization that those days were long gone and they would never come back.
From corner to corner we traveled, in a gentle movement that allowed for no rushing at all, like a feather that will fall gently from the heights of a chipilin tree but will slowly dance from side to side as it makes its way to the ground. We finally made it to the corner I knew so well, the open green lawn and the high walls of a stranger’s house, a house that to me meant we were about to turn and arrive at my cousin’s place, my Uncle’s house. My grandmother turned and pointed to the bags on the car floor in front of me.
“Don’t forget to bring those out… there’s the bread and the chicken… and that little white box has the sweet bread… you can tell them that you got it for them.”
I turned to her and shook my head. “I didn’t get it for them. You did. You know that, I know that, they know that…”
“Don’t argue with me…” she said it with a weak attempt at anger in her soft voice, “just tell them that you got it… that’s all!”
And then, as the car calmly slid up the little driveway of my Uncle’s garage, she shook her head once again.
“You argue about everything! Sometimes I just want to bang your head in!” but then she would laugh in her tiny whine that felt like invisible bubbles of pink soap sliding up towards white clouds. I laughed with her and the car came to a full stop. “We won’t be here long… I need to get back to my rest… we’ll eat and sit for a bit…and then we’ll go back…”
We had done this at least a hundred times before, maybe more. Almost every weekend, and sometimes during the week. And yet she would always explain the details, she would always tell me what she had already told me. I would always listen and nod my head.
And then she would say, like she always would, “Make sure to say thank you for everything, and don’t bring up any bad subjects, ok?”
I nodded and smiled at her, impersonating a small skinny innocent boy, and doing such a good job that I almost believed the illusion myself. She looked at me, smiling broadly, laughing at herself, and my own smile grew in response to hers, both of us enjoying this quiet preamble where there was only her and me and we could breathe in a quiet space of unspoken understanding.
“Just be a nice boy…we’ll be back home very soon…”
Then we stepped out of the car and walked up the long hallway of shiny red bricks, red like the ones in her own house, but these ones were long and narrow, and their edges were so pronounced that I could feel them through the soles of my shoes like long lines of knives that had no edge. As we walked up to the main door, it was already opening and I could see my Aunt behind the door, her mouth opening like the door itself had opened, teeth separating, big round black eyes bulging, and mirth already building to an explosive orgasm of fresh laughter.
“Aja Nina Tonita! Aja Juan Carlos!”
My grandmother immediately pointed to the bags I was holding in my hands. My Aunt reached towards her and kissed her cheek in greeting. My grandmother nodded, her wrinkled pink chin bobbing up and down in a rapid motion. She pointed once again towards the bags.
“We bring you some bread and things…Juan Carlos, put them in the kitchen!”
I nodded and moved towards my Aunt who reached towards me herself and raised her face so I could kiss her cheek. I leaned over her big smiling face, the tips of her curly black hair reaching out towards my lips, as I heard the order repeated.
“Take the bags to the kitchen,” my grandmother said and nodded to herself as she slowly made her way into the cool shade inside the house.
“Give him some time Nina Tonita! Give him some time!” my Aunt said and then she laughed in that uproarious way of hers that seemed to come straight out of the back rooms of an old brothel. “She wants everything done like now! Just take them in… put them anywhere.”
I nodded and shrugged my shoulders. Then I moved towards the dark interior of the kitchen to get rid of the plastic bags as quickly as possible so that my grandmother could feel at ease. I walked past the old brown piano that nobody played, with all the pictures crowding its narrow upper surface. There were pictures of my cousins, pictures of my Aunt and Uncle, maybe some of the very same pictures I would one day explore with so much attention and care. But I didn’t have much attention for them on this afternoon. All I wanted was for lunch to be over, so I could leave this house and return to what I saw as my real life.
I saw my mother’s paintings, all proudly hanging from the bright white walls all around me. I saw my Uncle sitting on the sofa and standing up to greet my grandmother, patting her back, kissing her cheek and then sitting back down once again, one leg crossed over the other, upper body leaning all the way back. I heard the sound of the TV blaring out an advertisement for candy, followed by one for a shopping center, and then one for a clothing store. Everything was just as it ever was, just as I had always remembered, and I couldn’t wait for it to be over.
As I walked out of the kitchen, I could hear my Aunt screaming up towards the second floor, calling for my cousins Roberto and Juan Antonio to come down.
“Juan Carlos is here! Come on down!”
I knew they had no eagerness to see me, just as I had no eagerness to be here with them. As the years had passed, the games we had once played had dwindled to nothing and no new games had come to replace them. Now there was only brief empty talk, and the sound of the TV in the background. I sat across from my Uncle on the rubbery surface of the brown sofa, and the material clung to my sweaty skin in a way I found uncomfortable. My Aunt brought me a soda in a short thick glass full of ice. Roberto, my cousin, walked by and nodded towards me, saying hello as he passed through into the garden, saying something about the dog.
It was a white dog. Another white dog. The same white dog. There were many white dogs, but it was always the same one. Always announcing impending doom, but never able to deliver his message.
Juan Antonio came and sat in the other brown sofa next to me. He was dressed in a short sleeved blue shirt and red shorts. My grandmother tried to come up with some kind of conversation but nobody had anything to say. My Aunt was cooking in the kitchen and we were all simply waiting for her to be done. My Uncle pointed out something on the paper and my grandmother made a quick comment. The sound of a loud Mexican comedy show came from the TV, filling the room with canned laughter. I leaned farther back, trying to not close my eyes, but feeling the urge to do so. Then my Aunt said that the food was ready and we all got up to eat.
“Go wash your hands!” my grandmother said, and I went immediately, glad to be away from them all even if only for a brief moment.
I would be seated at one end of the long table, covered in white and silver dishes, and tall narrow glasses full of soda. My Uncle would sit at the other end. Together we were the extreme opposites of a hidden spectrum.
My grandmother would sit to one side, mediating between these two extremes that continuously refused to even acknowledge each other, always looking elsewhere, always diving from the cliffs of the bright sunlight into the strange darkness at the bottom of our thoughts. She would laugh sporadically and even make some jokes, trying desperately to construct that invisible bridge that would connect what could never be connected. She knew the impossibility of her goal already and still she tried, with the stubborn gentleness that hid beneath her royal stature.
Roxana would sit beside my Aunt and Juan Antonio would sit next to her, both of them simply stretching the time like chewing gum, tasting the food and raising their eyebrows, ready to run when the signal was given. Roberto would sit to my left, close to my grandmother, protecting her from gross and subtle violence, the kind that leaves a mark, and also the kind that doesn’t. He would laugh in a male version of my Aunt’s laugh, which sounded even more vulgar in a thicker male voice, his nose squeezed tightly together and the eruptions sliding out of the black twin holes over his mouth like slimy snot that had grown airborne.
They would scatter references to people I didn’t know, and these names would fly all across the room like tiny black flies. I would make no attempt to swat at them because there was too many and there would always be more. They would make jokes that only they understood, jokes about places I had never been to, about food, and ocean waves, and restaurants, and long highways in the middle of a desert I would never visit.
When it seemed that too long a time had passed, my Aunt would look back at me and smile broadly, since it was the only way she knew how to smile. Then she would ask me what I was up to, what my plans were, what had I been doing since the last time she saw me. I would open my mouth and start to build sentences out of play-do, trying to create a tale that would satisfy her need while leaving enough gaps to satisfy my own need for her ignorance. It was an effort without merit and without reward. Before I could fully answer, sometimes before even a full sentence had left my mouth, someone else had already made another joke and I would never get to finish. My Aunt was already laughing at the new joke and it was clear that she was not really interested in my answer. There was no need for care or secrecy, there was nobody listening. I was playing to an empty house.
I learned to shrug it off and look back down at the food, which was always delicately made and delicious. This my Aunt could do with utmost attention, in her cooking she could finally invest her deeper vibrations and allow her powers to flower in the form of sauces and pasta and rice. This was enough, for we were only here to eat. Anything else was secondary, including my own thoughts, including the jokes, including the many strange names that still floated freely around the table, making it hard for me to see the faces of flesh, covered as they were by black references.
My Uncle would make some free floating and drastically pessimistic comments about money, and my cousins would then make jokes directed at him. My Aunt would complain and my grandmother would gently reprimand her. It was a scene they all knew well, a scene that would play in exactly the same way whether I was there to see it or not. Maybe it was still playing there when we left, repeating in a caged loop of sentences and words that would never have a meaning or a solid conclusion.
Somewhere in the midst of the pre-written sequence of jokes, commands and reprisals, I would find an empty space to drop in a statement that would seem to come out of nowhere. For a moment, everyone would turn to look at me, eyes wide open, expectant, waiting for an explanation. Then there was a complete silence. My Aunt would release another loud explosion of laughter as she said: “Ah! Juan Carlos!” and then they would all laugh and my grandmother would laugh in her restrained whiny way, and my Uncle would laugh in his way which simulated dry spitting and my cousins would laugh and I would smile and return to eating.
Eating lunch, that was why we were here. Everything else was secondary. Soon it would be time to go home. Soon this would all be a memory, a recurrent dream that sometimes fades away into oblivion but eventually comes back.
When it was time to say goodbye, there would be hugs and good wishes and then it would be just my grandmother and me again, slowly making our way back to where the air was flowing more easily, where the silence was light and sweet and cool and there were fewer bouts of incomprehensible laughter. I sometimes wondered if my grandmother was as relieved as I was.

* * *

A picture of my Aunt as she had been once upon a time, my Aunt in a faraway land that even the ones who had passed through it had already forgotten. Here she was in black and white, with her hair arranged to resemble a furry top hap, reaching upwards to the heavens. Her eyes looked straight into the camera with a kind of smoldering sexuality that I had never perceived in her in the time that I had known her. Her smile in the picture was soft and sweet and yet distinctly seductive.
She reminded me of Malena, that girl that I loved so much for a very short time, the girl that still made an appearance in my midnight adventures every so often, if only to say a word, or wave goodbye from a passing train. Like her, she seemed simple and pretty, almost transparently shallow, but possessing of a deep well of magnetism that could not be denied.
I could place myself then in my Uncle’s shoes, in his pants and his shirts, standing before this vision and feeling entranced, wanting to possess her forever, wanting to know that she would be his and for no other, that she would forever wake up next to him, ready to kiss him and hug him and feel his form against her own, and, at night, when nobody else was looking, she would strip herself of all clothing and all shame and rub her naked sweaty body over his, and then he would push himself into her and her sweet, innocent, seductive smile would turn into an urgent frown of pleasure that would make half restrained sounds that would barely manage to restrain the furious lust which was hiding underneath.
Yes, I could see what he saw then, what he imagined then, what he urgently and secretly hoped for. Now she was no longer this girl, this girl didn’t exist anywhere at all, and she was only vaguely alluded to by this old picture. This girl had been gone for so long that what there was might as well be another creature, another alien species that had come to replace the one he loved. Now, the only desire that remained in her came out through loud raucous laughter that resonated against all the walls of a house stained with dog urine and the invisible blotches of hidden failures. Now she would wake up alone and in her own room while my Uncle stared at old pictures in the darkness of the early morning. And yet there was still an urgent smile in her, a sweaty need to live, to breathe some more while it was still possible, while air was still available.
Once, we had been seated in a dark shadowy restaurant in the middle of the afternoon. It had been her and my Uncle and my grandmother, all of us seated around the elegant table covered in a white tablecloth, looking at each other in the air conditioned twilight. She had reached over the table towards me, pushing her face up close so that I would be able to hear her words.
“Juan Carlos, you know about dreams right? You know how to understand them? You know what they mean?”
I said, “I know a little bit…”
As if the answer was already a known foundation upon which her hopes rested, she simply repeated:
“You know about dreams. You know how to interpret them…”
I nodded, knowing that she had something to say and that I wanted to hear it, I wanted her dreams to be reborn here among the cold waves of the air conditioner.
“I have a dream that comes to me over and over. I’ve had it for so long that I don’t even remember a time when I didn’t have it. I wake up in the middle of the night, and that is the only dream I can remember. And then I relive it in my mind, laying in my bed, looking up at the ceiling. This is the dream…I see myself falling into a deep black hole, a hole that goes on forever. I am always trying to reach for the edge but I can’t quite hold onto it. It slips away from my grasp no matter how hard I try to hold on. I feel myself falling and I see the light fading above me and then I wake up.”
She stared at me with big black eyes, the same eyes that stared into the camera for this black and white picture that I now held in my hand. She smiled for me in the restaurant, ready to laugh uproariously once again, ready to seek sanctuary in establishing that it had all been a joke: the dream, her worries, her life, their whole life together. And yet she held her laughter for a moment, I could sense her pulling it in like a wild mare that is ready to run wild. She looked at me and asked me.
“What could that mean, Juan Carlos? What could it mean that I fall into a hole… a hole that goes on forever…night after night?”
I looked back at her and knew that it took no special talent to know the meaning of her dream. I just needed to look at her, right then and there, in the shadows of a restaurant bathed in ice, to know everything that her dream was saying, everything that she was saying through her dream. And yet she couldn’t see it. Or she didn’t want to see it, which was ultimately the same thing.
I smiled at her and I said something, something that could be said in front of my grandmother, something that wouldn’t send my Aunt reeling out of the restaurant, and such somethings are so close to nothing that it’s hard to tell the difference. They just slide out and dissolve even as the words are still coated in saliva, they turn to vapor and escape through the windows where the hot sun can bake their thin remains.
It was enough of something that she was pleased with my answer. She nodded and smiled and then returned to talking about the weather and the current prices of milk and tortillas. But the dream was still within me, just as it surely still was within her, and I silently swooned with the hopelessness of the situation, a seemingly endless fall into a dark hole that never ends, from the light of a clear instant of awakening through the years of compromise and self betrayal, and then here we were, about to pay the bill, about to go home, about to complete yet another sleepy afternoon.

* * *

We were sitting in the secondary living room that surrounded the secondary TV which was next to the dark kitchen which was the one room that was nothing if not primary. For once, everyone was sitting in the same place at the same time, all of us staring across the white gap of wall and transparent table and shiny floor, always managing to miss each other in our quest to find where to rest our eyes.
Of course it wasn’t everyone at all, because my grandmother was gone, gone to nebulous places where she could not be easily reached through ordinary means, and my mother was elsewhere, and my two cousins, Juan Antonio and Roberto, were at their respective jobs. But at least everyone that was in the house at the moment was sitting here, crowded around a blaring TV that nobody was watching.
Every once in a while I would turn my eyes towards it and catch a long view of blue waters from a cliff and a white walled bedroom where a woman talked on the phone, maybe soon the other side of the pearl would make an appearance, and a beautiful blond girl would offer herself for the sake of vengeance, and a beautiful brunette would stay quiet for the sake of appearances, maybe Paul was watching as quietly as I was and maybe he also had nothing to say.
I was sitting by the wall closest to the kitchen and my Uncle was sitting to my left, directly facing the TV (but in his glassy eyes I could tell that the images were not making any impact at all.) Everyone else was sitting directly across from me, momentarily focused on the strange creature that had come from far away for a very short visit before their eyes slid away to more recognizable objects once again. There was my Aunt, laughing at regular intervals, her forehead and cheeks trying desperately to swallow her eyes as she let out another burst of hyena calls, shaking with her head at the endless humor of the situation, of all situations that now crowded around her like a giant metallic trash compactor slowly squeezing her out of the last remnants of life. There was my cousin Roxana whom I had once seen as pretty, even desirable, but which now seemed a bit too angular to truly be human, as if the rounded bones had been replaced by metallic plaques and straight rods of iron, and her cheeks had grown wrinkled and dry and her smile had frozen into a grimace of simulated self satisfaction, and her eyes were like little white marbles that rolled around in their sockets without ever finding a stable place to rest, and her skin seemed like armor, and her words tasted of charcoal, and her laughter was whiny and high but without the simple warmth that my grandmother’s laughter once had. Next to her was her son, Eduardo, my nephew. He was a soft little boy of about ten years, dressed in little jean shorts and a short sleeved green shirt. His skin was as smooth as I remembered Roxana’s had been, and his eyes still held a promise of sincerity, even if it was slowly clouding over with grayness, like an afternoon whose end is approaching, whose long bubbles of warmth are inexorably being covered by the thick blanket of the night.
This was only the second or third time that I saw Eduardo, but he had always seemed strangely familiar, not just because in his face I could recognize the trace of my mother’s family, but also because within his very eyes I could see something of myself.
I saw him once in my grandmother’s living room, back when she was still around and capable of smiling and talking and breathing, before she became dust and mud and memories, no longer limited to one location but free to dissolve into the world itself and observe it from all angles. On that particular voyage, I had seen deep into the heart of San Salvador and I felt that everything in it was decaying and I couldn’t place my eyes on any corner without recognizing the visage of slow death. I was feeling this deep sense of decomposing heaviness, when he inadvertently spoke to me of simple answers hidden behind soft red skin and curious eyes.
I saw him walking around my grandmother’s living room, staring at the many little trinkets that were spread all over shelves and walls. To him, they were as new and marvelous and mysterious as they had once been to me. To him, this San Salvador was the world, and the world was new and full of surprises, and the houses didn’t seem as predictable because they were all brand new and undiscovered, and the trees didn’t seem as damaged because they were all new and full of life, and the streets and the sidewalks themselves didn’t seem as broken because they were all new and ready to be traveled on, and everything that was new was just as it was supposed to be and it was all ready to be seen and experienced for the very first time.
Seeing him there, in my grandmother’s living room, I wondered if the San Salvador that I myself had seen once, the San Salvador that I once saw as new and mysterious, had been just as broken, just as ugly, just as eager to slide into urban death as this one was, but I had seen it as new and so it had been new to me for as long as I saw the newness in it.
Then I wondered further, all the while looking at Eduardo slowly examining the world of insinuations and implications that was my grandmother’s living room. If San Salvador was really truly new, as new now as it had been, as it would always be new once again, moment to moment, then I only saw it as old now because I had grown old myself, old and tired. My sight itself had grown old and tired with me, and the sidewalks and the streets and the houses and the world itself accommodated me in my descent.
For him, for Eduardo, my Uncle was not an old man in the last pathetic moments of a turbulent ride through a biological gauntlet that destroyed every last bit of hope left in him. To him, he was an old and wise grandfather, much like my own grandfather had been to me. And my grandmother must have been even older and wiser and my Aunt was a kind grandmother who laughed with him and took care of him in the midst of her constant delight. And my cousin, she was simply “mother” who was sometimes kind, sometimes strict, sometimes angry, sometimes glad.
As simple as that, they all rotated around their invisible axis and I saw them as if I had never seen them before. Once their past was removed, they were new again and fresh and ready to be examined for the first time. But the past was like a great ocean that didn’t like to be held back, so I would hear its rumblings behind the temporary dam I had built to give me a moment of discovery.
Now, sitting here with them, I could hold on to that vision, and remember that the world itself was as new and as shiny as I chose to make it. In front of me was this little white boy in shorts, rosy cheeks, wide bright eyes, open smile with a hint of mischievousness. He was the teacher who taught me this simple truth. He taught without knowing, he taught without even looking up at me or acknowledging my presence.
On the TV there were men and women kissing and my Aunt was laughing again, but my eyes were on the little boy, trying to somehow decipher how I could make contact with him, how I could pull from him the ghostly secrets that would speak to me of my own past, of my own descent into grayness and shadows.
But he was already growing older, he knew now what he liked and what he didn’t like, he knew how to get what he wanted out of people, he knew what things meant, he knew what the future held, he knew too much and it was too late to show him otherwise. So I just watched him, and I took pictures, and I asked him about the video games he played and he responded in short brief final sentences, and he made certain statements that told me he knew so much that he knew nothing at all. Maybe that was just as it should be, for it was only knowing nothing that you could ever hope to learn.
My Uncle eventually stood up and told me he would now take me home. The moment was over. Eduardo had new games to play with. My cousin had to get back to work. My Aunt had to rest. As we walked down the hallway away from the house, I could hear my Aunt’s laughter and a dog barking in the yard next door. There was dirt on the walls and I could still smell the little white dog’s urine. My Uncle moved even slower than I remembered.
But everything was the same. Aside from the shorts and the constant presence of a grandfather, there was no essential difference. I had been here before. I would be here again. It was new then. It was new now. It would be new again.

* * *

Another picture of the end, the end of all things that ever were or ever could be for my grandmother, the end of my grandmother and all things that came along with her. Meandering talks on narrow green sofas, visited by a gentle breeze, by the rustling of thin brown branches, by waves of tiny mosquitoes that buzzed right up against your ear as if they were about to invade your brain and then they vanished just as easily as they had appeared. Loud trebly laughter half repressed with trembling wrinkled hands pressed up against a shaking red face, down turned eyes that signaled an unknown shame of pleasure. Soft hugs to say hello and hard hugs to say goodbye, all in the shade of the little triangular awning and the shiny red bricks of her main hallway. Slow drives to my Uncle’s house so she could show them that I was one of them, so they could pretend that they agreed, and then just talk for a bit and eat and drive back, having done what we had to do and nothing else. Soft advice delivered in whispers, pregnant with the knowledge that it would never take root.
It was the end of all that and so much more, a vast web of tiny occurrences that I had never quite understood, flashing moments of red and brown and green that came at me with such ease, and settled within me with such laziness, that I never stopped to listen, to look, to question, to dig.
Here was a picture of it, of the end of it. In this picture she was more a corpse than a grandmother, she was as thin as the Holocaust victims were in the old pictures I had seen, the unfortunate bundles of flesh and nerves that inadvertently fell into the hands of the Nazi machine and ended up looking more like slimy skinny skeletons than men or women or people at all. She was not naked in the picture, she was not walking on a broken road of white rocks in front of an old army truck, but she was just as thin, just as pale, just as severe in her announcement of the final curtain. She stared at the camera with eyes of total incomprehension, as if she was asking:
“Why now? Why this? Why here?”
But she had no clear foundation to even complete the questions in a way that they could be understood, and so they were left hanging in her eyes like verbal tears that would never roll off her pink cheeks made of crinkly paper.
They were all around her.
My cousin Roberto, tall and strong and broad shouldered, sitting right behind her, pushing her up towards life with his own physical strength and his radiant smile (which was truly radiant even if it hid layers of anger that nobody close to him could ever begin to suspect. I could only see them because I was far away enough to notice the trails of blackened smoke that shifted around the edges of his eyes.)
My aunt was beside him, her soft white arm around his strong brown shoulders, smiling in the middle of laughing. I could hear her laughter right through the glass of the picture, making it all glimmer with a sense of urgency, of a dam about to burst (or maybe it was her laughing down below us, maybe she was just then walking from the kitchen to the living room and laughing, or walking up the stairs and laughing, or cleaning up after the little white dog, and complaining loudly, right before laughing again)

I could feel my grandmother trembling, too weak to let my Aunt know that she was laughing too loud, that her intense bursts of deflective mirth were puncturing right through her weakened defenses. She was too far gone to even make a gesture, to even raise her thin little hand in a dismissive wave. And yet she somehow knew that she would not hear that laughter for too much longer, that the days themselves were growing shorter, shorter and shorter, thinner and lighter like her own body, until there would be no days at all. And she vaguely understood that this indeed was the end of days, the one that had been predicted all along by scriptures and dirty madmen walking up and down the Plaza Libertad, and it was coming for her, this end that she now knew to be conscious and mobile, self aware beyond her own wildest imaginings and ready to devour her and dissolve her into its entrails just as she was beginning to finally understand.
Here they were all around her, and they were ready to send her off, in a voyage that she now knew she wasn’t quite prepared for, a voyage she had never packed for and now it was too late to begin, it was too late to do anything at all other than wait. Maybe she would pray, although the prayers now stuck to the roof of her mouth like old chewing gum that had lost its flavor. Stuck and dry, they didn’t come out quite right and they simply lingered around the edges of her thoughts like rustling branches. She felt a trace of emptiness that she couldn’t quite place, a narrow channel that led to nowhere and wouldn’t let you take any side roads, it wouldn’t let you get back to bed, it wouldn’t let you sit one more time on the old green sofa and rest for a moment while Manuel brought the bread or the fruit or the milk. At least soon the laughter would be over, and then maybe she would have enough silence to finally figure it all out.
My younger cousin, Juan Antonio, was sitting next to the bed, and he seemed thick and stable, like an old tree with deep full roots that reach deep into the earth and prevent it from ever moving. His face was very wide and he had a half smile on his face that didn’t seem genuine or even a good approximation. It had probably been forced onto him by someone suddenly saying “now, smile!” and this is the best he could do with such short notice. This people couldn’t, shouldn’t, really ask for more. The half smile would have to be enough. Very soon he would have to be back at work, making his way down long empty hallways, answering his cell phone with a metal mask of seriousness over his brown face, pretending to ignore the whispers that followed him, sitting at his own desk and admiring the little pictures framed in metal, the stacks of papers, the sound of typewriters on the other side of the walls. But he was here now, and he couldn’t believe how thin my grandmother looked, how sick, how destroyed…but hopefully she would get better soon, hopefully normality would return like the sun and the paper and little girl offering tortillas while banging a nickel against the garage door. And then everything would be as it should be, as it always had been.
Here were the two grandsons. Eduardo was right up front but only his eyes could be seen in the picture, staring straight into the camera with a sharp corrugated layer of shallow resentment (which I immediately recognized from another old picture I had carried around with me for years, a picture in which my eyes expressed the same boiling anger, the same indignant wish to punish those that would force me to stand here for this.) I recognized him here as a kind of recording creature, a magical entity sent to inhale the moment, an unstable shifting chamber of drastic transformation that he couldn’t quite understand as it flashed before him like a burst of colored light. But understanding was not a prerequisite. It was only necessary to look. It would soon be over and then it would be time for the next game, and then the next game after that, until a certain afternoon of smoldering darkness would awake the memory within him. Then it would all come spilling back like a waterfall full of incomprehensible colorful detail. But, by then, he would not be who he was, and all the colors would have changed their names, and all the names would have changed their letters.
On the bed was my Uncle, lying right next to my grandmother, still holding the place of my missing grandfather, even to this last moment, making sure that my grandmother was not alone, that my grandmother did not miss the man who had left her for a life of adventure, sitting next to her where her man should have been (and my grandfather couldn’t be here at all because I had seen him transform into a shower of white powder and I had seen the powder flying over the cold waters of a distant bay.) He was staring into the camera with the down turned smile that was the single trustworthy weapon in his repertoire, holding onto the little white dog who was his only guide, the same white dog that now whined and cried in the distance, surely in the midst of another stream of uncontrolled peeing, another involuntary split which would send his body crashing onto the slippery white bricks. With each fall, with each cry for help, he was taking another step closer to the end, the end of all things that ever were or ever could be, the end which would eventually come to get all of us: little white dog, Uncle, little arrogant boy, strong cousin, happy cousin, laughing Aunt, grandmother, even the creature that hid behind wide open eyes and claimed to be me. The end which, like a cloud of nothingness mired with fangs and floating jetsam, came for my grandmother shortly after this picture was taken. The picture then carried her presence as well as her absence, and it would soon carry more absences within it, as, one by one, the flattened inhabitants of its shiny paper would dive into the roaming eschaton.
There would come a time when there would be nobody left to look. Then the picture itself would come to an end.

* * *

It was late at night, or a dark evening that I used to perceive as late when I was young and so it would forever maintain its character of lateness in my memories. It was much earlier than what late was now for me, now that time passed so quickly, like a speeding modern train on its way to a distant city across open fields, a gleaming city which no train could ever reach; now that late and early met each other like a serpent biting its own tail and finding its own body too hard to swallow.
I was sitting next to my grandmother in her car and she was driving, as slowly and methodically as ever, a turn at a time, a gentle acceleration, then a stop and maybe another turn. I had asked her to drive me all the way to La Satelite, the little suburban neighborhood where I had found a street populated by loyal friends and beautiful girls and waves of invisible enemies, the place where I would rather be if I was granted any choice at all.
To me, La Satelite wasn’t that far away from my grandmother’s home, from the small area of the city that my grandmother knew closely and drove through in a sonata of precise repeatable movements. In the daylight, I could walk all the way to La Satelite in about half an hour. I could make my way through the dirt roads, strolling by the military hospital with its stylized picture of a young soldier standing straight up with legs open and back straight, holding his black rifle in front of him at an angle, a fake smile painted on his innocent young brown face. When I saw him up there, my eyes would invariably go to the gate where the real soldiers were standing. They would stare at me as I passed by. They were just as young as the one in the picture but their faces were not as friendly and their guns seemed heavier and more burdened by secret sins committed behind dark bushes and light brown mountains covered in Napalm scars. Maybe in every boy that passed by them they saw a promise of vengeance, the wrathful punishment that awaited them for their hidden crimes, the punishment that would surely come flying towards them from the depths of the midnight sun that they tried to forget, the punishment that would be carried by skinny little arms and legs in an orgy of elemental sacrifice whose underlying deep drone was pain and whose gruesome melodies were constructed out of notes of fear. So they would stare at each boy that passed them by, hoping that this was not the one that would carry out their slow death sentence, hoping that this was not the one that brought the last message that they would ever receive. I would go right past them without looking back and as I moved down the road, covered in dust and tiny dirt pebbles, I would feel their eyes on my back, as surely as I could feel my sweat and the weight of my thick wallet.
I would then walk past the dirty old houses that were the secret alcoves of the poor and the even poorer, the unknown scrawny creatures that lived not so far away from the hospital or from the small middle class houses that I was on my way to visit, and yet it was far enough away that it seemed like a whole other universe, a universe filled with little pot bellied children running around naked and screaming, and women calling for them from within dark faded rooms (the walls empty except for little cheap calendars with a picture of the Virgin Mary), and teenage girls with big round asses that barely fit into old ripped up skirts, the zipper on the back always halfway down, and they would be moving their hips back and forth as they went to run an errand, maybe hoping to meet a friend or a boyfriend on the way there, and there would be thin multicolored hammocks that were tied to dark thin posts, and light blue transistor radios blaring “rancheras” and “cumbias” and there would be gusts of high pitched laughter that would sometimes emerge unbidden from the many hidden dirty sanctuaries.
Drunken men would walk by me, hobbling back and forth as drunks do. Then they would turn around and stare. They would recognize in me an old friend that they hadn’t seen in years, and they would come towards me, large smiles on their faces which trembled under their bloodshot eyes. They would start conversations that I would soon try to finish.
“Do you remember me?”
“No”
“You don’t remember me? You know what? It’s OK… I remember you. I have the deepest appreciation for someone like you, you know. Do you know that?”
“No, I didn’t know that…”
“I do…I just want to say that to you… also, could you have a colon so I can have something to eat?”
But I had somewhere to get to, and, as much as I enjoyed the walk, in those days I enjoyed the destination even more. Once I arrived, the recognition would be mutual, the questions would need no answer, and the answers would come out in a stream of brightly colored words.
Driving was a very different experience. The dirt roads that I took when walking were not open to cars. In some places it was difficult to pass through them even on foot. Now you wouldn’t even be able to determine where it was that I walked back then, for everything had been turned to asphalt and sidewalks and dark smoke and corners that had lost their freshness and their sense of a future or a recent past. But back then, cars had to travel far to get to a place where they could turn back around. La Satelite then seemed much farther than it really was, like a lost treasure glowing in the distance, beckoning me with its hints of laughter and white breeze and cool shade on gray bricks.
Here was my fragile grandmother, with her white and gray hair covered by a thin net, with her trembling hands and lips, with her wide eyes full of worry, driving in the darkness of that early evening, in her old elegant white car, traveling through the narrow streets I knew so well but which she didn’t know at all. Where I saw familiarity and memories, she saw danger and darkness. Where I saw Rodney playing basketball in his dirty school clothes, she saw an overgrown park full of hoodlums. Where I saw the cinema where we laid back on the squeaking wooden chairs and stuffed our mouths full of popcorn, she saw a corner of vice and damnation. Where I saw hope, she saw a long slope that led to a terrible, unspeakable outcome.
As we approached our final destination, we turned at a nondescript corner overgrown with thick green bushes. It was only marked by a black sign that pointed to a local auto shot. I had never visited this particular auto shop but I had come to know it, both as a guiding landmark in our travels and as the workplace of the men that had once assaulted our vulnerable home. As we made that turn, the landscape seemed to become even more foreboding, in some way that I couldn’t quite pinpoint. My grandmother was shaking a little more than she usually did and she was holding onto the wheel with thin weak fingers, and her fingers were turning white because she was holding on so tightly. The dark blue steering wheel was her last bastion of safety. Without turning to look at me, for she would never take her eyes off the road, she asked:
“Is this the right way? Are you sure we are still going the right way? This all seems so strange and unfamiliar…”
Everything was so familiar to me that it was surprising to see that she didn’t believe me when I said, “Yes, it is. We’re on the right street. Don’t worry grandma, I’ve been here so many times… I used to live here, remember? We won’t get lost. We’re going the right way…”
And yet, when I looked through the windshield at the nighttime world outside, I could now see through the wide fearful eyes of my grandmother as she surveyed a mirage of pure fright. I could see the tall dark bushes that reached up like inverted giant squids towards the sky, their green tentacles shivering menacingly as we passed them by. I could see the crooked trees that danced with the growing wind, like strange monsters out of an old ghost tale. I could see the old dilapidated houses with their long eerie shadows and their yellowish pools of light, and the long narrow alleyways with their fateful promises of gut wrenching deadly encounters.
For a moment, I allowed myself to wonder if we really were somewhere else, if we had somehow strayed from the places that I knew and we were now hopelessly lost in the dark realms of a San Salvador I didn’t know at all, a San Salvador which was as foreign to me as a city of nightmare, a place where men were hungry predatory beasts and women were not much better. I could see that this was a dark place of danger, a place to be avoided at all costs, a place to be forgotten and relayed to the closed bins of the past. I could see it now, staring out from behind my grandmother’s eyes and letting her visions invade me like cold waves of brittle ice.
My grandmother had spent most of her life finding a way to get as much distance from all of this as possible. How could she understand that her grandson wanted this more than he wanted anything? How could she understand that, to him, the tall secure walls of Escalon, and the large color TVs, and the shiny new cars, and even all the books in the world, they all couldn’t replace this little neighborhood in the middle of nowhere, where he had found something so elusive that he hesitated to give it a name.
Seeing this street now, through her eyes, I could see that I might be as crazy as she thought I was, and that we should have been safe and warm at home, watching the latest soap opera, or listening to a good new record freshly recorded onto an old cassette tape. Instead we were here, driving through the back streets of a city already in the throes of decay. Her long thin hands were trembling like tiny thin maracas. It was too late to turn around so we continued.
We were now making our way up Constitucion Street. Here everything was so utterly known and familiar that I couldn’t see through her eyes anymore. Her vision left me as easily as it had come. The final turn was coming up and I told her so, pointing with my outstretched hand. Then I added:
“We are almost there. Don’t worry anymore. Everything will be fine.”
But I could hear her thinking and her thoughts were as plain as the white walls of the two story house in the corner:
“Why would you want to be here tonight? Why would you have me come all the way here, when there is nothing here? Nothing at all…” but she didn’t say it out loud, she just nodded and turned the wheel when I asked her to.
Soon the car was rumbling in place in front of the gray corner house which was my friend’s home, and soon I was kissing my grandmother’s cheek and she was kissing mine. She shook her head and I smiled one more time at her. Then I walked away from the car and I heard it moving slowly back to where it came from.
Days later, I was sitting on the terrace of my grandmother’s garden, leaning on the old big brown couch where I used to become a pirate, when the red bricks were an ocean, and the couch itself was a ship, and the garden was a vast mysterious world full of menace and treasure. It was the same terrace that would eventually disappear to be turned into an extra room which my grandmother would then refuse to use. My mother used it sometimes when she was visiting, a tiny ordered home within the strange labyrinth that was an outgrowth of my grandmother’s mind. The little room then became an apartment, where strange people talked in loud voices while I tried to remember a terrace that was no longer there, a terrace where I used to play with my cousin, where I used to lay back reading comic books on a sleepy afternoon.
On this particular day, the long red terrace was still there and so was the big old brown couch. I was leaning all the way back, my legs up in the air, one knee crossed so that one foot was swinging in the air while I dived out of my body into a world of high adventure and bright colors spliced into chewable bites by slender white lines, a world where death was always roaming around the sharp edges of the panels, but it never quite came for the ones that mattered, the ones that stood at the heart of the world.
I heard the sound of the car driving up the long ramp, and I immediately knew that it was my Uncle. He would slide up the ramp at a very high speed, with a loud screeching of wheels as they spinned hungrily against the faded sun baked bricks outside. I always thought that he was about to run straight into the far wall, but he always braked at just the right time and in exactly the same way, and the wheels creaked against the bricks in just the same way as he braked, and then the door opened in just the same way and then his shoes made a rhythmic patter over the same bricks as he approached, his keys jingling loudly as he entered the house.
I didn’t make a move at all, for in those days I lived there and I didn’t feel like I had to get up and greet my Uncle when he arrived. In any case, he didn’t expect it. It had become our agreed custom to stay out of each other’s way whenever possible, strangers roaming in adjacent chambers of the labyrinth, never opening a window, never opening a door, never any need to reach across the gap. Or almost never.
I returned my attention to the comic, but I kept on hearing the loud footsteps, past the point where I expected them to stop. Suddenly they were too close to ignore, they were echoing right past the sliding doors that led to the terrace, and then there he was, in a light brown pair of pants and a striped white shirt and big dark glasses which covered half his face. He was taking the last few steps towards me.
I put the comic book down and waved hello to him halfheartedly, still believing that he was on his way to the garden, maybe to check on a newly planted tree or flower, maybe just to make sure that the gardener was doing his job. But he didn’t go past me towards the open lawn or the surrounding foliage. Instead, he stood right in front of me. It was now clear that he had something to say. I looked up and dropped my legs to the floor in a vague sign of respect, a respect I didn’t truly feel, since for me he was like a forgotten painting, a painting that moves and talks but is still a painting, one that I didn’t look at very often, and, when I did, it was only to remind myself that it was indeed still there.
“Juan Carlos, I have to talk to you,” he said it in that slightly whiny nasal voice, a voice that had an element of thick weight in it, but was mostly made up of my grandmother’s voice, translated through a male adult’s vocal chords.
“What is it?” I said, wondering what he could possibly have to say to me, this forgotten painting which, in my own mind, had already said everything it could possibly have to say and was now just passing the time until it got taken away.
“You took your grandmother all the way to La Satelite the other day…”
“Yeah, she took me there… why?”
Then I looked at him more closely and noticed that there were slight differences in the painting on this particular afternoon. It was as if someone had gone over the old lines with new brushes, creating new highlights in the midst of old shades. His face was redder, his arms were more pronounced, he was even trembling slightly.
“You can’t have her take you there… ever… you understand?”
I could have said yes and forgotten all about it, but that was not in me. I simply couldn’t release such things as easily as closing a door or stepping outside. I was very curious as to what his hidden point was, or if he even had one.
“What do you mean? What’s the problem?” I asked in the most innocent voice I could muster.
“She is very old… she can’t be going all the way there!” Now his voice was rising and I was finally understanding the nature of the situation.
This man who walked past me every day, this man with whom we managed a clear understanding of mutual lack of communication, this man was now very angry. I had seen him angry many times, at the security guard, at his secretary, at bill collectors, at his sons, at his wife. I had heard his screams of anger from my room, coming from his little office on the other side of the patio. I had seen his looks of anger as he roamed around his house. I had heard him bark like a large dog when one of my cousins tried to contradict him. I had clearly experienced his anger. But on this particular day, he was angry at me. The shift was disturbing and somewhat frightening.
“I told her where I was going, she volunteered to take me. Nothing bad happened. There’s nothing to worry about…”
I said it in a calm voice that carried an edge of dismissal, hoping that he would simply walk away and it would all be forgotten. But he was still trembling and now his mouth was gaping open, unable to believe that I would dare to respond to him in any way.
“Listen to me,” he said again, and his voice was louder and heavier, like balls of iron rolling over a gray concrete floor, “you can’t ever have her take you there. Ever! That’s a dangerous place where you go… and she took you at night… don’t you ever… ever! … do that… ever!… don’t you ever do that again! You can go there if you want… that’s your own problem… but don’t ever take here there again! Do you understand me?”
I nodded but I couldn’t help allowing a slight grin to form on the side of my face.
“If I need to go, and she tells me she will take me, then I will say yes. I don’t see why I shouldn’t…” My voice now had a touch of anger as well, slimy anger that slid around my syllables like a venomous snake showing its curved fangs.
“Because I’m telling you that you shouldn’t! That’s why! She’s my mother and I don’t want anything to happen to her! I am telling you right now… don’t ever take her there again!” Now his face was very red and his mouth was very wide open, slender trails of saliva extended from one line of teeth to the other. I could imagine that his eyes were bulging out under his big thick glasses, but all I saw was two big pools of darkness in the middle of his face.
“Listen to me, Uncle…” the word ‘uncle’ came out with a strong taste of dismissal, like a bit of excess flesh removed from my lip, “you’re not my father… you don’t talk to me like that…you don’t tell me what to do and what not to do…I don’t have to take that from you… at all…do you understand me?” I said it in a cold voice that I knew would have the worst possible effect on the strangely palpitating figure before me. The snake’s fangs were now dripping venom all over the floor and my eyes were fixed at an angle, like sharply cut slits on a wall of sheer white iron. If I had seen my face in a mirror, I would have recognized it instantly. It was the face that I had once feared above all things. It was the pure image of male anger expressed in simple muscular motion and it now belonged to me.
His whole body trembled and I could almost feel him taking a step towards me, even though he never moved from his position a few feet away. I stayed where I was as well and continued to stare into the darkness of his sunglasses.
“Do not take my mother there! Never again!” he said.
I shrugged my shoulders. He turned around and walked away, mumbling under his breath. I could hear the footsteps clicking on the red bricks all the way back to the front door and then to the waiting car.
As I heard the car moving down the ramp, I felt a kind of gentle relief, almost as pleasantly cooling as the breeze that filtered through the thick green leaves of the garden outside. I would not have to go to my Uncle’s house anymore. Not for a long time. Now I had a reason to stay away and I would use it. I would raise that reason before me like a conquering flag adorned in the colors of primordial anger.
I smiled to myself and continued to read my comic book, feeling that I had been given an unexpected gift. In my mind, I was already planning to ask my grandmother for another ride. Maybe next time she wouldn’t be so afraid. Maybe then the streets would not be so dark and the shadows would not be so menacing.

* * *

Here was a picture of my grandfather, my grandfather as I remembered him, as I could see him now within the blank screen of my mind, walking up and down the tall hills of San Francisco, moving quickly and vigorously, with solid, strong steps, barely ever breaking a sweat or showing any sign of tiredness, pulling ahead of us as he walked and turning towards us to say:
“C’mon! Hurry up! Hurry up! We don’t have all day!”
His eyes would drill into us, showing a guttural disdain for people like us that couldn’t keep up with him, people that were weak and confused and impractical, people that didn’t know what life was truly about. I could see my grandfather sitting at a little cafeteria, leaning over the table, over the dishes of yellow rice and smoked roast beef, telling us about the wicked ways of the city, sliding around any direct and obvious references to what he saw as the hidden horror that lurked among the alleys and boulevards that he had learned to avoid. He preferred to use euphemisms or vague references to the Bible (“Sodom and Gomorrah! That’s what these two cities are! Sodom and Gomorrah! You understand me?” he would say to my mother, protecting me from lascivious perverted images that already lived within my mind, images that had flowered in my dark inner theater long before he came along to caress their edges.)
He would also tell us how much he loved to be here, in this same city of godless damnation. This never seemed to be a contradiction at all, not for him, for the city was a being in itself, a creature made of concrete and wood that had been invaded by other foreign creatures that did not belong there. He hoped that maybe, just maybe, all these invaders would soon go back to wherever they came from and the city would return to its original state, to the way it was when he first saw it. (And it was impossible for him to see that he himself had come from elsewhere, just as all the others had, and if they all were to go back, there would be no city left at all. Maybe that would be a true return to the origins, but no matter how far back you went, there would always be another question standing behind the edge, another origin behind each pristine cause.)
He would easily walk from one end of the city to the other, from the clock tower, to the Civic Center, from Powell and Market to Fisherman’s Wharf, always at the same constant speed, always retaining his straight demeanor, eyes looking vaguely downward at those around him, always impatient and eager to speak as briefly as possible so he could then move on, so he could then walk some more. That was his preferred method of movement, walking down Vanness or Grant, tipping his hat with a quick shift of the right hand wrist, in a manner that proudly spoke of elegance, and it spoke of elegance much louder than I had ever heard it spoken before, in a way that seemed unreal to a dirty boy like me who ran away from conventional manners and customs as if they were riding on a heavy black freight train rolling straight towards me, ready to crush me and tear me apart.
Here he was, in this old picture, just like I had known him, dressed in a full gray suit, a gray hat out of a movie from the ‘40s, something with Humphrey Bogart in it, something in black and white with a lot of people smoking, all covered in fuzzy bright lights. He spoke in the same way as well, so much so that if I dreamt about Humprey Bogart, I knew it was about him. He had become a kind of Humprey Bogart that had no clear direction, a man whose movie had run out many years before it was time to leave the theater, and now he was simply walking the streets of a shifting noisy city in the hope of finding a new reason to live. He spoke English in a certain cutting way that still held the world of half a century ago in every syllable, quick sentences that sounded like single words and flew like invisible knives through the cold air of the bay. He still lived in that world that had been and he carried that dead era with him, like a big white sack full of fading memories always draped across his back. Walking with him through the city was watching another city come to life in front of me, a city with fewer brilliant colors but with a sense of old fashioned honor and righteousness, at least according to his own code, a code which was unspoken but vibrant in every sentence that ever came out of his mouth.
Here he was in the picture, with his left hand fingers reaching for his chin, in the classic pose of a man who is thinking. He had always maintained an ambivalence towards learning that ultimately made him hate me more (for I had become the family’s symbolic icon for reading and learning, a pus ridden pustule where resentment could grow and assumptions could run wild.) He would proudly state, repeatedly and falsely, as I later came to find out, that he had never made it past the fourth grade, that he only knew what he needed to know and that single true stream of knowledge was always coached in the raw and final declaration of practicality.
“In life you must be practical! That is all that matters! You can’t fool around with frivolous things. You have to be practical. That has to come before anything else!”
And yet he relished the sounds of classical music. And yet he boasted of his knowledge of composers and writers to my grandmother, specially when I wasn’t around. And yet he tried to understand the Bible in a semi scholarly fashion, filling up thick notebooks with notes and references, notebooks that ended up lonely and forgotten in my garage. And yet he was proud to have been a good accountant, even if he had never received the appreciation that he deserved. And yet he was proud of all the things that he did know. A little knowledge would build you up, but too much knowledge would spoil you. I was a clear example of the latter case. He was an example of ingesting just the right amount.
In the picture, he had a broad open easy smile, the kind of smile I had rarely seen upon his old thick brown face. He was much more prone to frowning than smiling. He would leap towards fiery anger in a quick and single instant that would remain forever hard to predict (until, instead of being unpredictable it became the norm, and then there was no need to predict it at all, because by that time I knew that he would become angry at least a few times each and every time I saw him, no matter what I did or said, and so I had no need to worry, I knew exactly what was coming, I would have resigned myself to his anger before I even placed a foot inside the car, much like a traveler might have to deal with rain or snow, much like a dreamer might have to deal with nights of insomnia.)
His anger was borne of impatience and disillusionment. He had lived alone too long, caged in by the four walls of various hotel rooms and apartments, which were all the same room but with different views, and all the time knowing that he needed to be elsewhere but having nowhere else to go. And all these people that surrounded him, (including me and my mother, once we came to live in his city) we just couldn’t live up to the speed with which his brain understood itself. For his brain knew all his stories and knew all the correct questions and their corresponding answers, and knew when and how these questions could be posed and when and how these answers could be delivered. We would always ask the wrong questions at the wrong time, we would misunderstand statements, we would become distracted. Then his eyes would bulge out like heavy underwater creatures that threatened to leap out of his brown face, and his hand would drop like a heavy axe and his head would shake, making his wrinkled cheeks dance like Jell-O. Then he would become grandfather as I knew him, angry and offended, ready to run away at any moment, eager to lash out, indignant and proud.
When I would see him like this, in his full splendor as true grandfather Roberto, lost father to my mother and my Uncle, lost husband to my grandmother, elusive lost wise ghost to my cousins and me, when I saw him then, I wouldn’t exactly love him but I would certainly recognize him. As much as I recognized him now, right here in this picture, smiling. For I knew that the smile would fade away soon and then the anger would return, or maybe nothing would return at all for he was dead and gone. I had even seen him burning inside a long tunnel made of thick black metal, burning like a soft and malleable piece of meat that quickly exploded into white dust and his shape was gone before I could catch the thoughts that had burned away with him.
My grandfather lived here in my Uncle’s home though this false smiling picture, but my grandfather lived here in every corner, on every wall, on every forgotten alcove, on every silent exhalation, on every loud burst of laughter. My Uncle’s entire life had been a slow and failing attempt to make up for his many shortcomings, to make up for his ever present absence, to make up for his dreams of adventure that ended in a dark hotel room. He tried and tried to make up for what he couldn’t understand, only to find that the old habits were not so easily avoided, they clung to your skin like leeches, they were hanging from your eyes like frozen tears.

* * *

Here was a picture that had been colored to look like a painting, or maybe a painting that had been made from a picture, paying close attention to every detail. Or maybe it was just a painting without a picture, a pure imaginary transient dream flashing before my eyes, a dream of a perfect creature that never quite existed except here, on this colorful picture.
Here my cousin Roxana was young and tiny and happy and innocent and so beautiful that she radiated beauty outwards from behind the old glass frame and it spilled over into the other pictures that surrounded her (maybe that was why my grandfather was smiling in the picture to her left, maybe it was her radiance that kept my grandfather alive within his own frozen world.)
Had Roxana ever truly been this beautiful? I could never know, for when she was this young I had been young as well, even younger than her, and I didn’t have the skill to notice, I didn’t have the attention to trace the outline of her face and derive conclusions from my findings. Now that I could notice, now that I could look straight into her eyes and carefully examine the mountain ranges of her flesh and the slight shifts of color in her skin, now she was old and hard and wrinkled and made of rusty metal, and her voice had become like chalk scrubbed against a blackboard and I would soon be forced to look away if I stared into her for too long.
Here in the picture it was otherwise, here she was the light that shone above my Uncle’s heart, the living embodiment of all that he secretly considered holy. Here she was the pureness of love without boundaries, without demands or claims or rights. Here she was playful and curious. Here she was true, and her truth contained all the truth that my Uncle had been able to squeeze out of his heart to soak it into this new creature that had emerged from his very loins to give him one last glowing ray of hope before the night finally set in.
Like all of us, she was a clash of opposites, a living contradiction. Her laughter was high and whiny like my Uncle’s and my grandmother’s and it was copious and loud like my Aunt’s. Her demeanor was flighty and impetuous like my aunt’s but her thoughts were hard and heavy like my grandfather’s. To me, she had been a deep mystery that grew into a shallow question, an open case no longer worth solving. From her whiny laughter in the darkness of my grandmother’s bedroom, where she would kick back and forth in her sleep and my grandmother would wake up in the morning with bruises, to her little room flushed in pink and light shiny blue, that spoke of questions I couldn’t then formulate. From her derisive laughter aimed at my Uncle who sat at the head of the table and simply took it in, shaking his head in mock disapproval but allowing her to go on without interruption or argument, to her declarations of overarching ambitions of power in my grandmother’s living room, while my grandmother behind her shook her own head in disbelief, smiling softly at me, knowing that I would stay quiet. These formed the quadrants of my experience of her and they left much terrain that would never be discovered.
In my Uncle’s dream, which was physically manifested in the bright colors of the picture, she was life itself, hope and love and a promise of forbidden pleasures that lay beyond the horizon of the knowable. She was the golden treasure that must be raised over the army’s head when victory is approaching, the beacon of rightfulness that made everything else worthwhile. In my Uncle’s dream, life itself laughed at him continuously, life itself described all his shortcomings in between loud whiny exhalations, life itself turned her back on him for other more worthy consorts. In my Uncle’s dream, life rejected him and left him alone in a dark room, hoping for a final burst of light to save him from the endless darkness.
They said that she would be my wife someday, and maybe they were joking, and they didn’t know that their jokes were heard very carefully and elaborated with threads of precision and desire. My first dreams of married life were with her and my secret explorations of her room when there was no one else around, were for the sake of knowledge, a knowledge that was hidden by the years and the great destructions that would make it impossible to peer through the thick clouds.
They said that she was like my mother, and I would say she was nothing like her, but what they said was true in a way I couldn’t yet understand. She was to my Uncle what my mother had been to my grandfather, and where my grandfather had abandoned his life in search of a new one, my Uncle had sacrificed his own for the sake of the little burst of gold that once cried hopelessly in his arms. For my grandmother, for my aunt, for my cousin.
Crone, witch and virgin. It was all the same.
My mother hated my grandfather for escaping, my cousin hated my Uncle for his total and absolute surrender. Looking at her in her original splendor, in the brilliant colors of a manifested dream, I could believe in true escape, in the possibility of a final redemption. In her fixed eyes, that stared straight at me through the glass, I could sense centuries of fateful hopes and dismal failures, I could sense a circular path that always came to the same place where the nothing turned into something and a story could then begin all over again. No matter what path you chose along the complex labyrinth of a lifetime, you would always come back here, to a sleepy afternoon soaked in sweat and dust and fading memories. Here was what would be rejected and what could be would be forever yearned for, desired in unspoken words that were as light as feathers, as transparent as tears, as distant as stars. From the picture, my cousin looked at me, shining with hope, unaware that all her hope had vanished long ago, and it was now only a mirage, a memory of things that had never truly happened.

* * *

One after another, the old scenes came to fruition, like single slices of film being slowly processed through the living camera hidden behind my eyes. I could only slowly slide into a sense that I had been through each and every single one of these scenes ten times, twenty times, a hundred times, a thousand times, and I couldn’t bring myself to say how many times it truly had been because it couldn’t have been that many and yet I saw them like endless reflections stretching forever into the past and into the future.
Here were the white clouds moving slowly past the brown and green shadow of the volcano. Here were the loud horns of the buses, screeching as the big black wheels pressed onwards up El Paseo, a teenager hanging from the side, calling for more passengers by screaming the closest destination (“Salvador del Mundo! Besa! Besa! Besa! Salvador del Mundo! Besa!”) and letting the ones inside know where they were. Here was my Dad, again deciding once and for all that people were idiots and then going on to outline their true problem as he saw it, and here I was trying to make fine points with him, points of logic and empathy that would slide down the drain of his perception like dead leaves down an old gutter and I could only watch them floating away, already decomposing beyond recognition, already lost beyond repair. Here was my grandmother Graciela making her way up the wooden stairs, a maid at her side holding her up, reaching up with her trembling skinny hand to pass it by my cheek, offering her own cheek so I could kiss it and then feel with my lips the soft wrinkled remains of what was once her youthful face. Here were the birds, singing continuously outside the windows, flashing from tree to tree in joyful bursts of melody, repeated calls for the lost past “Dichoso fui! Dichoso! Dichoso fui!” (“I was so happy once! I was so, so happy once!”) and for the mysterious present that was still hiding behind the shining cloak of moistened green leaves. Here were the maids stepping out of little black metal side doors, their sandals clapping loudly on the sloping sidewalks as they made their way once more down to the supermarket, their legs brown and thick and tainted with dark blue veins, their skirts light blue and dark blue and all made out of cheap fabric. Here were the guards, talking and joking as the days passed by without notice, moving quickly only when a shiny dark brown Cherokee approached and that meant it was time to open the gates and salute, sometimes with a smile, sometimes with a single direct frown that signified respect. Here was the station wagon with a loud bullhorn affixed to its top, letting the whole world know that it carried fresh fish and shrimp (“Camaron fresco! Boca colorada! Camaron de rio!”) all in a deep sexy voice that couldn’t possibly be the same one I had heard when I was a little boy and yet it was indeed the same, just as deep, just as sexual, just as eminently seductive, and it would stay the same as long as I returned to this place (and when I couldn’t return any longer, the place itself would simply keep on rotating.) Here was the young girl banging with a nickel on the side of the metal gate below and ringing the bell which she could barely reach while she called out forcefully: “Tortillas! Tortillas!” Here was my Uncle, parked sideways on my grandmother Graciela’s little driveway, standing by the door and forcing a downward smile as I stepped out of the garage door, reaching out to me with his thick white hand covered in little white hairs and saying “Aja Juan Carlos!” Here was the big military academy with its towers full of machine guns and its brilliant eyes that shone out from the layers of shadow within. Here was the loud sound of little vans passing by, drenched in “rancheras” and “cumbias” while people struggled to keep their eyes open inside, pressed against each other by others just like them, all sharing the same sweaty anxiety, the same clinging fear. Here were the men with hairy arms and chests, all dressed in short sleeved shirts, all wearing gold medallions around their thick brown necks, all perpetually balancing between a place of anger and a place of laughter, always ready to show the silver that crowned the yellow teeth in their mouth. Here was my Dad once again, in loose gray shorts, leaning against the brown sofa, arms widely outstretched, pressing his back against the seat and looking at me with curiosity, then leaning his head back and looking up at the roof while exhaling loudly, his nose elastically flaring up. Here was a small clear glass, covered in a white weaved little jacket that my grandmother had made, in her bouts of quick intense creativity. Here was the sound of my grandmother calling for the maids to come quickly, and then her loud exhalations of complaint when they never managed to come quickly enough. Here was the loud sound of honking as we drove into downtown San Salvador, and the thick clouds of smoke slowly deepening their darkness as the sound increased and more and more people reached for the window, offering their items for sale in loud whiny voices that demanded your attention. And here I was, leaning against the seat of my Uncle’s car, watching it all, going for a quick lunch at his house, returning a few hours later, ready to read another book, ready to slide into the arms of another sleepy afternoon which was ready to embrace me back with the abandon of a happy drunken woman, with the warmth of a new mother, with the unrelenting oppressiveness of endless enthropic death.
I was watching the film but I was part of it as well. I had my part in the script and I followed it to the letter. It had been written long before I decided to watch it. I had no business trying to change it. I could only delve deeper into its mysterious corners, into its most hidden parts. If my Uncle wanted to talk, then I would let him. I might ask questions, I might take pictures, I might even try to step out of line. But regardless of my actions, the film would go on. The heavy presence of the transparent afternoon would not let it do otherwise.

* * *

She must have been beautiful, as beautiful as the young girl I saw selling chewing gum on the street the first day I arrived. Like her, she must have been very thin and her flesh must have been soft and brown and unmarked, and her eyes must have been wide open and appealingly innocent, full of a devious curiosity that sparked fresh reflective curiosity in the watcher as well. Her hands must have felt like feathers, purposeful feathers that gathered around his most secret places and made him realize that life was still there, for it was surely holding him now, and it was making him relish what truth there was in this moment, with this beautiful girl that just stared into his eyes and barely smiled in the cool darkness of his apartment. Maybe now she was completely naked and her soft young body was shining in the darkness and her eyes were shining as well, and her hands were even softer, specially now, compared to his own rough hands that now made their own voyages over the landscape of her flesh. When she started moaning with unabashed pleasure, it was almost too much, for it was akin to a miracle, a tree caught on fire in the middle of the desert, a booming voice from the sky, a young girl that moans in uncontrollable pleasure when he touches her. Right then and there nothing else mattered, nothing else could matter, and the sky outside faded into nothingness and the air inside was as dark as clouds packed with rain, and his own eyes began to radiate some of that same curiosity he saw in hers and he vibrated so much that his skin tingled and her own skin tingled pressed up against him, and their sweat formed rivers that fused into a single current and then divided up again as they made their way through the ridges of their anatomical geography, and he grunted like an animal and she grunted as well and that sent him over the edge just as she started to grind even harder. Then they were kissing and her lips felt like pure love sliding over harsh ocean rocks and it tasted of a sweetness that had nothing to do with candy, and it smelled of fresh discoveries, and it felt like life in a form he had nearly forgotten.

“The problem with the gangs, las “maras”, is as terrible as ever, they are even more violent than they ever were before. They say that if someone wants to be a leader in one of these ‘maras’, they have to kill at least eleven people. Imagine that! Eleven people, just as a basic requirement…”
We were making our way back from my Uncle’s home and we were just then driving past the old “deportivo”, the sports club where we used to go all together when I was a little boy, where I would play with Juan Antonio on wooden horses that never left their metal stable and just danced back and forth, locked forever into a frozen pattern made of color and echoing laughter. We would sometimes swim on the big pool as well, but we would mostly stay by the see saw and the horses, and there we would invent our own games and follow our own rules while the older kids soaked their half naked bodies.
I looked out the open window of my Uncle’s car and I saw them. A long line of tough looking skinny boys on their knees, their hands on the back of their heads, all of them facing the wall of the old sports club.
“Look, there it is… just what I’m talking about… that’s what you should take a picture of!” my Uncle said and he pointed with a thick finger that was both an expression of anger and fascination.
I looked towards them. Two of the policemen that were holding them in place immediately turned towards me. They seemed nervous and ready to find an excuse to be angry and violent. They cradled their heavy black shotguns like a mother carrying a newborn baby and they looked at me with the ferocity of the same mother, if she were to believe that her baby was in danger. While some of the policemen searched and interrogated the long line of boys in dirty shirts and loose blue jeans, the two who were serving as guards stared at me, daring me to do something that would unleash their wrath. I reached for my camera but the car moved and then we were gone.
“So what happened with your therapist? I heard there was some story that went with that?” I asked, knowing the story pretty well but wanting to hear it fresh from my Uncle’s lips.
“It’s terrible… it’s these gangs… they’re like animals… you saw them there… it’s good that the police are cracking down on them… somebody has to…”
“Tell me the story… I would really like to hear it…” I said it just as the car turned up the street that led back to Escalon, to the cluster of streets that I had once seen as a sanctuary but I had never understood from what .
“Well, there’s not much to tell…”
“I’m sure there is…”

And once having experienced love and life and truth in this way, he came back for more. He had to. Again and again, for what else could there be. There was only her, a young girl in a short skirt and shiny earrings dancing from her ears, shining with the sun, white high heels that wrapped around her tiny brown feet, and a laughter that tinkled against the walls like little pebbles made of glass. There was the feel of her thighs against his hand when they sat together in the movie theater, and there was the first sensation of freedom when the door closed in his apartment and they were all alone once more, and he knew that now he was free to take any liberty that he could imagine, and he took liberties then with her that he had never taken with anyone before. There was the sound of the cell phone when she called, and the sound of her voice when she said “hello” over a crackling tenuous connection. When the soft timbre of her syllables slid into him, the streets didn’t look so dead, and people were not as hostile as they had been not too long ago, and the sky itself was wider and clearer, and he could look up without fearing the repercussions of a mysterious God that didn’t love him, for he clearly did, otherwise he wouldn’t have sent him this gift, this incomparable offering that made him smile in a way he hadn’t smiled since the days of being innocent and foolish. Maybe he was indeed foolish again, but he didn’t care, he didn’t care at all. He would take her to the most expensive restaurants, and he would buy her whatever she wanted, and he would lavish her with jewelry and he would take her where she needed to go, without even asking why she needed to go anywhere.

“He was depressed himself I guess… it’s funny that these people want to help you get better but they’re not that well themselves!”
I nodded, prompting him to continue. Two young boys were running in circles around each other across the street, releasing loud continuous beads of laughter as they pointed at each other and at the cars.
“So he found himself a young girl…a teenager… and he fell head over heels over her… he was like a different man… he missed appointments and he wasn’t even sorry… but he seemed happier just then, he seemed full of life…he was definitely different…”
“And then what happened?”
“Well… one day….”

She called and asked him to come and meet her. Maybe he felt a slight chill that ran up his back like a tiny black spider made of cold tin. She seemed too eager, too desperate. The tone of her voice was not the same he remembered, it was not the soft calming melody that he had come to recognize. But he wanted so much to be inside her again, that he couldn’t resist the urge to tell himself that she was only eager to see him, only desperate to be his once again. So he agreed to go where she specified.
It was an apartment that he had never been to before. She said that she would be waiting there for him, and she even dropped hints about what she would to him once he arrived. When he knocked at the door of this strange place, she was indeed there, as beautiful as ever when he ran his hungry eyes over her slender figure. He kissed her lustfully and she kissed him back, but there was a touch of hesitation in her movements. They sat on the leather sofa to be alone together in the cold rumbling quiet made by the walls and the air conditioning. There was a sense of danger that was sliding around over his body, creeping up from his stomach to his chest and then traveling all the way down his arms. But he wanted to ignore it, he didn’t want to lose even one second of lustful celebration with the creature that offered itself to him in the cool shade of this strange new place.
Maybe once or twice he suggested that they go to his own apartment but she said that she wanted to stay there, so his shoulders dropped in resignation, unwilling to start an argument and risk her love in even the slightest way. Maybe once or twice he looked out the window which overlooked some office buildings and he saw the tall white walls covered in old black smudges. Maybe he felt then that this day wasn’t a good day for this and he told himself that he would just leave and see her another day, and then everything would return to normal and there would be no chills or spiders or dirty walls with black smudges. But then he would turn away from the window and see her, so beautiful still, so perfect, in her short blue skirt that was riding up her thighs as she leaned on the sofa. Then he just shrugged and figured he could stay just a little longer, just a few more minutes and then he would go. That was when the front doorknob turned and several thin young boys came in.
His blood turned to ice and the tiny black spider multiplied into hundreds of them that were now riding all over his body, dancing like mad puppets over the sweaty expanse of his hairy flesh. The boys knew her but he didn’t know them. Still he tried to tell himself that everything was fine and that there was no problem. But it was clear that there was and it was too late to change it, the scene was already frozen and echoing into eternity.

“She invited him to come and see him somewhere else… it was an apartment that her boyfriend owned…he had never been there before…”
“Her boyfriend?”
“Her real boyfriend. A gang leader. So the boyfriend showed up with a bunch of his friends…all gangsters, “mareros”…and he was there with the girl…and he had no way out…they had set him up. “

They drank for a while, all sitting around the old coffee table. He looked into their eyes and joked with them, and they joked back. Every once in a while, he would look at the door or the window and then he would smile at them and laugh again. Since they were all getting drunk together, it was easy to believe that they were all friends, quick friends made over alcohol on a sleepy afternoon of sweat and heavy gray smoke. It was easy to believe that everything would be fine soon and he would be back in his house, all by himself, breathing softly and laughing all alone at the crazy thoughts that had gone through his head earlier that day.
Maybe then he could even start to rethink the idea of this girl, of being around her, of being inside her, of following her around as if she was a magical guiding star quietly floating over a huge barren desert. He was old enough to be her father, her grandfather even, he should not be doing this, he would think, it was completely out of line. Maybe once he was home, all alone in his bedroom, watching TV, maybe then he would go over the details and maybe he would call her and break it off, and then she would cry for him but he would tell her to be strong and to understand, and he would feel very sad himself but he would try not to let it show. Then his life would go on just like it always had, and he would forget all about young beautiful girls who moaned like wild beasts in the twilight of the late afternoons and he would forget the sweetness of her voice on the cell phone and he would forget a moment when the doorknob turned and strange young boys appeared and disrupted his world of pure love and desire. He would forget all that, but not just yet.
Right then he was still sitting on a long leather sofa, and they were all drinking together and having a good time together so there was nothing to be afraid of, and he would just keep on repeating that to himself and it would have to be true, or become true by pure force of his quiet dreaming.
They kept on laughing loudly, their eyes squeezed together tightly and little drops of sweat rolled down their brown foreheads like tiny raindrops dropping from their hair. They had tattoos all over their arms and their chests and even their faces, making them seem inhuman to him in a way he couldn’t understand, like creatures from a nightmare he had already forgotten by the time he woke up. They laughed at every joke that came out of his mouth like it was the best joke they had ever heard, and he laughed at their jokes as well, and the laughter just kept on getting more intense, and his girl was laughing too, his girl sitting on the sofa with her short blue skirt and her soft brown arms spread outwards in both directions, so inviting, so completely untouchable.
The boys were all red and sweaty, and the sky outside was getting darker. One of them, the one who first came in and the one who first talked to him, put his arm around him and cradled him like an old lost brother, rolling him around as they sang about kings without thrones or queens or anyone left to understand them. He felt at home with them, and he thought that maybe they truly respected him and loved him because he was with the girl, who was like a part of them, so maybe now he was a part of them too. The laughter and drinking continued for what seemed like hours to him and he was almost ready to forget his fears and simply drift in the turbulent river of consciousness that the alcohol had formed in his mind. Then suddenly one of the jokes seemed directed at him and they laughed harder than ever, and the laughter itself seemed deeper and filled with dark insects dancing in heavy mud. He dismissed it and told himself that maybe he had misunderstood. But then there was another joke and this one was clearer, much clearer, too clear, and then one of them took out a gun.

“What did they do to him?” I asked my Uncle as I stared out the window at a short line of three secretaries in tight red dresses walking back to their job after a quick lunch at the local McDonald's.
“They did horrible things… horrible… they were not just happy to kill him… they did some disgusting things to him first, they raped him, and they humiliated him in other horrible ways… and she was there all along, watching them do it!”
“So she had known all along what was going to happen?”
“I don’t know… maybe they had planned to use him that way… maybe they were just angry… who knows with these people? They’re animals! They need to be dealt with like animals! Beasts!”
“But… did he try to run?”
“Yes, he tried to run… but there was nowhere to run to and they caught him and did more things to him until they finally killed him. It was in all the newspapers.”

As he looked up at the strange apartment, the last thing he saw were her eyes, the same eyes in which he had found innocence and love and a renewed faith in life. There she was, looking down at him, and she didn’t try to help him, she didn’t try to stop them, she didn’t even try to console him. Her eyes were cold and just stared at him with raw nothingness behind them. And what he had thought was innocence, was really nothing. And what he thought was truth, was really nothing. And what he thought was love, was really nothing. Nothing all along. And then he heard a loud sound, and it turned out that everything else, his life, the apartment, the street, the sky, his memories, the world itself, it was all nothing. I had been nothing all along. Nothing at all. And it was all contained in the cold eyes of a young girl that had the job of showing him what there was behind the veil of the fundamental illusion.

I remembered my recommendations then. They were not for this man and yet he had followed one of them, carefully and methodically, as if it had been intended for him. It didn’t help him. It didn’t deliver him from a slow painful slide into endless repetition. Or maybe it did. Hearing his story made me feel that there might be no exit at all, or at least not an easy one, not one laid with flowers, air conditioning and soft beds.
If you ran away from your fate, there would be a thousand platoons of hungry demons waiting to rip you open, ready to follow you to the ends of the earth to bring you back to your rightful place in the infinite movie that had never begun and could never end. As much as you may run, for as long as you may manage to avoid them, sooner or later, they were certain to trap you and bring you back weeping to your minimalist kingdom of sighs.
If you stayed where you were, you would simply shrink down into oblivion and fade away like old bits of dust flying in yellow sunlight.
No twilight hallway. No red doors. No empty street in the late afternoon that welcomes you with its silence as the loud sounds of the movie are still ringing in your ears. No way out. Not now. Not ever.

* * *

Is it possible that all these huge mansions in Escalon, high in the upper reaches of the micro universe of San Salvador, far beyond the reach of the little brown people who live their lives half in the mud and half in private puddles of tears, far beyond the little tin houses and the loud radios and the skinny boys covered in tattoos, is it possible that all of them hide in their entrails the unerasable mark of a heavy slow decay, of the black smoke of the buses which slowly eats away at everything, of the sweat that never dries and slowly makes its way under the skin leaving tracks like bloodless wounds, of the urine smell of the little dogs and the big dogs and the old men and the old women and the people who just don’t care anymore and they leave behind them a rotting trail of flesh and discarded matter which continues to dig into the surface of the world long after the carriers have vanished, people who can only look forward to one more day and maybe one more day after that, for all that was life has happened and all that they wanted was broken into little jagged pieces and dispersed through the many little holes of the city, never to be found again.
Could it be that all these mansions were created in a golden moment of happiness, a burst of intense hope and creativity that glistened on blue paper etched with patterns and structures and then rose up from the mud and the dirt and the sand, all gray and heavy and sharp, smelling of cement and sweat and covered in cool water, surrounded by gray light, green mountains and red bricks and men in ragged dark pants covered in paint and no shirt on, structures rising up from nothing to something, embodying within them a dream of eternity to be protected and hidden within white walls, deep in dark chambers where blood would be invoked and the future would come streaming out like bubbles of compost, and it would splatter all over the walls, and, as much as they would try to clean them, some of life would leave a mark that would remain.
Could all these mansions then be the physical manifestation of intangible promises, promises that were never understood and never fully envisioned, and yet they lived behind closed eyes, in the shade of these very houses that were built up around them in order to hide them, walls and roofs and pillars and stairs and rooms and gardens, all there to maintain dreams caked with sperm, spat out with fear and sealed in concrete oblivion, all for a promise that was shining bright within dark caves of forgotten thoughts, fixed ideals that were never clearly expressed or explored, and so they all fell, all the great orgy of them, dreams and visions and thoughts and hopes and fears and desires, they all fell together, gurgling down the esophagus of time, into a slow heat death, baked by the unrelenting sunlight of El Salvador, and now they have become massive mausoleums which smell like raw sewage and urine and old dry vomit, and they are enlivened now only by fake twisted newscasts and endless soccer championships and rusted guns hanging from stained walls and guayaberas stained by years of old sweat and bored fat sweaty maids that whisper while they eat, stuffing their mouths with tortillas and beans as they try and fail to hide themselves from the stench, and big open cuts in the walls which open wider each day, spilling out pestilence and pus, and men that lie down alone in the hope that the TV will help them to forget one more time, and they can’t even remember what it was that they hoped for one day but they can't truly erase it, and so it lingers like the smell of rotting food and the harsh words spoken in a moment of reckless abandon.
Could it be then that the great walls of the mansions of Escalon are not there only to stop the poor little hungry thieves from breaking in (with their thin hopes of finding a brand new TV or a radio or maybe a bundle of dollars inside a drawer)? Maybe the walls are also there to prevent the sick old rich decaying creatures that still faintly breathe inside from crawling out of their smelly holes and infecting the vigorous life that still remains around them. Maybe the walls are there to let them die slowly while a young woman on the TV screen says: “Try it out!” and an old man whistles outside while he chops down the tall green bushes that are growing past the edges of the walls.

* * *

My mother came up to me as I was sitting on the dining room, roaming absentmindedly over a magazine as I drank some milk. She sat down next to me and looked straight at me. I put the magazine down and looked back at her.
“You won’t believe what happened… it’s so sad…”
I turned completely towards her and forced the scattered bits of my attention that were still clinging to the glossy pictures on the magazine to focus on her.
“What happened?”
“It’s your Uncle… I can’t believe it… he has such bad luck… it’s so sad…”
I nodded and leaned forward.
“Tell me what happened…”
“He went to sleep upstairs and he left the door open, you know, the glass door that faces the garden and the pool… he left it open…that’s really all he did…but now he feels so bad, so guilty.”
“What happened? Tell me…”
“When he woke up in the morning, he couldn’t find the dog, you know, the little dog he loves so much.”
“Yeah, I know… I saw him…”
“He ran all around the house, calling for him, he even went and woke up your Aunt so that she could help him. You know how your Aunt is… but maybe she saw the desperation in his eyes, maybe she was just worried herself…they both ran all over the house looking for the dog, calling him over and over…”
“And then?”
“Finally he saw him… it was your Uncle that saw him… he walked outside…maybe sensing that he had left the door open… maybe he had sensed it all along. And then he saw the little dog at the bottom of the pool…”
“Oh no…”I said and as my mother spoke I could see my Uncle with the little dog between his arms, caressing his head, pressing his own cheek against the cotton of his furry body.
“They fished him out and your Uncle had him in his arms… your Aunt says that he just grabbed him and pressed him against his chest and he wouldn’t let go of it… he just sat in the living room, with the tiny thing in his arms…crying and crying and crying…and in the midst of it all, blaming himself for leaving the door open…your Aunt tried to console him…but she says he wouldn’t talk, he wouldn’t talk at all, he just held onto the little dog and cried and cried…”
“The dog was very sick… he was probably going to die soon…he couldn’t hold himself up…”
“I know…that’s probably why it couldn’t swim out of the pool…before he probably just swam around in it… no problem… maybe this time he dropped in… thinking he would come out just like he usually would…but it didn’t work… if he had only died naturally…but now your Uncle feels so guilty… so guilty…”
“He couldn’t know… it was an easy mistake…”
“Finally your cousins came and took the body of the dog away… but since then, your Uncle has been in his room, all alone in the darkness… your Aunt says he won’t eat anything at all and he won’t come out… he’s not even reading….”
“Maybe you can talk to him…maybe you can get him to come out…”
“I’ve been trying… but it’s not working… what can you say? What can I say?” and she was looking at me then as if I would have some kind of answer. But I was only asking the same question, and it was ringing loudly in my head like a loud brass bell: What can you say when hope itself has died? When it has sank slowly to the bottom of a pool and it is now just a little bundle of wet fur and weak soft tissue? What do you say then? What can you do for the man who has lost everything?

* * *

It was sunny as always, and my grandmother was tired from so much talking. It was time for my Uncle to disappear down the red brick ramp and go back to his dark room and his swirls of dreams and memories that had no real shape and their shapelessness made them that much more terrifying. It was time for me to lie all the way back on the green living room sofa, maybe reading a book I had brought from my father’s house, maybe reading an old comic book I had left here years ago, maybe the same one I used to read on the brown sofa in the old terrace, on afternoons when I didn’t feel like walking over to La Satelite or going to the movies. But it was time for something else.
Even as the footsteps of my grandmother slowly making her way up the curved steep stairway were still ringing through the house, banging against white walls, ricocheting from mysterious abstract paintings and large pleading hands, bouncing on the naked woman of bronze who was still leaning undisturbed on her perch in the middle of the ocean of white pebbles, travelling right over the vast desert of shiny red bricks where I once sat down to talk on the phone for hours, even as they were still traveling and bouncing and slamming into each other, my Uncle stood up and gestured for me to follow him.
“Come with me Juan Carlos, I have something to show you…”
I stood up as well and I placed my book carefully on the edge of the sofa. We walked out to the edge of the red brick ramp. I stood facing away from the house and the sun was hitting me directly on the face. There were birds dancing over the slim black roof that hung over the black metal gateway, there was the sound of buses in the distance honking and screeching as they made a turn. I squinted to protect my eyes from the sun. My Uncle then turned towards me and smiled. I smiled back at him, very curious as to what he was going to show me. He then proceeded to slowly unbutton his shirt.
“Look, Juan Carlos, look…”
He opened it up with both hands and pushed out his chest so I could look at it more clearly. I first saw the thin white hairs that covered his flesh and then his thick fingers which surrounded the circle of hairs, pulling tightly on the sides of the shirt to make sure that I could see what was in the center. He smiled at me and nodded his head, and his smile was downward as always but held a kind of pride as well as a heavy sadness… maybe all emotions at once were contained in that smile and negated by his bulging eyes that held no emotion at all. I looked deep into the center of the fleshy gap that his fingers were creating and I saw the long scar that stretched from the center of his chest all the way to the edge of his shoulder.
“Look at it, Juan Carlos, look at it…”
It was like a zipper of raw red flesh interlaced with a thin black cord, like a strange animal that had come to live on my Uncle’s chest and was now busy integrating into its surroundings, becoming one with the upright monkey that carried it.
“This is what they did… they opened me up… just like that… look!”
I looked again and now I couldn’t help but picture a cut so deep across my chest, and I could then almost feel a long sharp knife cutting straight across my flesh and revealing my heart, holding the edges of my flesh open with thick fingers covered in black hair, and my heart in the center, pumping in a slow steady rhythm. So vulnerable, so easily brought to an anticlimactic end. So easy to hurt, so hard to heal, so impossible to recover.
“They cut me apart and they put something in me… this is what they did… see? Look at it, look at it, Juan Carlos…”
And I looked again, and then I looked into his eyes and they were very wide open and filled with a kind of subdued excitement.
“It’s tough, isn’t it? Look… that’s what they did to me…”
Then he closed his shirt because I was looking up at his eyes and not at his chest. He shook his head.
“I’m going home. Is your Dad coming to get you?”
I nodded.
“Good, then I’ll see you another day.”
I saw him walking down the long ramp of faded red bricks, framed by the tall wall covered in flowers and long bright green branches, surrounded by tall unruly grass, all of it delineated by the black metal gate that separated us from the street. As I stared at his back, slowly receding as he slowly walked away, I could still see the long red scar in my mind’s eye. I wondered then what they had truly done to him. I wondered who they were. And I wondered what they had taken out of him and why they never put it back.
Without it, all these days would become like each other, and the end would just be another short nap after lunch, another sleepless night of formless dreams, another descent into a realm without limits or stable categories. And even that final moment of silence would soon be cut short. The sun would soon be once again blaring down upon us and it would then be time to begin the story again, it would be time to follow the script that we never had a hand in writing. The same story as always, the same characters, the same rooms, the same streets, the same empty lots, the same dirt paths, the same crushing deceptions, the same open eyes, all cradled between invisible arms, all dancing in swirls of dust, all in the midst of a slow decay that had no ending, all forever alive, deep in the rotating heart of another sleepy afternoon.

Little white dog
Calling out its empty warning
Forever trying to stop
What will forever happen
no matter how much it barks
no matter how much it jumps
no matter how it whimpers.

How many times I saw her
a solemn memory of power,
of days of glory
and days of brilliance,
a distant shadow looming
over the gentle woman
the one I did know
the one that herself
has now become
a slowly fading thought.

My elegant grandfather
here smiling with a touch
of venerable compassion.
For my mother and me,
for most people that knew him,
he was like a figure out of a movie,
out of a tango or an old tale,
something to be seen from afar,
and admired for its faultless perfection.
No man could ever live up
to his well honed image,
certainly not him,
not when you came close enough
to see the cracks in the ancient armor
to see the snow on the TV screen.

The beauty bows to the beast
and the beast accepts her respect,
with a gentle resignation,
a kind of arrogant acceptance,
reinforcing ancient connections,
that lie buried,
lost and forgotten,
deep under mud and sand.

They are to her
what others were to me,
and what she sees
is not what I see,
and what I see,
she would find incomprehensible.
Somewhere in between,
a voice demands the truth,
if only to find a solid footing,
but there is only silence
and silence has no surface
and silence has no end.

The sound of tinkling glass,
and forks crashing against knives,
and jokes and tales and commands,
and questions without answers,
and laughter without force.

My uncle and my mother
With my grandmother between them,
A bridge of warm embraces
And unspoken demands,
desire borne of days
far beyond our reach,
A bridge to quiet tears,
Cradled in wandering men
lost in far and foreign lands.

A silent living room
Full of wraiths and double images,
Of traces of jokes told
A thousand times,
Of stories that would
Never be heard,
Of tales that would
Never be told
Of questions that would
never be answered.

Indeed she was beautiful,
desirable and unreachable,
and it was his place to catch her
and it was her place to be caught.
Once in his power,
a descent would surely follow,
for dreams die quickly,
when they are finally held
tightly in your grasp.

A kiss of sensual beauty
that lived beneath the stairway,
that beckoned without shyness,
that surrendered without fear.
But her creator forgot to name her
and so she drowns now
in a lake of quiet forgetfulness.
For without a name
she couldn't be allowed to exist.

She dreams of the black void
and she can only laugh
to keep from crying
to keep from looking
to keep from falling
to keep herself from knowing
what the void itself
has already whispered
in her ear.

She was once a vision,
a jewel in a king's crown,
a banner of truth and glory
hidden behind silky veils.
But who remembers such things
when even the photos that remain
seem to never have been real,
when even her eyes are fading
into the color of dying grass.

A quiet fire of real innocence
slowly smolders to rusty iron,
shades of lost days
when I was the one reaching out
through those very same eyes,
days when I didn't know
that things grew old,
broke down
and came to an end
all while I wasn't looking.

She has changed
into something harsh and cold
from what was once
something unreachable.
Now she dreams of power
while she leans on a couch
laughing at the world
that never fully welcomed her
into its deadly embrace
of metal and concrete.

News, news and more news,
And it’s all bad and worse
And terrible and bad again,
All to let me know
All to assure me
That it isn’t just me
That I am not alone
In my furious and reckless race
Towards the final caress of oblivion.

My grandmother Antonia
As I knew her and as I didn’t
Infused with warmth
And bathed in innocence
In a kind of purposeful blindness
To the wide underground currents
That ran deep and strong
just a few inches beneath her feet.

And the little white dog
would forever keep on barking
and some ears would turn and wonder,
and some eyes might even look ahead,
but in the end they all would jump
and the abyss would swallow them
and scratch their faces raw
with vicious pointed fangs,
and as they slipped under the weight
of years of passive negligence,
the dog would bark more weakly,
finally learning that hope
could truly live only in the past.

Blows To The Head

The lawn of the garden was a tremulous green ocean, pock marked here and there by islands of gray and white rock, black and brown dirt, yellow and red plastic, and other small landmarks that spoke of potential safety to lonely riders of emerald waters, but, in fact, these little islands could also hide invisible dangers behind their calm façade, dangers that would lurk behind tranquility, dangers that, once triggered, would be too fearsome to overcome, too powerful to escape. The bright green leaves of grass were waves that shook lightly in the wind, and the dirt under their uneven carpet was the terrible depths, the depths where voyagers could get lost forever, trampled and stepped on, bent out of shape, covered over in tiny pebbles and finally forgotten, to be found maybe in careful archaeological digs by future historians whom I would never have the pleasure of meeting. And the truth was that I wouldn’t really meet many people, historians or otherwise, and I didn’t really need to, for I had a green ocean to contend with, a green ocean which always needed careful attention, a green ocean which was really a battlefield in a terrible millennial war that could never come to an end. Sometimes I would overflow this green field with the transparent rainbow currents coming from the old rubber hose, and I would watch the little warriors try to hold on to the remains of their safety, for in the midst of their war I was above them all and I could rain death upon them when they least expected it. War always came in one form or another, it was as unavoidable as the sun in the afternoon, or the breeze in the early evening, or the bats in the middle of the night, fleeing winged shadows against the dancing yellow light of a lonely light bulb.
There were always secret dealings, the kind that started in a little alcove halfway up the capulin tree, miles away from any prying eyes, far away from the centers of civilizations, in places where true natures could be revealed and artificial masks could fall. Here a sergeant, his rifle permanently fixed in a ready position, always pointing forward, head always cocked back, would meet with a lowly enemy combatant, his ear permanently fixed to his backpack radio, his face etched with what seemed to be the beginnings of a smile, his knee permanently bent sideways, his backpack permanently placed on the ground. Here, in this tiny hole in the wide expanse of the tree’s bark, they would meet and talk in unnecessary whispers and they would discuss matters of extreme importance, plans that could echo far beyond this hidden alcove, far beyond this giant tree and its wrinkled brown skin. They would survey the world from their little forbidden meeting place and trade words that were not meant to be spoken, they would nod and shake hands in agreement, and then they would retire back to their usual habitats, content that they had done their work, content that the matter was settled and it was just a matter of time before the devastating conflict began.
I liked these secret men, because they dared to do what others would only dream of, because they traveled far without help or reinforcements, and they found the chambers of silence that for others would always remain as legends, because they would step valiantly past the threshold of the law and find their own purposes where others could only see the dark. I liked these men and I respected them, and yet I brought them pain, I brought them death and suffering and terrible lifetimes of constant persecution and certain ultimate defeat. I knew that their dealings were treacherous, in their world of secrets they bred terrible shapeless monsters that would soon gain a life of their own (and may sooner or later come back to consume their creators.) I knew that what they did was ultimately good for the world itself, for it brought the life of bloodshed, and the world that I knew, the world that I was in charge of, it fed and grew and was replenished through these terrible rituals of death. But I also knew that what they did was bad for all their fellow men of plastic, who would succumb under the rain of translucent bullets that would come upon them when they least expected them, just as they climbed, in a long curved line like a dark green serpent, up the rocky hill that led to the tomb of my first Enriqueta (where I could still see the wooden cross, broken and dusty and forgotten, and I would tell myself that my little black dog still loved me down there, under the dirt and the worms and the stones, and that she would eventually come back to life just like the plastic men would come back if they were ever found buried under the dirt and then they would be just as alive as they ever were; but in a colder place within me, I knew that my little dog was not ever coming back, she had been too radically changed by the rat poison, she had been taken too far beyond the gates of reason, beyond the fragile sanctuary of lustful life.) The green plastic men would slowly make their way up this hill of dirt and pebbles, looking in all directions for any signs of possible danger, and they would maintain their formation carefully, for their strength was in each other, and in the careful arrangement of their different skills. But when the bullets started flying towards them, from snipers carefully perched in the slim little branches of rose bushes, or the tiny crevices in the gray wall, the men would disperse in all directions, the long green snake would suddenly dissolve into its fundamental components, and, now alone and hunted, they would desperately call for help, hoping that someone or something out there was able and ready to listen. Some of them would die alone, hoping for a brilliant rescue. Some of them would regroup and call for reinforcements by the large rocks that stood under the mountain of sand. Some of them would get lost and they would have to find a way back through the ocean, they would have to find a ship that could take them from here to there, back to a place where they could themselves regroup and come back for vengeance.
Without the war, there would have been only green ocean, and tall trees, and birds chirping, and bats sleeping, and dead dogs loving under the dirt and little boys staring at nothingness. So the war was needed to find completion for the emptiness of a dark garden present, and all this terrible savagery would begin in a little alcove halfway up the capulin tree, far under the thick branches that extended out and up, and far above the thick brown roots that extended out and down, deep into the depths, where old forgotten wars had already been fought, won and lost, and then summarily forgotten.
But the past was just a shadow, and the future was just a slim pregnant song, and the present was a lonely plastic man, separated from his platoon, desperately trying to make his way back across an ocean of invisible dangers, back to a promise of safety by the round glass table or by the tower that rose in one corner of the furthest terrace, where the white hammock was. In his one and only life, there was fear and desperation, and it was one and only because he didn’t know, and he couldn’t know, that later that same day I would put him back in a wooden box and, regardless of his triumph or his failure, I would bring him back out to fight another day, and, through this nightly process, his tiny plastic mind would be cleared of all terrible memories. Here in the present, there was only anguish and a slim glimmer of hope, for there was an island in the distance, and there was no sound of flying bullets at the moment, and no rain was coming down upon his head. As I watched him scamper across the gigantic green waves, I may have felt some pity for him, pity which I expressed in a tiny smile, as I arranged the enemy soldiers that were getting ready for a devastating ambush, ready to rip his plastic flesh apart without a second thought. Pity was so strange in that way, for it was beautiful and sweet, but I couldn’t allow it to take over, or it would damage the whole of creation, and here, in the present, warriors were made for battle and pity was saved for tales of quiet remembrance, tales to be told long after the war was over and done.
I could then stand back and let the world freeze, let the moment hang in mid air like a helium balloon that never quite leaves its assigned post and so becomes like a star, attracting its own system of dirt globules upon which other beings may live, flying in even spirals around their spherical god of truth and immortality. It was my choice, as much as I had choices at all, to stand back and look, to look at the situation as it was lived by this lonely soldier, and by the enemy patrol waiting in ambush, and the strange wizard in the island by the remote regions of the farthest wall, and the wild men who lived in the trees who supervised the situation from afar, waiting for their opportunities to descend like the scavengers that they were (for the men of the trees had no side in the war and so they were even more fearsome than the regular soldiers.) I would stand back and look at them all, feeling sympathy for each of them, feeling the anxious knowledge of impending events, things that would change the landscape forever, and once it was changed, it could never return to quite this moment, this complicated arrangement of forces ready to follow through with the impulse of their prearranged momentum. This was unique and precious and I had the luxury of standing back and looking at it all, all complex and intertwined and frozen, and admire the beauty of its pristine and unmovable ferocity.
I would then walk towards the little incline, the little hills of death where my little dog was buried, under a forgotten wooden cross, broken in two pieces and already rotting from the rain. I would step up onto the rocks by the edge and jump up onto the chain link fence, and there I would hold on tight, my little thin fingers wrapped like tiny worms around the gray metal coils, and I would begin to make my way across, my eyes alternating between looking sideways, where I was going, and looking forward towards the outside world that lay on the other side of the wall, where there was chaos in the form of huge green bushes taller than a man and mountains of refuse, trash and rocks and piles of old clothes and newspapers, as tall as the bushes, and a house on the other side, slanted gray metal roof and red corrugated walls which hid the endless mystery of the Other, the strange people that lived behind the red walls, and even more houses beyond, all covered in gray metal roofs, all hiding their own secret stories, their own moments of quiet, their own moments of terror, their own moments of tender love, and if I looked in that direction, out through the holes in the chain link fence, I could see all the way to the San Jacinto hill in the distance, a towering pyramid of dirt that gave the landscape of metal and brick a touch of the ancient past, a touch of the splendor that once was, back before the white men came (the men that were as white as I was) with their spinning wheels and sticks of fire, back when the world was virginal and covered in bird song and giant green bushes, like the ones in the vacant lot next door, back when it all was pure and new, even if I didn’t know it (for as far as I was concerned, the world had always been brick and metal and electrical wires hanging over empty streets, from concrete cylinders that pushed their way up among the branches of the older trees that lined the sidewalks.) There was a big world out there, the vast city of people and cars that was too large and too complex for me to even begin to fathom, too far away to understand, too close to bravely examine.
So I would turn myself around, and still holding on to the fence, I would look down upon the vast world that was my kingdom, a world of wet green grass and black soil and thick brown roots, a world in itself as large and as complex as the one outside, but one where I could freeze the moment and not let it get away from my grasp. I would then be able to see it all, from the lonely soldier that was trying to escape across the ocean, to the old wise men of the tall wall in the back, the ones who looked out from their little caverns with a sense of peaceful neutrality in their eyes, to the men of the trees, who were wild and unpredictable, loving and compassionate one moment, cruel and vengeful the next, to the guards that waited in the fort by the glass table, where they could rest in the knowledge of their apparent safety, which the walls and the heights and their numbers provided, to the patrol waiting in ambush, all lined up in concentric semicircles, all ready to kill and destroy and rip apart the vulnerable plastic flesh of the desperate survivor who had not yet managed to see them, to the spies that were scattered in the roots of the capulin tree, moody men who hid more than one color beneath their green and gray plastic skin, to the scattered bodies that were the remains of recent massacres, all covered in dirt and traces of dew and lipstick stains (which was their blood), to the mystic wizard in his island, aloof except when forced to intervene, and then unpredictable in his moods and his motivations, to the grand general in his high tower by the white hammock, a lonely post surrounded by a small retinue of highly trusted soldiers, measuring the dangers in the distance against the more pressing dangers just behind his back. All of it was then available, all of it understood, all of it frozen and clear and vibrant with the expectation of the immediate future and the momentum of the recent past.
I hung above it all, from a height that would have been incomprehensible to any of the participants, I was higher up than their wildest and most terrifying fantasies, higher up than they could ever yearn to be, higher up than they would ever want to. From up here, there was no need for further events, no need for resolutions or solved equations, no need for endings or new beginnings, no need for death and no need for life. The war as it was, still and frozen and viciously quiet, held perfection in itself, and it required no further events to complete it. From up here, the war was not good or bad, moral or immoral, sad or happy, shameful or glorious. The terrible violence, the pain of the dead and the wounded, the desperation of those in danger, the anxious relief of the survivors, the eager ambition of the warriors still in motion, all of it was perfect and I didn’t need to change a thing. From up here the world was vast, complex and complete, and the contradictory forces that were contained within it, were all one and the same. No difference. No judgement. No fear. No hope.
I would hold my breath for a while, letting the vision expand within my little trembling body, knowing that the slightest move would disperse it all, and the seconds would start to move forward, ever so slowly. The war would soon begin again.

* * *

The little street was dark and somewhat barren. It embodied a kind of loneliness that comes accompanied with the sound of TV sets and radios in the distance, the kind of loneliness where light flows through half open windows and the light shakes and shifts and changes colors as the TV screen moves through its motions inside, telling stories of detectives and love affairs, stories of people who win money or lose it, of faraway bombings and of people who have recently managed to lose weight. There were cars moving in the distance, down the broad long road that was El Camino Real (the longest street in the world according to my grandfather), which was just around the corner, stretching like a river of darkness all the way back to the known quantities of my neighborhood and the unknown strangeness of the cities to the south. There were no moving cars here, and the echoes of the rumbling motors of small cars and trucks would come to us across the distance, already muffled by the many obstacles on their way. There were a few cans and bottles laying on the side of the curb, along with some newspaper pages that flapped in the slight wind and a shiny bag of chips crumpled up into a ball and tossed into the gutter. The grass on the edge of the sidewalk was overgrown and there were hints of more trash among the long leaves that stretched towards the asphalt.
I could see these things from my spot on the driver’s seat, where my eyes would alternate between looking at my companions and looking once again at the street outside. The parked cars were about a decade old and their paint was starting to peel, and the walls of the apartment buildings were suffering the same fate. The street itself was like the cars and the buildings, it had lived in a time when people had smiled when they saw it, maybe back on the day when they first moved in, and maybe then they thought that this one step was the one that would bring them final happiness, here is where their family would grow in comfortable safety among rhythmic bouts of work and sleep. But now they would probably only nod as they looked at their battered street, and accept the fate that they had been dealt, simply accept the fact that this was not perfect but it was certainly better than nothing (and it would go without saying that most things were.) Far from the shiny newness which it once may have exhibited, far from the promise of safe hope and easy comfort, the street was starting to tilt in the opposite direction. Soon there would be more graffiti and the paint on the cars would peel even further, and the corners might not be as empty as they were that night.
I leaned back on my seat and settled into my proscribed role for the evening, an evening when my friend was deeply disturbed and I had to find a way to calm him down. I had no clear reason for wanting to do so, other than that he was my friend and it seemed to be my duty to try. I felt a rush of warmth through my chest at the thought that I could help him, and I would do whatever I could to do so, even if I wasn’t sure at all of my success.
"What I can’t fathom…what I can’t bring myself to understand or accept…" he said it in a voice that cracked slightly, with the overwhelming tension of contained pain, "what makes me really angry… is that he is family! My family! Our family! How can he do this to one of his own?"
I looked at Ricardo carefully, trying to move as slowly as I could to give him the space to talk, while still retaining the wakeful attention that would let him know he was being listened to. I looked at his trembling lips and his wide dish-like eyes, trying to communicate to him that I could understand him, that his message was coming through, while at the same time, trying to dig through his angry communication, trying to find the spot that I could open, trying to find the secret door through which I would sneak my way in. He was sitting on the passenger side of the car and leaning sideways so that he could look both at me and at the girl that was our companion. She was leaning in the backseat, staring forward towards us, and, every so often, looking over at the living room lights in her apartment across the street, which were constantly shifting in color and intensity, throwing moving rainbow shadows over the curtains behind the large picture windows of her home. My friend was stocky and somewhat muscular, his face was wide and heavy, he would sometimes look like a rock statue that had come to life, all grainy and covered in angles and broken surfaces and little pebbles that could easily slide down his cheeks, specially now with the dim light of the street lamp half hitting the side of his face and making his flesh seem gray and fixed into a mask of painful displeasure. He had a short trimmed moustache and his wide open eyes that, on this particular night, seemed to be on the verge of tears.
The girl in the back was a singer in my little band, (or at least she claimed to sing, much as we claimed to be a band. We all lied to ourselves and we all hoped that others would go along with our transparent simulacrums.) She had dark moist skin, big curly hair and deep dark eyes, and she talked in a seductive monotone that seemed to always imply a knowledge of something that couldn’t be clearly pinpointed, a secret vision that spread around me like a sphere of smoke and which made words themselves seem a bit more vague in their usage. (Her secret knowledge would forever remain secret, right up the latter days when it became apparent that she had no secret at all.) Even if she couldn’t sing, I had found that it was good to have her around, maybe for the intangible smoke around her, maybe for her soft brown skin, maybe because she had a habit of leaning against the first man or boy that sat next to her, pressing her body against our chest, her cheek against our cheek, and then talking in whispers against our ear. Here, in the backseat in the middle of the night, she stretched in her tight white pants and in her soft light yellow shirt that only barely covered her little brown breasts, and she shook her head in moral judgement, acknowledging the truth in what my friend was saying.
"I understand… that is really the worst part of it…family should stick together…family should never turn upon itself!" She said it in a high pitched voice that screeched just a little before she settled into a new variation of her chosen mask of disgust.
My friend again nodded, and squeezed his fists together. Once again, I could see the trembling in his muscles. I didn’t like it. I had only seen him be violent twice in all the many years that I had known him, both times had left such an impression on me that I wouldn’t want to see it again, and yet he had managed to always carry with him the implied threat of violence, maybe inherited from a time long past, when the former rock statues of his family tree had used their weight and their strength upon lesser beings made of weak vulnerable flesh. After enough generations steeped in heavy physical aggression, maybe the act of it became irrelevant, and just the heavy weight of it, carried upon the strong shoulders and wide mouth, just the threat of it would be enough, enough to move through obstacles, enough to push enemies aside, enough to find new ways to be aggressive, to find new ways to cut through disagreements, new ways to squeeze, new ways to hurt. All things evolve in their own way, and here was a particular specimen that was clearly different from my own line. I was far from any statement of clear understanding, but here, in the twilight interior of the parked car, there was a slight clue in his squeezed fists, in his trembling strong arms.
"It would be one thing if he was only a friend… if he was just some asshole Luis had met in the corner… or down the street… wherever!…but to give drugs to his own cousin! To care so little! For his own blood! For one of us! That is unforgivable!"
I turned towards him fully, watching the light of the moon dancing lightly on the dark clouds above through the dirty windshield of my car, and I prepared myself to fulfill my function, a function which I didn’t truly understand, a function I would not have been able to explain if asked to do so. And yet I had done it before. And yet I would do it again.
"But wait… let’s look at this carefully…" I said, in a voice as soft and calm and friendly as I could possibly muster, knowing that the slightest miscalculation would turn all the seething anger in his small heavy body against me.
Ricardo’s wide open angry eyes turned towards me then, and like the wide light beams of a theater, I could feel the heat travelling through the heavy sweat stained atmosphere inside the little car.
"There’s really not much to look at… my brother goes to him… looks at him as his older cousin… someone to admire… he is looking for guidance… for help…he is looking for some kind of leader…and he turns it around and gives him drugs! What else is there to say? What else is there to look at?"
I nodded, temporarily accepting his postulates while I scratched the side of my face and smiled halfheartedly. His defenses were thick and tall and all the drawbridges were pulled up. This would not be easy. The girl in the back snorted loudly and shook her own head, adding fuel to the fire.
"It is in fact unforgivable! That is really the only way to describe it!" she said it in a tone that seemed eager for more anger to come spilling out of my friend’s body.
I wondered for a moment what secret pleasure she was deriving from his state, what strange vampiric ritual was going on before my eyes in a level of reality which I couldn’t reach at all, some invisible ancient procedure that was so ordinary that it had been completely forgotten. But it was all too subtle for my comprehension and I had a simpler message to deliver. I couldn’t allow myself to deviate. I couldn’t focus my attention on her at all.
"But ok… I understand what you are saying…I can understand what you see and how you see it… here is your brother… basically innocent… looking for guidance from his older cousin… who is a strong guy… a kind of leader…and his cousin… your cousin… he introduces him to drugs…ok, I understand how it looks to you…but let’s look at it again… let’s look at it from his point of view… from his…"
Again his eyes flared with alarm and they almost seemed as bright as the little red brake light that was still on behind the plastic screen of my car’s dashboard.
"What do you mean? What is there to look at?"
I saw that as my opening and I moved in.
"Well, from his point of view… I’m not saying I agree with him… not at all… but from his point of view, he is doing something good for your brother… he is initiating him into a secret, something special, something that will make him different, something that will make him one of them…"
As I said it, I could see his cousin, arms all covered in tattoos, wearing a stained white T-shirt, loose gray pants, hair cut trimmed right to the scalp, sitting in his living room, surrounded by others that looked much like him, and I could see him leaning forward with a little glass pipe, smiling, his own eyes twinkling, and I could see a much thinner brown arm reaching out to grab the pipe. Ricardo leaned forward towards me, a physical manifestation that revealed to me that he was listening intently, his chest would slowly push out and then, just as slowly, it would pull in, in very slow cycles that told me he was trying to calm himself down. Something about it didn’t sit well with the brown skinned girl sitting on the backseat, who tried to bring the mood back to where it once was, back to the fierce single propulsion of clear and final judgement.
"It is still unforgivable really! Who cares what his point of view is? Who cares how he saw it? Who cares what he thought he was doing? We know what he was doing! He gave drugs to his own cousin! That is all we need to know! Why are we sitting here wondering what he thinks? What he thought? The point is what he did and there is no question about that!"
My friend nodded and looked at her. I felt like reaching for his chin and turning his face back towards me, but that would not have been subtle enough. I just had to find a way to maneuver back to the space we had almost reached, a space where questions could be asked, questions that didn’t have predetermined answers.
"If he only knew what I can do…" Ricardo said it with relish, with the impassioned fury of a general about to order an assassination or a bloody massacre, "I could squish him like a bug if I decided to do so… I could utterly obliterate him… I could… he would never see it coming…he would have no way of defending himself… he has no power…that is the truth… he is helpless before me…he just doesn’t know it…"
I nodded, again accepting his statements at face value, accepting that his strange old magic, touched by liquor spitting old women and Hindu men in turbans and red robes, could overcome his cousin’s tattooed muscles, his whole gang of thugs and his many shotguns, all carefully hidden under the old thin mattress of the living room sofa, ready to defend a dirty kitchen full of beer and tortillas and beef and lard. I believed it was possible. It was possible that Ricardo could really attack him, could really hurt him in some mysterious way. It was possible enough to set aside and swallow my questions, possible enough to let them hang like some more of the many balloons of doubt that had floated all around me for as long as I could remember, silent reminders that not everything was known and there was much yet to be discovered, some of it so far from me as to be invisible, some of it so close as to not be seen.
"But what I’m saying is that he was doing something for him…" I continued, resting my eyes for a moment on the girl in the back seat, trying to get her to be quiet, only with my gaze, only with the slightly intensified tone of my voice, "within his world, he was giving him the best gift that he had in his possession… he saw his young cousin approach him… he wanted help… he wanted to be tough…he wanted to be a man… he wanted to be one of them….and he said ‘yes, I will give you that’… that was not a move of aggression… that was not hate or betrayal…it was love… a kind of love that may be foreign to us, but love nonetheless…he gave him love in the form that he knew… in the form that it was given to him...he welcomed him into his circle and made him a warrior. In fact, he did… he did just what you would have wanted…what any of us would want… he truly treated him like family."
The light of the TV screens was still flashing in the windows outside, and the sound of cars rolling down El Camino still came to us in waves of mechanical power. For once, the girl in the back was quiet, looking towards her apartment window, maybe wondering if it was time for her to go. I let out a few breaths, waiting for my enraged friend to speak, anxiously waiting for what he would have to say. Ricardo’s eyes were still flaring outwards, in a way that made his face look like a strange thick insect made of pink flesh, and his breath was still heavier that it usually would have been, as it came in loud rushes that sounded like little orgasms, but he leaned closer to me, his whole upper body tilting towards me slowly, and he spoke in a softer voice.
"I hear you… I do… I understand what you are saying. It’s a bit hard for me to visualize… maybe just because I’m angry, but I do hear it… I understand…" He took another loud breath and let it out slowly, and it sounded like a tire slowly deflating in the silence within the car, "But still, how can I just let it pass? How can I? How can I just ignore what he has done and act as if nothing has happened? How can I do that when he has hurt the family… do you understand? Can you even understand that at all? You have no brothers! How can you understand what it means? He has hurt the family! He has hurt one of us!"
It was possible that my friend had a sense of his family that I could never quite penetrate. I was (or believed myself to be) an only child, and I had mostly lived with my mother through most of my childhood. So I couldn’t quite comprehend the sense of being part of a large group of people, all connected by blood, all moving through the vast labyrinth as a unit, looking out for each other, sacrificing for each other, dying for each other. I could feel it, I could yearn for it, but maybe it simply didn’t live within me in the way it lived within Ricardo’s heart. Still, I shrugged my shoulders and leaned towards him as well, our heads now so close that our foreheads could almost touch.
‘He was trying to help… in his own way, in the only way that he knew how… he was trying to help. He was giving your brother a gift, a gift that you can’t understand. A gift that I can’t quite understand either, but a gift nonetheless… I can recognize that much."
The girl snorted in the back, in a final statement of utter disgust, and once again looked towards the living room lights, which kept on making colored shadows across the curtains.
"I should go. They’re probably wondering why I don’t get out of the car. They probably think I’m making out with one of you… or maybe with both of you at once!" and she laughed in a way that simultaneously implied that she could do that, if she really wanted to, and that she wouldn’t, because she was somehow out of our reach. I nodded at her and reached over to kiss her cheek, stretching my body over the car sets. Ricardo did the same, and whispered something in her ear. She laughed softly and winked. Then she stepped out of the car and walked towards her apartment building. For a moment I wondered who it was that was waiting for her, back behind that murky yellow light, behind all those colored shadows. I wondered what they thought of when they were alone, what they dreamt about, what they wished for. I wondered what they thought of her and her attempts at singing, I wondered how the world looked to them from behind their closed window, and what kind of gifts they would offer to those they found deserving. I wondered what punishment they would threaten her with if they found her to be at fault. When we heard the door close and we saw a shadow move across the living room curtains, I turned on the car and I felt it shake to life underneath me. My friend turned back to look at me.
"So what should I do then? Should I just ignore it? Should I just let it pass?"
"He was giving your brother a gift… the gift of strength, the gift of knowledge, the gift of belonging…"
"But what should I do? I understand what he did… to some degree at least… but what should I do in return?"
I pressed the accelerator slowly and we moved gently into the narrow asphalt in between the two rows of parked cars.
"Should I just let it pass?" he asked once again.
I whispered, looking at the empty road as I turned towards El Camino: "I don’t see what else you can do. I don’t see what else can be done…"

* * *

You don't have to be knocked out, not completely, not to the point where the silky darkness descends upon you filled with green and purple clouds and it caresses the edges of your mind so that your mind itself becomes purple and filled with clouds of nothingness and then you can’t remember anything because there is nobody there to remember, there is no you left to keep the blurry perceptions down, you don’t have to go that far, you don’t even have to lose the blurry edges of your vision, the windowsills of your precarious existence, populated by things that are not there or shouldn’t be there, by the traces of childhood memories that have been set aside in favor of clear consensus and shared normality, you don’t have to lose the scarred signs of the circus’ previous owners, the tales of those that came before you, the ones who also relished their moment in the sun, and once or twice dared to think that it would last forever, the ones who could only envision you as some kind of imaginary creature, much like the fairies who live in the forest, except your forest is their future, and their forest is your past, and, yes, they, these figures of lost memories, just like you, in one way or another, they also jumped head first into the unknown and they crashed savagely and they got up, after a minute or a week or a month or a year or a decade, and they found their way back up, and they got themselves ready, and then they jumped again, over and over until there was nothing left to climb, nothing left to jump, and the traces of their many falls still remain, somewhere within the girders of your semi conscious skeleton, their dreams trail into yours, like long green slivers pocked here and there with yellow and pink flowers open and ready for your thoughts to penetrate, for your visions to engorge themselves and grind back and forth in an orgy of stories and color and fear and hope and love and hate and climbing, climbing most of all, these dreams, they tell of places that you never went to, places you can’t ever fully picture no matter how hard you try, you can’t smell them, you can’t touch them, you can’t run your hand over their surface and feel the imperfections prickle your skin like the surface of a stingray, like the skin of a shark, and they don’t have to go away, not altogether, not the way it happens when you enter a dark, dark cave, and everything fades, and there’s nothing left but the sound of your own breathing, that loud recurring wave of hot musky air that lets you know that you are still alive, you are still going through the seemingly endless cycle of replenishing the vehicle and tracing your way through a maze that seems to have no purpose, no compassion, no light, and so you can remain.
You don’t have to be knocked out, not down to the place where your memories will scatter like marbles across a flat shiny floor, some coming back towards you slowly, gyrating with flashes of light as they return, and some getting lost forever at the edge, where the bricks end and the chaos begins, you don’t have to be knocked out that far and still you may sustain an injury, an injury to that most private of your treasures, that vulnerable membrane that is more delicate than anything else that you have encountered, within or outside of your soft monkey body: your clear idea of what is true and what isn’t, your clear fantasy of knowledge that lets you walk out into the morning world, all pregnant with enthusiasm and bright blue sky and soft white clouds and a light cold breeze that makes the tiny hairs on your arms stand up to attention, your solid yet imaginary construction that lets you walk out into such a shocking revelation without falling backwards in extreme and complete amazement, for far above you a ball of fire rains down streaks of cosmic flame upon you, and the rays travel through vast empty wastelands of true cold and raw darkness, devoid of even the yellow mountains of sand of the desert or the discarded newspapers that flutter through the abandoned alleys of the cities, and it is a matter of gratitude, that you may walk out and sustain that which can’t be described, as long as you may remain enclosed, as long as you may remain protected, soft, tight, warm, complete. In here, there will be no change, in here, there will only be the tested and true, one foot after the other, the key turns and the motor rumbles, the light poles follow each other in just the right formation, and soon there is an elevator, and soon there is a "good morning" and soon a computer screen comes to life and everything is as it should be, everything works as it should always work, as it will always work for as long as you can help it, and since so much of it is beyond your help, you may as well not think about it, and let yourself think that it simply is and it will continue to be and it always was, and then focus on the task at hand, for there are emails to be written and papers to be proofed and people to be talked to and voice mails to be gone through, and all other visions must be set aside and forgotten, and what is, will continue to be, and what never was will stay that way.
But if this should be touched, if this world of known quantities and delicate details should somehow get scrambled, then there would be only amazement, there would be only an open mouth and drooling saliva, there would be great fear and great trouble, there would be a storm of fresh messages, coming at you from all directions with no place to land, no tower to process them, no traffic guide to tell them where to find a home, maybe it would start mild and yet still traumatic, for some injuries can be as cutting as a sword or an axe, and they come upon you suddenly, like a flash of lightning when the storm hasn’t yet begun, a gigantic flash of light through a dark sky that flares up the street before you in the single color of desaturated yellow and, before your mind has managed to catch up, the great roaring comes, and confirms for you what has happened, and the shivers that run through your body let you know that you are truly uneasy and that you would be well advised to find a way to hide it.
Some storms are like that, but other storms are slow and methodical, others come as thieves in the night, sliding your windowsill open and making their way inside you, maybe adjusting your lamp so that it isn’t in the same place where you left it the previous night, almost the same but not the same, and then you may ask yourself: "Did I forget? Didn’t I…?" but you will surely dismiss it as just a random occurrence, not worthy of a second thought, for the "good morning" is waiting and the computer screen and the light poles, and you will only remember next time, when the soap isn’t where it was, and maybe now your car is open when it shouldn’t be, and maybe now your clothes are not what you remembered from the day before, they seem to be a stranger’s wardrobe, designed for someone else with very different tastes and a very different outlook, completely and distinctly different purposes from the ones you vaguely remember having just a couple of days ago (but was it really just a couple of days ago, time will be more and more difficult to measure), and then you may say to yourself (in silence or very quietly, when you are certain that nobody is listening): "Am I losing it?" but you may even ask yourself, following up on the philosophical barrier that will immediately rise up to deflect your question: "If I were to lose it, what is it that I would love? What is it that I would care for? What is it that I would want?"
But most of us never go that far, most of us will simply say concussion, most of us will simply say something has happened, and I was never knocked out but I didn’t have to be, and somebody out there will know about it, maybe they will even have defined it clearly as a serious public health problem, a syndrome or a malady, and, in that case, there will be pills and injections, all with colorful names and instructions in tiny little black letters that you won’t ever bother to read, there will be a clear methodical treatment that will give me back my clothes, that will give me back my car, that will place the lamp back where it was supposed to be, that will make the questions go away, that will make me forget what I was turning into and remember what I was supposed to be, and then life will be manageable again and the silent struggle will come to a stop. Even then, after the long cold fingers of science have stepped in to offer their soothing balm, you may still look out of the corner of your eye, at the silver and brown clouds that are not supposed to be there, at the tiny explosions of fairy dust that occur just when your heart flutters, at the flashes of recognition that make no sense and come with no clear understandable sentences, and then you may say to yourself: "these are the aftereffects…soon the treatment will come to fruition and I will be fine…"
But your inner metal skeleton will have been touched, the one that kept the whole edifice up and running, the one that lies underneath your quick visual constructions and your rapid bursts of opinion that explode out of you like machine gun fire, and once that structure has started to shake and shiver and tremble, you will never trust it quite like you used to, for the walls can only be solid if they are always so. If one day you lean against the white wall of your room and it opens up like gooey syrup, and you drop into a maelstrom of silky darkness pointillistically drenched in the dust of stars, if that happens sometime, you will never lean in to it again with quite the same trust, with quite the same sense of confidence. And you don’t even have to be knocked out, not altogether, not to the point of utter voidness, not to the point of unrelenting clear light, you don’t even have to lose the blurry edges of your vision, but once the secret insides have been touched, once they have been shaken and stirred and thrown about, then you have opened a door that you will never again be able to close just right, no matter how hard you try.

* * *

There I was, hanging from the side of the chain link fence, staring intently at nothing, or at would have seemed like nothing to most observers, but to me, right then, it was an entire world of oceans and islands and mountains and valleys, all of it drenched in war and mystery, in plots and subplots, in treachery and deceit, in bravery and virtue. I was holding on behind my back, hardly breathing, letting it all come into me, trying to swallow it up all at once, and the clock within me was ticking, sooner or later something would happen, something would disturb this moment and I would have to come down. From where I was hanging, I could hear the sound of Cruz, the maid, washing clothes, rhythmic splashes of cold water on soaked clothes, the sound of her voice singing a Mexican romantic ballad over a tiny transistor radio that constantly broke apart into static. I could hear the sound of cars driving by, sliding along our little street carefully, maybe looking for an address, maybe looking for a lost little dog. I could hear a little group of street kids cursing and screaming and laughing as they rolled down the sidewalk on their handmade carts of wood and discarded bits of roller-skates and bicycles, and if they had seen me, what would they have seen? A strange skinny little kid hanging from a fence and staring at his own backyard, giving his back to the wide world, preferring the wider world within; maybe from somewhere out there it would even have seemed frightening, to run down the sidewalk and stare over a wall and see a little kid hanging, without moving, without hardly breathing, just looking and looking, without any sign of animated life. (Later I would receive confirmation on how truly frightening this picture was, and it came from someone that I had never even pictured as an observer, someone who loomed outside of my solid structure, invisible to my restrained eyes.)
There was a limited amount of time in which I could hold it, a limited time before Cruz came calling, before my mom came home, before Avelar rang the doorbell, before my fingers got too tired, before I had to breathe again as usual, and then what had seemed like forever would turn into a moment, and what seemed like a moment would turn into too long a time. When it seemed that my time indeed was up, and I had looked into the frozen land of the garden world for long enough, then I would jump down, flying through my green solitude in one great curving arch through empty space, and that was exhilarating because it was a little frightening. In that swift sudden jump, the world would change around me, there was a small gap in between two solid spaces, and when I landed, there would come another moment of silence, a moment of solid endings of dirt and new beginnings of grass, and then everything was alive again, everything was moving, and I was breathing hard and I had the urge to run and do things once again. I would land hard on my feet and I would immediately run back to the wall to do it all over. But this time there would be no waiting, this time there would be no space of looking without breath, I would simply reach the appropriate point on the fence and jump and, with every time that I jumped, it became easier, and with every jump, I was more adept at landing so that I would roll right off. I became fearless, and I would then jump sideways and even backwards, changing the curve of my arch through the air in subtle and dramatic ways, and I would try to roll around in the middle of my jump, even though the distance was so small that it barely gave me time to do anything at all, but I would still try, and I would half roll and then land and run back to the wall again. It all came from that first jump, as if once having jumped I couldn’t stop at all, I had to do it once more, I had to jump again, there was something in the air that I craved, something in the curve that I desired, something in the taste of finality and of fresh new starts. Eventually I would get tired of so much running, and I would turn my attention back to my neglected warriors, and they were just where I had left them, and they were ready to find their destiny at my hands, and they were pliable and willing to go where I would place them and to give of themselves everything that their little plastic bodies could give, so that the story would continue, so that there would be war once again, and peace, and mystery, and the subtle signs of something else for which I had no words and neither did they.
One time, when I was up on the fence and experimenting with my various ways of jumping, I jumped forward carelessly, without taking into account that my head was facing down, facing straight towards the solid ground, and maybe I had hoped to twirl all the way around in the air like a human cannonball from an old black and white cartoon, or maybe I had simply hoped that I could raise my head like a plane would do at the moment of lift off, or maybe I had been simply convinced that this time I would finally be able to fly and nothing at all would stop me as I roamed freely over the gray metal roofs of the surrounding houses. But, since none of those things would happen, and since I was facing down, and things tend to follow their current position all the way to the point where they are not things anymore, then I traveled through the empty space in a very narrow arch and , without a net or a any form of safeguard, I landed directly on my head, directly on the crown of my head, to be precise, as if I was a little missile of flesh and bone thrust down into the ground from a war plane on a deadly mission of impersonal destruction. It did indeed seem like a deadly mission because I had flown straight into the ground, into the same vast world which had seemed so peaceful from the heights, and now the tall green grass was right up against my face, and the dirt was soft and dark and rolling into my nostrils, and my whole body was laying amidst the pebbles and the leaves and the moisture. I had been so high up above everything and now I was down here in the thick of it all, where the world itself could touch me, where the insects could crawl up onto me, where the little men lived and died, where the mud rolled over death and pain with the sound of a metal shovel digging into piles of sand. I noticed that there were little crackling bolts that ran right through me, from the crown all the way to my feet. I knew what had happened, I could visualize it from outside as if it was a Road Runner cartoon and I was the Wiley Coyote making one more desperate attempt to capture my fleeting prey, and I had just flown right straight off of a cliff, pedaling into empty space for a moment, over a cloud of sand or dust or pebbles, and then I had plummeted rapidly into the hard unforgiving ground, never to be seen again (at least not until the next desperate attempt.)
I then became scared that I would be very hurt, I became scared that I would be permanently damaged in some terrible way, that I would never be the same, that something drastic had been changed within me and I would never be able to change it back. I couldn’t feel any clear pain but the fear still overtook me like a cold heavy wave of deep ocean water. I lay there wondering what the world would be like now that I had fallen, now that I had been inherently altered in some unexplainable way. How would things look? How would they feel against my fingers? How would they smell? How would they sound? (Yes, most of all, how would they sound?) And I stayed down there for what seemed like a very long time but most have been only a few minutes. I stayed there feeling the dirt against my nostrils, the long tendrils of green grass flowing back and forth across my face like soft segmented waves.
I finally got up, slowly but firmly. I shook my head, as if returning from a long and involved dream of large white bats that flew fearlessly against a limitless orange sky. I shook my face and my shoulders and my hands, and I looked all around me, carefully trying to determine how much had changed and how much of it I would be able to dismiss so that life could come back to normal. Things did seem different, but not so different that I couldn’t recognize them, and not so different that I couldn’t still walk towards them and feel them with my hands. In the distance I could still hear cars driving by, and kids playing outside, and the birds that would always be singing recurrent minimalist melodies a few meters out of sight, and the sound of Cruz washing clothes, and the people splashing into the pool in the hotel next door. I slowly came to realize that I was fine, that nothing truly horrible had happened. I had survived and I could even walk around the garden and onto the terrace and act like nothing had happened at all, and, if I didn’t mention it, nobody would ever know. More than that, I realized that I had actually enjoyed the sensation as my head hit the ground like a heavy bowling ball being dumped from a second floor. I had enjoyed the vibrations that had spread from the crown to the rest of my body, like a web of ephemeral fire that expanded in microscopically complex, self recurrent shapes, a secret web of experience that begged to be invoked once again. I looked up at the chain link fence, and then all around me one more time, making sure that I was still alone, and then I smiled. I knew exactly what I wanted to do.

* * *

I saw him, from the very beginning, as a street kid, a rough and dirty ruffian that thrived on the edges of the law, a boy destined for transgression but lacking in malice, a wrinkled white shirt and gray pants, black leather shoes, covered over in dust, hair parted to the side with a cartoonish sensibility, eyes locked in tension when listening and lost in the vague world of random thoughts as soon as you looked away, hands tight and long and affixed with twisted fingers that knotted around objects like tentacles, and a laugh that emphasized the "n" sound where there wasn’t supposed to be any "n" sound at all, as if the very act of negation was the most hilarious thing of all. Rodney would come walking with the others, all of them striding with confidence, stretching across the empty street as if it was their private playground, which it was, and leaving adult concerns for later, much later, school, homework, politics, the civil war, the future, the past, unemployment, rising prices, fear, it could all be set aside. For today the sun was shining and there were balls to kick, and girls to meet, and arguments to be solved and little kids to make fun of, games to be played, and places to rediscover, all under the bright hot sun that would have kept more reasonable creatures inside.
So I saw him the very first time and so he continued to be, for he could be nothing else. He was innocent in a way that allowed for prolonged sessions of masturbation where he would rotate his physical position constantly to discover new strange pleasures in a simple motion of the hand, and he was wise in the way that is borne of knowing others like him, older kids that would show him what to say and when to say it, when to retreat and when to rush forward, when to sit back and laugh at someone else’s misfortune and when to run for your life because you were about to be blamed for everything and the only solution was to disappear. In the world where he lived there was little mercy, little recourse to tenderness or soft eyes. What there was came with the edge of male punishment and female negligence, it came with loud words spoken with bubbles of spit between cracked teeth and prematurely wrinkled eyes on brown sun-baked skin, and yes, it was still mercy, but it would never allow for tears in public, it would never allow for overt sadness of any kind, it would never allow for self proclaimed witnesses or snitches, it would punish it all in the only act that it would understand as compassion, for only through punishment could true men be made, and this whole land of dust and black clouds was a great factory for the making of true men and women. Everyone was supposed to help in that one great effort.
My presence disturbed the clarity of this secret vision, a vision so secret that it would forever be kept hidden, even from the ones who held it tightly within themselves. And yet, when something didn’t fit, when someone didn’t follow the expected pattern, when a boy talked in a soft effeminate voice or laughed at the wrong moments or refused to fight when challenged or believed what he was told when he should have known better, then this was a problem, this brought out into high relief the sharp lines of the hidden diagrams and they had to be pushed back underground before they became so apparent that the sunlight might start to make them crumble into dust. I was such a thing, I was the element that did not fit, the little soldier made of orange plastic in a bag full of dark green, I was the one who stood out as different, and in this difference there was an unspoken challenge that had to be dealt with. It was not through design, and not through special intelligence or through careful observation, it was certainly not through any outstanding ability or skill. I had no idea what I was doing or why I was doing it and I had even less of an idea as to what the effects may be. I had simply become a bad cog in the dusty machine through the randomness of solitary accidents, through the intricate web of cause and effect that had brought me to this particular little suburban neighborhood, on this particular afternoon, on this particular day. No consciousness at all, no purpose, only a sequence of little accidents in a long silver chain that appeared to be absolutely unbreakable. These accidents had left me with qualities that were both attractive and repellent, a curious kind of mystery that ultimately invokes a sense of nausea in the depths of your guts.
So he would come and be close to me, he would sit beside me on the street gutters and the little brick walls of stranger’s houses, and he would share in my strange stories, and share in my strange way of talking that seemed like some kind of accent but couldn’t be aligned to any particular foreign nationality, and he would share in my deranged atmosphere of wraiths and ghosts and monsters, and he would sometimes laugh and ask further questions, and he would sometimes nod and look away. But when it became too much, he would have to lash out with his hard-learned ferocity and say: "Enough! There can be no more of this!" Maybe this was true of all the others, maybe they all reached a point of exhaustion where they simply wanted nothing more to do with the strange boy that lived down the street, but I saw it most clearly in him, because he was so transparent, because he shamelessly hid nothing, not his happiness, not his sadness, not his fears, not his courage. So the only things that could be hidden, those were hidden even from himself, and they were visible through the transparent edges of the rest of his body, through his rough scarred skin, through his jumpy eyes, through his loud whiny laughter that screeched against the pavement with the metallic sound of the "n", and so he would lash out and strike, and he would push me and laugh, or he would pull me and shake me and then laugh, or he would step on my shoes, hard enough for my toes to hurt, and then laugh, or he would ram his fist against my shoulder, and then laugh, or any combination of the above. The game rules were soon understood to be such that he could do any of these things and more and I could only complain mildly and then everything would quickly return to normal and nothing between us would have changed.
One day, in one of these sudden flare-ups of anger and exhaustion masked with effusive laughs, he scattered the red dust of broken bricks over my long black hair. It was something that he had never done before but it was similar enough to all other things he had done that it could have passed as the same and everything would have gone on as expected. He had his role and I had mine. But when I felt the red dust all over my scalp and I reached up to try to get it off and found that it would be very difficult to remove, a lever within me snapped, something that was so loud inside me that I could almost hear it just like I could hear the buses rolling up Constitucion avenue a block away, just like I could hear Rodney’s laughter and the barking of Pirata up on the terrace. I had had enough.
Galaxia street was mostly empty that day, from the corner where Ricardo lived all the way to the forced turn with Sagitario, so it was only Rodney and me and Ricardo, sitting on Zonia’s front yard, on the little brick wall that surrounded a flat square of light brown dirt and dried up grass. Rodney was wearing his usual outfit, a loose white button up shirt with short sleeves and the gray dress pants that were the uniform at his school. Ricardo was all in blue, blue jeans, blue shirt, black shoes that could be mistaken for blue in the dark. They were both laughing but Rodney was laughing the loudest. I looked at him and tried to recognize a friend, I tried vainly to understand what the word meant, what it was that I wanted from him, from them, and what did they want from me. Now Rodney had gone and done what he had done, and my hair was covered in red dust and I wasn’t happy, not at all, and I ran my fingers over my hair and I felt the dust all over my cranium and I looked at my nails and they were all covered in red dust, and I looked at him laughing uproariously, as if this was the greatest spectacle that he had ever witnessed, as if this moment presented the culmination of a long story, a much awaited punchline to an intricately rambling joke. I decided then that something needed to be done, maybe the lesson had finally broken through into me, maybe I had finally understood that in his world, the world of rough dirty kids and sunlit empty streets and black leather shoes covered in dust, in his world he would just keep on pushing and pushing until I pushed back. Maybe then, when he finally felt some kind of resistance, maybe he would push even harder, maybe he would even enjoy knowing that there was some level of challenge after all, and he would jump right into the challenge, just like he jumped to grab a bouncing basketball, like he ran to try to score a winning goal. But there was nothing else to do, there was nothing else that I could do. I grabbed a piece of red brick, from the same pile that had been the source of the red dust that now covered my black hair, and I lifted it over my head. My eyes turned serious and threatening and I slowly moved towards him. He looked at me, still laughing, and he said, in a voice that carried the weight of blood on desolate sidewalks:
"Don’t even think of throwing that at me!"
I simply held on to it and looked at him with tear stained eyes. Ricardo had decided to become objective at this moment, much like an Allied army that suddenly decides it is in its best interest to simply watch. He leaned away and looked at both of us as if we were some kind of laboratory study, as if his only interest was in discovering what the first rat would do to the second. I saw him in his blue shirt, with a trace of a smile crossing his wide face and I knew that I would find no sympathy or assistance with him. He was enjoying himself way too much to stop the action. So it was all up to me. I could either do something and delve into deeper waters, or do nothing at all, and let the punishment increase by red stained steps that would sting like alcohol rubbed on open wounds. I lifted the broken red piece of brick even higher and my eyes narrowed.
"I’m telling you! Don’t throw it!" He said it now in a louder, harsher voice. The laughter was gone, but the smile was still there, and it was a smile of sardonic aggression that carried much more menace than a solid frown.
I realized it was too late, as late as it ever was. A chain had been set in motion, and once the chain of events had started to unravel, it was nearly impossible to stop it. Each scene followed the previous one like frames in an old silent film, so old that all the actors were dead and nobody could provide a clear interpretation of the action any more. Once I saw that it was impossible to stop the sequence, I decided I didn’t need to try. Before I was fully conscious of what had just happened, the little piece of red brick was flying through the air and it was landing next to him, bouncing off the dry grass, close to his thigh. With reflexes much faster than mine, he had jumped aside just in time. The statement had been made and now I would stand back to learn the results.
He jumped up from the little wall of Zonia’s porch, up from the dirt and dry grass where he had rolled away, and he approached me with his arms up in the air. I stood where I was and I thought of various justifications for my actions and other tales of sadness, but my thoughts were all cut short when his hard fist landed squarely on my unprepared face. Then came the electrical storm, and my entire body went soft, as soft as a pile of rubber with no frame to hold it up. I felt my knees buckle, and I wondered to myself why were my knees buckling when I hadn’t been hit anywhere near my legs, and yet they bent and I slid backwards, like I had seen the street drunks do when they walked down this very street in the middle of the day. As they walked, they shifted from side to side, from one edge of the street to the other, deep in the midst of some private solitary discussion that could never reach a satisfactory conclusion, a discussion begun back when there had been someone there to listen. They slid to one gutter and then to the other, and, as they danced, with their legs flapping weakly like little stems broken in two, they narrowly escaped breaking their foreheads open against the curb, like a ripe orange cut in two, leaving a red mark on the dusty white concrete for kids like us to find the next day. I had seen them, and now I was like them, for my legs moved backwards and they were bent and as much as I tried to regain my footing, it seemed that I had no strength. I felt myself going sideways, and I reached out, trying to grab onto something, but there was nothing there to grab, no wall, no tree, no firm support at all.
The world itself seemed different just then, as if all the colors that surrounded me had changed their nature in a single instant, changed in a subtle way that I didn’t have the language to explain, not even to myself. Rodney didn’t look as he had looked before, even though his white shirt and his gray pants, and his twisted fingers and his long skinny arms, they were all there, but he was not the boy I had known, not the boy I had come to know as my friend, as my confidant, he was not a boy at all, and Ricardo, whose blue clad shape I could see from the edge of my eyes, he wasn’t a boy either, and the wall and the porch, and the house, and the street, they all seemed twisted and bent in shapes that they weren’t supposed to take, strange altered forms that didn’t match my expectations. I slid sideways, almost tumbled backwards, and I somehow managed to avoid falling. I straightened my legs and took a step forward. Then I looked at Rodney again. He was back to being a boy, the street kid I had known, the street kid I had first seen walking down Gemini with two others, all throwing stones at Luis, Ricardo’s younger brother, Rodney was back to being the street kid that had just rammed his hard closed fist against my face. I felt hurt then. My face was hurt. My head was hurt. My pride was hurt. But more than all of that, my vision of who they were and who I was among them, it was all hurt in a way that I couldn’t quite describe and I couldn’t even picture. I went home that night, thinking of white walls, and the touch of moist green grass against my cheeks.

* * *

Questions that went on forever, questions that rolled over the surface of a corrugated white wall, while the overgrown grass leaves flipped back and forth on the wind and the clouds moved in over our heads, letting us know it was time to go home. What I saw and what was actually there, out there in the real world beyond my individual perception, the two visions could hold some level of resemblance, sometimes very faint, sometimes so close as to seem indistinguishable, but how would I be able to tell when and where and how it was so? How could I determine when I had faded into a state of dream, where the bubbles would be airplanes, and the leaves would be ships, and the dirt would be an ocean and the carpet would be a desert? Maybe they were simply delusions, faint mirages of a mind that was not my own, it only seemed to be in my possession, I only appeared to live within it, but it truly was more like a rental car that we can treat very badly for a weekend and then carelessly return it with scratches all over the body and trash all over the floor.
The world outside the car could be as strange and as distant from what I saw as the dirty old homeless man on the corner of Taylor and Geary, the one who would look up when I passed by and would laugh with bloodshot eyes, eyes that would bulge out like red and white marbles, and he would stare up at the sky and see my silhouette combined with the clouds that would form a kind of halo around me, and he would laugh in such deep ecstasy that long globs of spit would slide out of the sides of his mouth and his broken yellow teeth would shake and rattle and the smell of old hot urine would rise from him like a cloud of weaponized gas, and I would still have to look at him, even if only for a moment. I would wonder at the strange alien reality of this beaten man, and wonder what it was that he saw, what kind of delusion was he experiencing when he looked up at me? Maybe I would stare at his dirty blackened rags and his stained thick striped gloves, that were cut off at the knuckles so that his blackened fingers could stick out (and the fingers were so black with dirt that they appeared to be gloves themselves) and I would think that he was crazy, he had gone past the line of no return, where a mind bobbed like a lost toy in the middle of a savage storm with no hope of rescue, no hope of ever finding a safe dry port. Maybe, sometime in the long forgotten past, when he was just a little boy with wide open innocent eyes and a whole wide brightly colored world before him, maybe back then he had suffered some form of brain injury, a sudden sharp blow to the head that could have come in many forms. Maybe, in one way or another, he had been hit very hard, and then maybe his world had been twisted and he had seen things that he shouldn’t, visions of the real that were not meant for human eyes, curling details that cut through your neural networks like spinning knives with perpetual momentum. Maybe he had seen himself as a little boy and maybe even then he had laughed, because what he saw was so strange and so utterly indescribable, so utterly alien to the simple words that people uttered all around him, so deep, so viscous, so ungraspable, so alive.
And now, when he looked up at some random pedestrian, a solitary man with long black hair and a dirty black jacket that happened to look at him as he crossed the street, maybe then he would look up once again and laugh, and maybe he would see a benevolent angel or an avenging demon, a otherworldly alien or a subterranean monster, a dream savior or an archetypal threat, and it would all be radiating with such intense colors, colors so deep and full and complex, and it would all have such an intense sense of immediacy, of reality revealed in its most raw form, right here on the corner of Taylor and Geary, that he would just have to laugh, and he would laugh hard, and spit and tears and urine would all slip out of his wasted body as he was shaking with laughter but none of it mattered, none of it could begin to compare.
I would stare at him only a moment longer, because I had other places to go, and I had to stare into that same world that he stared at, and I had to find a way to convince myself that the world I saw, the one that was colored in black and white and gray and soft hues, the one where the clouds spidered over the blue sky over buildings that resembled spaceships, I had to convince myself that that world was true, that what I saw was real, and that this man was simply deluded, simply crazy, simply wrong (as if the word "simple" fit easily into any of those categories.) If I looked at the street hard enough, with the man laughing, and the women giggling, and the cars honking, I might start laughing too, and then there would be no way to stop.
In those days, I pictured a strange maze of rooms, each small and clean and quiet, and each room held a little window that looked outside, out onto the street below, and you could go freely from one room to the other, the doors had no locks and there was nobody else around to stop you from exploring. There were so many rooms that the hallways never seemed to end, and my curiosity could never be fully satiated. From each window of each room the street looked different, the city itself looked different. Sometimes the difference was subtle and sometimes it was extreme. Through some of the windows people were not people at all, but strange tentacled beings from another galaxy, or walking mannequins without a face, or black slugs pulling on half broken attaches or large white shopping bags, or rumbling motorized vehicles that honked through a big hole right beneath their front exhaust. I could move from one room to another, as long as I could pull myself away from any particular vision, and in each room I would convince myself that the world was as it should be, that it could be no other way. It was crucial and absolutely necessary to forget that I had moved from one room to another, it was necessary to set aside the knowledge that, as clear and true as this window seemed to be, there still were others, and when I found myself there, then I would completely forget that I had ever been here and this window would be like a half remembered dream, quickly forgotten as the light of the real world intruded upon my fantasy.
If one day I happened to slip from one of the windows, maybe by accident, maybe by design, then I would find myself in free fall, arching through space in slow motion, watching the world lunge up at me like a giant mouth filled with cement teeth. I would be wincing in anticipation because soon my tender head would hit the ground in a big shower of fiery sparks, sparks that burned with the terminal quality of the absolutely real. Somewhere down there, amidst the slugs and the mannequins and the loud heavy machines, a homeless man would be laughing. I could hear him from the window, even before the fall.

* * *

Before us there was a vast field of green and brown and gray and even some patches of blue and white rock, all interlaced through a web of brown and black dirt. Behind us was the mountain of mystery that we had come looking for, and it towered above us like an explosion of rock and dirt and it pushed hard up into the sky, with little trails of trees and snow and enormous solid shapes of brown and white and we could only barely see it all through the web of branches that was above us and around us. We had prepared the clearing by outlining the different spots where our work would take place, the circle of the past, where we would remember the things that our bodies wanted to forget, the circle of emotion, where we would try to forget but the tears would roll down our cheeks anyway, cool and easy and gentle, flowing like tiny slender waterfalls from our wide open eyes and dripping onto our shirts and then vanishing into the cloth, and the circle of mind where we would dig deep into the malleable soil which was our intellect, and there we might find answers to questions we hadn’t yet spoken, and we might find traces and links where we could never see them before and new questions would emerge like giant flowers of radiant color, and we would never want to answer such questions, we would simply water them with our tears and let them grow.
But before any of that happened, there was only Ricardo and me, sitting by the edge of the clearing looking out at the great field before us, being very quiet and feeling the subtle urgency of the pregnant moment. I knew why we were here and he didn’t, not exactly, but he trusted me so much that he might as well have known, and maybe he already suspected. Maybe his suspicions were clear and specific or as vague as the extended diagonal forests that reached up towards the distant mountain peak at our backs. I knew what has hidden in my shirt pocket but maybe there were traces of darkness in my knowledge as well, as much as there were traces of knowledge in his emptiness. I had understood something so ephemeral that it slipped from my fingers if I tried to settle down on it like a playful bird, and so I had to circle it and circle it, without ever landing at all, and what I remembered I knew was only the trace of experience that was left after the real event was gone, and it was that real event that we were seeking. It would come unexpectedly, as much for me as for him, even if I had been there before, because it could not be held, it could not be restrained, it could not be pinned down and maintained like a book or a statue or a record. It was as elusive as the sound of the distant birds, or a single look of fear that crosses a good friend’s eyes, never to be indicated, never to be talked about, never to be heard of again.
I looked at him and I said:
"Are you ready? You can still change your mind…"
"I don’t know what we are doing… so I would have no reason to change my mind…"
I smiled and he smiled back at me, with only a hint of arrogance, and it was a hint that was always there so it could be removed from my memory easily, just like the noise of a passing train or the rumble of the trucks or the singing of the birds in my father’s terrace, loud and exotic and intense, and yet they could all fade, for my attention was now here, on him, on what we were about to do, today, together.
"Open your mouth…" I said to him, in a voice that trembled just slightly.
He turned, moved closer to me and opened his mouth wide, exaggerating the movement to let me know that he was in fact doing as I had asked.
"Push out your tongue…"
Again, he did as I told him without hesitation. I slipped my hand into my shirt pocket, pulled out my little plastic bag, and I placed the tiny piece of paper under his tongue. Then I smiled.
"Now hold it there, keep it there… don’t swallow it… just hold it there… and… wait…just wait…"
He nodded and smiled again, and then shook his head and retreated back into his zone which was so close to me and yet not the same. The twigs crackled under his weight as he moved, and a bird sang loudly in the distance, maybe as loudly as it had a moment ago, or maybe much louder. I followed the same procedure and placed the second tiny piece of paper under my own tongue. As I approached my open lips, I looked at it and saw, for one last time, the tiny golden key that was printed on it, with tiny little rays all around it, letting me know that it was glowing, letting me know that it was magic, letting me know that it opened doors that had no doorknobs and led to chambers that had no walls. I thought briefly of the homeless hippie that had sold it to me on Haight Street, of how lucky I had been to find him just in time, of his offer to try it with me and of my refusal, which came with a distinct taste of regret. I thought of my own solitary experiment, all on my own in my living room, an experiment simply meant to ascertain that these tiny pieces of paper were indeed what they claimed to be. I remembered the sounds and the fullness of my body, announcing its presence to my incredulous mind. I then brushed all these thoughts aside and I placed the tiny piece of paper under my tongue and closed my mouth.
"Now what?" he asked.
I raised my hands and let them float in the air like little balloons, feeling them trying to get away with the wind.
"Now we wait…it will come when we least expect it…the change will be subtle at first, but then it won’t be subtle at all…"
"Should we talk while we wait or should we be quiet?"
"We can do either… the space is set, we are on our way…now we simply let it happen."
Maybe we both thought we would talk right then, since we had never been at a shortage of words, since our conversations lasted deep into the night and started again early the next morning, but right then, we both looked towards the vast open field, and we both listened to the complex symphony of the many birds that were now singing, and we both listened to the crackling of the branches in the wind, and the sound of the hippies in the distance setting up their drums to invoke invisible extraterrestrial beings that may or may not arrive. And we waited. In the glorious silence. After a while, I raised my hand once again, and now it was floating so easily in the wind that I could sense no effort in my muscles, no effort at all, and it moved to a distinct rhythm that I hadn’t heard before, a rhythm that seemed to have been hidden behind the complexities of the details, a rhythm that required careful listening to even begin to discern its pulse. I stood up, and, without the hesitation or shame that I would have felt if I had been myself, I began to dance.

* * *

So I did it again, and again, and again, up the little incline, with all the reminders of ages of battle and little dead dogs with black eyeballs like marbles and wooden crosses broken apart by time and negligence, and from the edge, I would jump up onto the chain link fence, pushing my little fingers through the big gaps between the wire and I would scamper across, now faster than before, confident that it wasn’t so terrible to fall, since in fact it was my intention to fall purposefully in the end anyway. I discovered that I could move across the long stretch as fast as I could run over the grass if not even faster, and I discovered that once the fear was gone, a little bit of the edge was gone with it, but the world outside still beckoned with its infinity and the world inside was still frozen in deep patience, and I still found my way to the place where I needed to go, and I still flew through the air in slow motion, watching the ground rush up at me, like a giant truck made of grass and dirt and pebbles and there was still that sudden change, that clear distinct and digital transition from air to earth, from rapid flight to heavy stability, from open possibility to certain knowledge, and then there was the smell of the moist grass and the edges of the leaves against my cheek and, most of all, the crackling and the shifting of perspectives, so that the Queen of the Rebels, the one that waited in the dark caves behind the capulin tree, acquired Amaya’s face, and the magician of the island was just like the little skinny man that once gave me some old comic books, and the king was my father, and the soldier that ran across a strange ocean of green leaves of grass, all alone and in the depths of a terrible fear for his life, he might have been me, or someone very much like me, except I couldn’t see him too well through all the murkiness of the wet ground.
As time passed, it became a routine. I came to do it several times each afternoon, when my mother was away at work and Cruz was washing or ironing or away in the store, which could also mean that she was seeing her boyfriend or her family or some other maid down the block that had sweet new gossip to impart to her, sweaty information passed across the edge of a metal veranda, or through the open glass slates of a dark window, both maids looking in all directions around them in case the owner of the house decided to come home. Wherever she truly was, she was not here where she could see me, and neither was anyone else, so I was free to fly and crash, and then fly again, without interruptions, without calls to reason, without explanations, without a need for justifications or clear conclusions. It became one of my regular duties when I found myself in the grip of a heavy hot afternoon of endlessness, when the available options became fewer and smaller with each tick of the clock and the sounds became like mosquitoes buzzing against my skin and my ears. Whenever I felt the need for the world to change, it would change in an instant, right when I hit the ground, and then creation would start once again, with a swift gesture of brilliant color, with a smile surrounded by thin blonde hair over soft pink skin, with a bunch of little street kids laughing and screaming as they whirled their self made vehicle down the already cracked sidewalks that were just waiting to be cracked some more, with the King and the Queen and the Magician. It changed with the blood of the dying and the calls to renewed glory of the survivors, it changed in ways I couldn’t quite place, and the new form wasn’t what I wanted, it was the change itself that I sought, for the change had its own taste, its own sound, it own texture, and it could only last but a moment and soon it would be time to change again. Change came with a little jump up, a quick sideways scamper over a chain link fence and a fearless jump into the void, which was always there, which was always new, which would never leave me waiting, which would never hide, which would never stop giving of itself for it had nothing else to give, nothing else to surrender.

* * *

I embarked on a long series of experiments, a steady sequence of voyages that moved by terrestrial inches, while jumping over invisible miles, the distances that have no placement in the maps of humans and have no measuring stick in the innards of computers. One by one, they gave their gifts to me, they who had no face and discernable existence, and one by one, I stepped through the many doorways, falling face forward in some, arching through the air gracefully in a gentle curve without imperfections, falling backwards in others, hands flapping away in desperation, anxiously trying to find a place to hold onto, trying to find some kind of support. I could then stretch my view all over the past, where these voyages scattered like pieces of a broken movie, each frame still alive with expectation but missing its cause and its consequence, and I could stare into those lonely frames trying to find in them what seemed to be hidden, but was right there all along, and if I couldn’t see it, it was only because I was looking underneath, I was trying to find explanations in the invisible realm when the answer was in the skin itself all along, not in the guts. The guts were just blood and pumping machines, the face held all the true secrets. But I wouldn’t want to look where I could be seen as well, for the face had eyes, and the wide open eyes were themselves in the process of looking.
I came to realize that all the words that I had previously thought meant something, they were only tiny symbols that hung on the edges of the real world, like tiny papers on a moist tongue, and, when they hang at the tip of your own tongue, they taste like metal, and when you feel them sliding around, you want to slip them back into place, for it would be no good to swallow them (not wanting to understand that I had already swallowed so many, that my stomach was lined with thousands of layers of flowery blue wallpaper, so many layers, one on top of the other, that it would take forever to make our way to the real wall that was covered underneath it all, and maybe, by the time we had made it all the way through, we would then discover that the wall itself was no longer there, it had been only wallpaper all along, nothing else.)
I had swallowed Spanish and I had swallowed English, as they were two of the most popular drugs (the kind of drug that you would be offered freely and which you would gracefully accept, unaware of the heavy price tag that came attached at the end of the surreptitious transaction.) They were the two rooms with the largest windows, large picture windows that seemed to embrace the outer world in their strong wide frames, and each caressed the sides of my brain with a distinct texture, and each had its own obsessions, and each had its own dreams. I saw it when my friend Carlos rocked back and forth in the darkness of a wooden cabin, shadows splattering across the shining glow of the candlelight while the ocean outside caressed the giant white rocks like salty lips on overgrown breasts, and when he said "que pasa?" he became a boy, innocent, gentle, questioning, wondering, full of the sincere curiosity that I recognized and loved, and when he said "what’s up?" he became a man, knowledgeable, harsh, tough, certain of things that he had never seen, but which, since they had already been spoken, they had been placed in metal files and stored away forever, never to be seen again, much like my mail and my clippings, that would wait for years before I might look at them again, and maybe their sentence would never end, and maybe my own was the same. Carlos looked at me on that night of shadows and flickering candlelight, and he looked at me much like his brother had on a night of stars and an ancient mountain of magic, he looked at me with wide open eyes full of shocked recognition when I said: "Talk to me in Spanish…once again… there’s something that’s different…there’s something that changes… when you talk in Spanish…" and he turned and he nodded, his mouth falling open without him realizing it, shaping a big O with his pale lips as the vision made its way into his own inner chambers, and he said…"Hey… I think I see what you mean…I see what you’re saying…I…" but I shook my head and I said, "no, no, no… in Spanish…"
It was maybe only a matter of being exposed to many forms, structures, constructions, forms that were as different from each other as they could be, and maybe it was a matter of not surrendering to translation, to the deadly isomorphism that equates things that can never be equated, the sounds of butterfly wings with the sounds of heavy metal arms ripping cars apart, the immediacy of eternity with the oppressing heaviness of a very long time, the soft whispering aperture of "que pasa" with the cutting edge finality of "what’s up". It could not be the same, no matter how much we might want it to be, it would not be the same, not at all, and the symbols would flash right through my cortex, like tiny lights that flicker in the middle of the night in old abandoned cemeteries, and they whisper of worlds beyond the apparent closure of the tombstones, all hard rocks, all etched with words that had been forgotten just a few days after the last tears were shed, words that now referred only to maggots and old bones and broken old black hats, and if you pulled them up, if you pulled them hard by the roots, then the gruesome rotting things would just come flying out, like a swarm of wasps in search of new food. But how I wished that somewhere down there was the answer, if only it would burst out and come at me flying, open mouth lined with threatening fangs and salivating tongue, and it would then tell me, once and for all, before devouring me, it would tell me that this is true, this is the language, these are the words, there is no more need for searching, you have found what you were looking for, it is now time to rest.
All along, the lights would keep on blinking, letting me know that the answer was indeed at hand, but it would come in an unsuspected form, and I would never touch it with the metal arms or the butterfly wings, and I would slide through the holes between the graveyards without ever being touched, without being eaten, and I would never even kiss it or make it mine, for it had no lips to kiss and it had no manifestation to posses. But it was there, just around the corner, where the inner mucus of my brain still danced to a rhythm that was older than my music, where the music itself was more complex than the classical symphonies I had so eagerly studied, trying to find within them the same key that I once stole from the wall of a patio when the maid wasn’t looking, and yet it was more simple, so simple as to be discarded by the blue buildings, so simple as to be forgotten, so simple as to be overlooked. The lost steps, as my mother’s friend had once pointed out, the lost steps were just around the corner, and they led past the graveyard, past the wallpaper, past the obsessions, past the frozen movies themselves, and in their decisive finality, and in their open invitation, and in their harshness and roughness, and in their taste of green leaves of grass and dark moist earth, they resembled nothing more than a sharp, hard blow to the head.

* * *

It was a narrow, empty street paved with sharply defined gray bricks. Along the opposite side ran a long wall of inverted arches. At its highest point, the wall was only about four feet tall, and beyond it, there was a small lawn that surrounded the single story buildings where the foreign students lived. We were sitting inside a small car that Rodney had borrowed for the occasion of my visit. I had been in Darmsdadt only a few days but we had already covered the essential points of biographical interest. After not seeing each other for many years, in a matter of a few hours of intense conversation, we had already established what we had been doing, what our human landmarks had been and what we intended to do in the future. There were, of course, areas that would remain in silence (some of them would always remain silent no matter how much we tried to approach them) and there were areas that were quickly touched upon which would have required many more hours to fully explore. A lot of it had to be done in English because my friend Rick had come with me from San Francisco, which made for very awkward exchanges, since Rodney didn’t like talking in English and Rick didn’t know how to talk in Spanish, so I had to become a constant translator and interpreter and diplomat between two beings who refused to look at each other in the eyes. It was a position I was accustomed to, a position I even welcomed, but it did involve a great deal of effort and it made a higher level of communication almost completely impossible to achieve.
But here, on this particular night, it was only the two of us, Rodney and me, and we could breathe easy because all the expected and required conversation was over and we could finally settle into the unexpected, into the realms which we both desired to touch but had to wait for the right moment to invoke them into full manifestation. We were simply sitting in Rodney’s borrowed car, taking a moment before going back to his little dorm where Rick waited (leaning back on a soft pillow on Rodney’s mattress, reading "The Three Musketeers") The German air felt crisp and cold all around us, as crisp and cold as the Germans I had met so far, just as heavy, just as straight, just as blank. The small car creaked as we accommodated our bodies within it, and it soon became clear that it was time to get comfortable, as he leaned his seat back and asked me to do the same. I smiled and pushed my own seat back, turning my face towards him.
"As you may have guessed, there’s some things I haven’t told you…" I said it in a soft, slow voice, that carried within it a clear call to attention.
He nodded, in the same way he used to nod back in La Satelite, with a quick uptake of his chin and a gentle shake to the left and to the right, a gesture I might have seen his father make while sitting on the old faded green couch of his living room, when he was rushing by us on his way to some mysterious errand, little leather attaché in hand.
"I know. I figured as much…go on…"
He stretched his hands, and his fingers were older and marked by the years, wrinkled and rough, but they were still the old twisted fingers that pointedly reached out in a half broken spiral to a world that somehow escaped his most sincere attempts at understanding. He was wearing a South American shirt, all bright colors and thick cloth, intended to show his acknowledgement of his Latin race, a subtle political statement that was also an emotional silver cord attached to a hot world that he had left far behind. He was also wearing straight German pants, intended to show nothing in particular. Somewhere under this strange new costume, he was still the street kid I had seen walking down Gemini street so many years ago, the same one that combed his hair all the way to the right, for pure comic effect, the same one that laughed off the side of his mouth, in a precise imitation of Curly from the Three Stooges, the same one that had sat with me for hours on end, on gentle afternoons of breeze and sun and laughter, playing chess, listening to Black Sabbath while only half understanding the lyrics, talking about girls and girls and more girls, their faces, their words, their bodies, their intentions, their unexplainable ability to be always just slightly too far away, the same one that stood up one afternoon and almost knocked me off my feet with a single punch.
The street kid was still there but it took some careful observation to recognize him. There were layers of cold German experience that covered the old and battered mask. He was older now, so much older that I nearly didn’t recognize him when I got off the train at the Darmsdadt station, and it was only when I thought I saw his father, off the corner of my eyes, it was only when it struck me as strange that Rodney’s father should be here in Darmsdadt when it was supposed to be Rodney that was waiting for me (waiting to hug me once again after so many years of warm silence and wrinkled stories), it was only when the straightforward logic of simple linear mathematics struck me like a white glove across the face, it was only then that I realized it was him, it was him that was waiting, pulled back thick skin circling a tight lipped smile. His eyes were bulging out in a way that made him seem vaguely amphibian and he reached out to me tentatively, as if he was just as surprised by my sudden appearance as I was surprised by his. As the minutes passed, and our voices caressed the silence with their rhythmic pitchless melodies, and the sounds of the German all around us created a sphere of closeness around us draped in Spanish, a Spanish so soft here that it tasted of drying parchment, I began to fully accept that it was truly him, the same one I remembered, the same one I had come to see. The same jokes were there, spilling over each other like old beaten up cassette tapes that have been fixed with scotch tape and lipstick, sometimes supplemented with new references, new stories, but still gyrating around the same subjects, the same words, the same unavoidable punch lines. It felt good to hear it all, even if more than a little strange. It was like tasting the old chocolate milk that I had known when I was little, and feeling it too sweet, too simple in my mouth as it first touched my tongue, but soon switching back into the boy who had always known it and then smiling, because it was the same once again, and I was the same, and nothing at all could ever change and that was exactly what I had always wanted. Rodney, here in this little car, in this empty street in the outskirts of a small German city, was like chocolate milk, like Chinese Food in San Salvador, like pupusas in San Francisco, like heavy words and simple phrases high in the mountains of madness.
"I have tried some things… I’ve done some experimenting… things I haven’t told you over the phone…I have tried many different things…I believe that…I have come to understand some things, some things that can’t be easily transmitted." As I said it, my hands lifted up and I let them flutter in the air, in a way that was unlike myself, unlike my old habitual movements. His eyes went towards them and I let myself dance lightly next to him, in a gentle way that subtly reminded me of what I couldn’t communicate, hoping that it would touch the parts within him that I couldn’t reach. The cold air seeped in from the half open windows of the little car, but I felt an immediate sense of growing warmth.
"I want to give this to you… I know how to do it now… but we can’t achieve this as we are… in order to communicate at all, we have to change, we both have to change… at least temporarily…"
He nodded, and his eyes started to widen, and his teeth started to show between his thin pale lips. He clearly didn’t know what I was talking about, but he knew enough to know that he should be glad. Good news had arrived from the other side of the ocean.
"I had wondered about your hand movements… I had… it all seemed strange so I had asked myself… I asked myself what it could mean, you know?…I figured you would bring it up sooner or later… I just had to wait…I knew there was more to it… something you weren’t saying…but go on…"
"I just want you to know… all through human history, some people have known about this… we just happen to be lucky enough to be living in an age when it is relatively easy to access…people like us, we would never get anywhere near it otherwise… and still, it is not so easy… the normal people fear it… they don’t want to change… not even for a moment…and they don’t want anyone else to change either…it threatens their life, their sense of reality…"
He nodded once again, and I could almost hear his heartbeat within his narrow chest growing like an Andean drum to accompany the raspy low zamponas of our voices. Everything about him was angular and narrow and crackly and full of edges and here I was, offering him a way to become soft, to open, to become tender, vulnerable, shapeless.
Two young German boys walked down the sidewalk, past our car. They were both blond and paper white. One of them carried a small backpack on his back. They talked in soft voices that still seemed vaguely military because of the implied rhythms of their language. They looked at us out of the corner of their eyes and we looked back. It was not too difficult to visualize what they had assumed about us but at that point I was several steps past caring. While they walked close to our car, I stopped talking and our eyes trailed their movement like small animals would trail the passing of a large predator in a dark forest. I resumed talking when they were a few cars away.
"When I encountered this… I knew I had to share it… at the very least with the people I loved the most…people like you…"
"But how… where….?" He raised his hands in front of his face, opening his long twisted fingers wide and shaking his head in resignation. "I don’t know anyone here… I don’t…"
I smiled at him then, in a way that erased the limits of our given roles for a moment, in a way that reached over through the cold still air within the small car and made him smile as well.
"You…?"
"I have taken care of everything… all you need to do is say yes…"
He leaned back and pursed his lips and let out a very soft whistling sound, and then he laughed in the old cackling way that I recognized, loud enough that sleeping students in the building across the street might have thought a witch on an old broomstick was flying by.
"Fuck! That is so… so… I’ve always said it… somewhere over there… on the other side of the world… I have real friends… the real thing…and this is it… you find it… all the way over there… and you bring it over to me… all the way over here… fuck!"
I smiled and nodded.
"That’s right. So?"
"So? Yes, of course, yes. Fuck, yes! What else can I say?"
And then there was a long silence followed by more cackling laughter. I laughed as well, in anticipation of the timeless laughter we would soon be sharing in a vast space that would not have so many walls.

* * *

Neurobiology hints at the place where the metal wires run right up to the edge of warm and moist dark tunnels covered in slime and smelling like death many times over, death that never tires of giving, death that will always find another form to shake and break apart. It makes your muscles shiver in the way that unholy incestuous unions will push their way through the surface of your eyes and touch the realms within in places that they shouldn’t be touched, places where they wouldn’t be touched, and yet there it is, as real as anything, electronic signals fuming like pistols in the darkness and bursts of smoke that come with a hint of metal and the gurgling of blood and the last brief instants of final regret as the wooden roof above you slowly fades into night. It is a trip inside, to the caves and mazes where the dragons live, where a fearsome large man runs around naked and covered in wet mud, large black horns sticking straight up from the sides of his head, mooing like the beast that he is as he makes his way along the endless dark hallways. You can’t see him or know when he is coming, but he is definitely coming, sooner or later, and he comes with the bleeps and bursts of static that you would not want to find here, not here, where you might finally hope for pure analog freedom, a respite from the digital, a sanctuary from the coldness of the choice. Even here, in the depths of the hidden maze, the edge of the binary will arrive to haunt you.
May the inner world then explode outwards, may it break the walls that hold it, yes may it break those very same walls covered in slime and smelly substances we can’t quite place in the dictionary or the encyclopedia, no matter how hard we try, for their nature escapes categorization and by the time you think you can pinpoint it, it has already changed. It pushes its way out, out from under the ground, out from the recesses where we can’t ever lay claim to its ever changing outlines. May it then become that which is hidden and may it manifest as it is, as it has ever been. May it come into full blinding presence. May it look down upon me as I look up at you and, with only a hint of the underlying fear, I tell you: "We are living within it. This thing all around us. It is the subconscious. It is what people have called the subconscious… but it is so much more than that. The word doesn’t nearly encompass its true meaning. It only seems fixed and static because we want it to be so. We are only vainly hoping that it will remain in place, just so we can have a little peace, a little rest, a moment of calm before the hurricane begins again. But the walls drip with unwholesome slime and even now they are closing in around us, tighter and tighter, absolutely unstoppable. We can only shift through its many levels and keep on moving, let it travel through our insides and let us then become that which we don’t even want to see, that which we don’t even want to remember."
And it was true then, on an early morning of pastel colors emerging from the raging darkness, and as true as it was then, it would be true now and forever, for time itself is only a continuous itch that we scratch through the endlessness of creation and, for a moment, a moment that had no barriers but it had no end, that which no words can limit had come out in its full flower, and it rained through her face and down from the ceiling, all over the garden and out into the sky and I was open mouthed and amazed and I held within me all emotions at once: fear, love, ecstasy, loneliness, sadness, enthusiasm, anger, compassion, and, most of all, glee… and they had all become indistinguishable from each other, their only true quality was intensity and they were all at full throttle at the time, and they were true in their indistinguishable nature, more real than they had ever been because they had shed all illusions and they were simply the thrust of the real upon the surface of the past. Such things could not ever be clearly understood, not by the me that was not there, the me that would never be there once it all became a memory, not by the woman who looked down upon me with a facial mask draped in concern, not by the solemn sage who would forever claim that he did understand and then speak in the language of locks and metal and dirty dungeons where skinny old men slowly rot away the remaining years of their life, certainly not understood, for understanding itself was a fallen idol, broken by the side of the road, forgotten and abandoned, and as I passed it by, I felt not a pang of sadness, for it had always led to pain and I knew then that pain was its true nature, hidden in the electrical wires, in the explosions of smoke, in the long black tendrils that kept the city alive, in the little tones of the hidden TV screens behind half closed windows. Out here there was nothing and everything. In there, there was something that held onto an endless lack.
I blurted out words that bounced off the slimy walls like silver pinballs and each word broke into its components which were more words and dreams and images and memories and illusions and they themselves emerged to call onto me, to tell me things that would have no meaning once time reclaimed its rightful position and the words reconstituted themselves into the things they had never been. It was clear that such places were difficult to maintain and that the fall would occur at any moment, sooner than later, as soon as awareness of the great height came upon me and I made the mistake of looking down, so far down to where the something waited, the something that I could see right through, the something that was a bubble of space laced with metal wires, sparkling with electrical fire dipped in fetid swamp mud, laced with the responsibility of continuity, burdened with the endless weight of time, of latching onto what had happened and what would come after the fall, looking down I could tremulously hesitate, I could shake from side to side and let myself float for a few more moments, for a single moment was all I truly needed, and I could already hear my own metal thoughts trying to determine what hidden mechanisms were responsible for producing these infinite hallucinations, and I had no reply for it because all replies were of its world and this is how it tempted you into falling: by asking, by demanding, by sending queries in little bottles up the ladder and saying: "Just for a moment, let’s figure this out… then we can return…" but there is no such thing as an easy return, there never was. Every single step up the ladder is hard fought and easily lost. Every single time you turn around to look is a moment of borrowed time, and it comes an instant before the inevitable fall. I could only hold up here, quiet, still, silent, let the questions caress me with their copper flesh, let them wrap around my skin like a veil of cutting finality, they had no power for as long as I remained afloat, for as long as I maintained the lightness that had brought me up here in the first place. Sooner or later, I would taste the solid ground against my mouth and it would invade my nothingness with a heavy body and it would fill my void with a name. But I would hold on tight for a single more moment, my little fingers curled around the metal wires. For a moment was all I needed. A single moment was all there ever was.

* * *

"He was guy that showed up one day at the Center. He was tall and thin, very white skin, short cropped hair, slender eyes… I had never seen him there before."
Ricardo was leaning back on his bed, his head resting on the dark wood of the bed frame. He was wearing light brown pants and no shirt and no shoes. One of his feet was perched on the edge of the desk opposite the bed, the other rested among the pillows. I was seated on the opposite side of the bed, with my head against the dark wooden bed frame, and I was prompting him with short open questions. Even though I had heard this story before, I had already noticed, even at that early age, that as the story was told again, more details might come through, more elements might be added, there was always the possibility of new vistas if I only asked some more.
"Where did he come from?"
"I have no idea. He probably had heard about Fanci’s lectures, maybe on the radio, maybe from someone else, he had a very serious demeanor, as if he had come to check up on us, to see if we were worthy of him…"
I pictured him in my mind dressed in dark clothes, leaning against a wall in Fanci’s Center. I pictured the walls covered with posters and sayings of wisdom, placed haphazardly around the rooms, like little colorful traps meant to capture your wandering attention.
"Did he come by himself?"
"Yes, I believe so. He stayed after the talk… he stood outside with me in the porch as the people left, and we talked for a while… that’s when he told me about the helmets…"
"Tell me again about that," I laid sideways on the bed and allowed my weight to crush the small hard pillows that were scattered over the bedspread. I grabbed one and placed it behind my head, trying to find a rest from the hard wooden frame. Ricardo turned towards me in my new position, his eyes flared for a moment and then he jumped into the well worn story.
"He said that the Nazis had strange esoteric experiments that they did with the high members of the SS…their most trusted soldiers…very strange things that have never been told…"
"How did he know about them?"
"He didn’t say…I didn’t really ask him… he seemed to imply that he had access to knowledge that was not readily available…"
"I wonder if his father… or someone in his family… but anyway, keep going…" I pulled up on the pillow by my head so that it would nestle my skull a bit better, trying somehow to protect my fragile cranium from the hardness of the wall.
"He said that they would put on big helmets… big thick heavy helmets that would cover their whole heads and all the way down to their shoulders and necks…then they would bury them with these helmets on…"
I was looking right at Ricardo, but I was picturing these German soldiers, all dressed in black, burying one of their fellow soldiers in a gigantic black helmet that made me think of the Egyptian pharaohs I had seen in the Kaliman comic books. I could see their silhouettes in my mind’s eye, shadows moving slowly and methodically against a bright orange sunset. They had no faces, these soldiers that lived only in my mind, they were simply the Nazis, and they were white and blonde and dressed all in black, and they carried a cloud of mysterious evil around them, soldiers embedded in the thick of a terrible cosmic war, devoid of fear or compassion, devoid of personality or likes or dislikes, simply shadows intent on strange purposes that I couldn’t even begin to understand. I could hear the sound of the shovels and the little clumps of dirt hitting the ground, and I could hear the breathing of the man who would be buried, coming from under the great big metal helmet that made him more alien that he already was.
"Once he was buried, they would place a bomb close to his head and run for cover. The bomb would then explode very close to the buried man…"
I would then imagine the terrible explosion and the intense echoes that would resonate within the helmet, waves of pure force travelling through soil and metal and bone and tissues, I would imagine the deep and all encompassing blow to the head that would change this man forever, in a strange way that was beyond my grasp. At least that was the expressed purpose, at least that is what Ricardo said.
"Why did they do it again? What did he say?"
"He said it was meant to wake up the kundalini… the hidden energy within all of us… the hidden force that lies at the base of the spine…it was meant to do it quickly and aggressively… without the slow methods that we have come to know…"
I wondered what the man would be like once the others dug him out. I could see the others holding him up, and I could see his trembling body, I could see his bulging eyes, his tangled blonde hair, his knowing smile, his clutching thick hands. But most of all, I could feel the sudden explosion, the rumbling sound within the giant helmet, the darkness that suddenly succumbed to the light of purposeful endings, of a willful face to face confrontation with violent death.
"I suppose his father told him…?"
"Yes, he did mention his father. He said his father knew about it…"
I imagined then that his father had been one of these men, maybe even the man inside the helmet, maybe his father had been changed in this terrible way and he had emerged alive in a new way, and anything that came from him would be changed as well, and that would explain the utter strangeness of the young man that I had only met through Ricardo’s eyes.
"Did he ever come to the talks again?"
"No, he never did. I always looked for him, but he never showed up."
We stayed in silence for a while, listening to the barking of Pirata, Ricardo’s dog, coming from the terrace above, and the sound of a single cart being pushed slowly down Gemini street, a little bell tinkling and a man calling out, offering ice cream and "paletas". Ricardo’s eyes were fixed on mine and my own eyes were fixed on his, and the vibration of our contact amplified the sounds like an echo chamber. A car was slowly moving up Galaxia, maybe looking for an address. A boy whistled loudly in the distance.
"Our fathers determine so much of what we are…" I said.
"Yes…it is a kind of physical destiny…what we can become is, to some degree, determined by what came before us…"
I allowed my eyes to roam over Ricardo’s face, grasping the details as opposed to the whole, recognizing the elements that came together to form the creature I called my friend. I could see his father there, thinner, younger, more open, less profound, but still there, looking out through soft new eyes.
"You know…" Ricardo started to speak and then he hesitated for a moment, which was not at all like him, so that one little hesitation carried much more weight than it would have in anyone else and made me see that what he was about to say hurt him in some undefinable way. After the short pause, he continued, "you know, both our fathers were alcoholics…"
I nodded, repressing a sudden urge to argue. I was much too curious to hear what else he had to say and I didn’t want to divert him by taking a side road that would take us off the path where he was headed.
"It’s true…" I said, in open expectation of what would come next.
"It’s possible that that is the only reason that we pursue the things that we do… I read that children of alcoholics tend to follow strange paths… it is difficult for them to reconcile with reality as it is presented… like us… very much like us…it’s possible that all we are… all we have been and all we will be…it’s possible that it comes down to that and nothing more."
I heard his words and I wondered at their meaning. I had never thought of my father as an alcoholic before. I knew he drank and I knew that, when he did, he drank a lot. I had been with him plenty of times, surrounded by his other drunk friends, swimming in the deep pools of unbridled semi unconscious discussion and confession that was propitiated by the alcohol. These sessions had always held a level of mysterious promise within them, they had also held a certain level of ungraspable danger. I had worried when my Dad would drive us back home, his speech slurred, his eyes turning towards me to tell me how much he loved me as I thanked him and tried to get him to look back towards the road ahead. But I never felt like he was captured by it, I never felt that the drinking actually ruled my father’s life. But that could be the blindness of my innocence talking, the simple refusal to see that which sits right in front of us. I knew my grandfather was an alcoholic, or at least he described himself that way, and others confirmed it. He would often refer to the ways of doing things in Alcoholics Anonymous and to his many years of abstinence and of the dark years that came before, and he would say, clearly and openly, without any sign of hesitation or doubt, that he was an alcoholic and that he would always be. So I had heard the word often before, but it had never been used to describe my Dad.
Ricardo said it with such certainty that I left it hanging in the air, I didn’t want to require a clear definition just then, instead I wanted to explore the meaning of his statement. I wanted to turn it around like a precious jewel and dive into its rich colors, feel its weight, trace its delicate details. Ricardo’s own father I had always known as a calm, peaceful gentle man full of wisdom, a man who sat and read by the shaded doorway of their welcoming home, a man that talked in a slow deep voice that inherently invited me to listen and trace the crackling outlines of his words. I didn’t think of him as an alcoholic or an addict, I didn’t see him as being out of control at all. If anything, I saw him as one of the more controlled men I had ever met. But, like my grandfather, he had a film of dark years behind him that hung like a heavy cloud over the memories of an entire family. Maybe it was true. Maybe Ricardo had suddenly hit on a clear explanation for so many unanswered questions. Maybe they had both drank so much, our fathers, that the alcohol had spilled over down the years and it had twisted our brains around in ways that nobody could ever have predicted, and now we sought, in our own twisted way, for new twisted answers in twisted places where there were no answers at all. Of course our own twisted nature would be forever invisible to ourselves, for it was our own twisted minds that would be doing the looking.
"It could then be that our whole lives were determined before we were ever born…and we would never know it…not unless something shakes us up… shakes us out of our trance…something unusual… something not of the world that we have known…"
I thought again of the buried man in a black uniform and of the great helmet that covered a full third of his body and of the big explosion that was close enough to either kill him or change him forever in way that I couldn’t comprehend. Was there any difference between those two choices? To die or to change. Were they not two doorways that led out to a wide open field where the breeze was blowing. The boy whistled again in the distance. Another car drove slowly by. The sound of little children laughing came bubbling out of the car’s open windows.

* * *

It would be difficult to trace exactly where or when I had first heard of them, how they had come into the chambers of my dreams like fluttering birds with wings of many colors, how they had insinuated themselves into my world, my world of safety behind beige colored curtains and brown women in light blue uniforms that only barely covered their soft coffee colored thighs. But they had indeed come and they had come with assumptions and images of half naked men and women, young for others, old for me, running up and down a solitary beach, at the crack of dawn, the naked breasts jiggling up and down as the women shook with laughter, the men pursuing them with open smiles that let their teeth shine brightly in the young soft sun that was only starting to emerge, and the sound of the waves, licking at the wet sands and announcing that here again was the place that had always been but it was today as fresh as a baby’s eyes, and once again the salty water would drench them in life and the life would pour through their many crevices and the men would catch up to the running women and they would embrace, sprinkled by the cold white fingertips of the water, all in couples, all as one, and they would kiss and laugh some more, pressing their sweaty soft bodies against each other, and then the game would start again, and it would once again be as if it had never happened before.
But I wasn’t there, I was not there at all. I was in my bedroom many miles away from the beach, and my mother, sitting by her desk full of pens and make up, she was telling me about the hippies and about the things they did, about the strange drugs they took to open their minds up to the winds and the rain and the large green leaves that fluttered like giant tentacles, and she said that then, when they were up there in the middle of their strange journeys into themselves, then they would see things, awesome things that weren’t truly there but still they saw them, and these things they saw had color and sound and shape and a kind of purpose that could only be truly understood by the one doing the observing, and these things she called hallucinations. I wondered at the sound of the word itself and how it splashed like salty water on moist sand, and how it flew like the birds across a deep dark realm of giant bushes and long thick leaves and I wondered why they did it, and I wondered if they knew themselves enough to know why they did it, or if somebody did, but my mother just shook her head, as she would always do through the years when she would surrender quickly at the appearance of a question that could not be easily answered, and then she didn’t wonder anymore, because these were all things of the hippies and they were them and this was us, me and her, in our little apartment behind the white building, in the midst of a dark garden that sometimes hinted at the vast deep greenness of the world by the beach.
Hallucinations then, as far as I could grasp it, were perceptions, flashes of light and sound, much like a gang of little dirty boys rolling down the sidewalk in their self made vehicles of tin and wood and cardboard and skater wheels and their laughter and their screams and their laughter once again, hallucinations were embedded in their fearlessness, in their rough exterior that masked a soft vulnerable core, as foreign to me as they were, as far from me as them. Hallucinations were the monsters of my many comic books, the flashing of bat wings and the rain of energetic bursts brought upon by the union of four blue clad warriors in the midst of galactic battle, it was a man from the stars who had come to rescue our planet, who would materialize explosively into being when needed by the human race, who maintained contact with his old school from the stars where a man with long curved horns waited in the darkness of empty space for news from his many agents through the galaxies that were scattered like white dust across the void.
Hallucinations were things that were not real, and, I had come to understand, all things that were not real were to be desired above the things that were. By their very unreality they became rare, and in their rarity they were valuable. Embraced in this simple equation were the stories of my grandmother about the man of the snows that attacked unsuspecting explorers in the midst of snow storms and his face was a gruesome mask of fangs and red eyes and wild white hair, and I would have my grandmother describe him over and over again, even if I had come to understand that she had never seen him and that she didn’t even herself believe the things that she was telling me, it was still good to hear her saying them, to hear her mouthing the words that described things that could never be. Listening to her then would be like running with the hippies, to run off into the world of the Never-was and the Never-will-be and find the colors that were missing, the giant leaps that could not be made, the walls that could not be built, the moments that could not be conquered, not here, not in a world of grayness and chain link fences that betrayed the rainbows that hid beyond.
As much as I knew what I was doing when I climbed up the wall, as much as I knew what I was doing when I jumped head first into the green surface of the yard, as much as I knew about the sudden change that the hard earth would bring to my eyes and nostrils and ears, I didn’t know hardly anything at all, and in that ignorance rested my adventure. For the journey itself was much stranger than my grandmother’s wild man of the snows or the pitched battles of a metal man from the stars. In the world of the hippies, I came to see that what is seen from the outside only holds the barest relationship to the thing that is inside, and that all the things I had been told were wrong in such a basic way that I couldn’t even begin to fix them, certainly not by talking, and talking is all I could do. (I saw all this once, laying next to Ricardo under an orange tent, in a little clearing by a mountain of legendary magic, on a night when the colors and the symbols of the hippies took on an entirely different weight.)
The worlds beyond, the worlds into which I eventually yearned to travel, they were not elsewhere, they were not long trips into lands of unreality, they were a jumping off, head first, into the world that had always been there. What changed was not the place where I was, but the thing that was seeing it, and that change could not be held tightly in a metal container, it could not be described, it could not be frozen in place to eat again the next day like a little bowl of Jell-O, it was quick in its appearance and quick in its vanishing, it was a single look down at my hand, at the veins, at the skin, at the red light coming down from the tall ceiling, at the hand that was next to it, at Rick, the man who was now my friend but whom I truly didn’t know at all, at his gentle smile that made me think of elves and gnomes, at his curious eyes that spoke to me in a way that I had never recognized, at the loud music that still came from the vast chamber next door in violent bursts of static and electronic drums, all full of people dressed in black, dancing and jumping against the red light like a scene from hell, but a hell where the music was stepping out beyond the limits of what I understood as music, where the dancing was stretching far beyond the boundaries of what physical bodies could withstand. It was all here all along and yet I had never seen it, and there were no hallucinations, there was no unreality, there were colors but they were simply the colors that had always been there, right in front of me, like the birds, and the water of the ocean spilling over by the hippies running into each other and laughing, like the long green leaves, like the pebbles, the brown and red dirt, the singing in the distance, the laughter, the sudden jump into space and the welcoming embrace of the hard ground beneath.
Here then, all that I had ever heard about the world, about tradition, about God and the Angels and the Demons and the great vast intelligence that was shapeless energy, that was structured thought, that was creation, that was the Absolute, it all descended to a place where I could touch it, where I could run my fingertips over its surface and feel its reality that left all the words that had described it far behind. Or maybe I was pulled up by unknown forces and brought up to a place where it could faintly reach my open eyes, but the place was just like the one I had left, exactly the same, in all its details, in all its light and shadow, except it was alive and I was alive within it, alive in a way that made me question what or where I had been before. It all meant so much more than my mind had ever dared to imagine, and meaning itself was then breaking apart like the threads of language that I had once thought were clear and unquestionable understanding. Here was what stood behind it all, up here I could see it all as a single thing, a single frozen thing that had always been and would always be, and there was nothing good about it and there was nothing bad about it either, there was nothing to change and nothing to stop from changing, nothing to fix and nothing to conquer, nothing to achieve for everything had been achieved already. Here was a strange man with a black beard and no shirt and a little collar around his neck, and this strange man looked very much like the hippies that I had seen running by the beach so many years ago, the ones I had only seen in my mind but which lived as a memory just as vivid as any other memory from that time, and he was sliding into the same place they had once scouted, the same place that the men of knowledge had explored so many thousands of years ago, the same place that opened secret doorways and pushed you through long dark hallways filled with fearsome figures of nightmare. This was the place and I was here. This was not a simulation. This, for once, was real.
And the place itself would always stray just a step beyond description, and so there would only be colors and sounds and sights to relay to the ones who stayed behind, and there would be things to say about what it wasn’t, and things to say about what happened, and things to say about the long slide down, but there would never be anything to say about its true nature, nothing to say at all. Now I understood what my mother had said to me so long ago, what she had said with a simple shake of the head, and I understood why she had said it, and I understood why it had been said to her, there was really nothing much more that could be said, and so, if we must speak, we could only lie, and if we had to lie, we might as well make the lies as profuse and as complex and as strange and as beautiful as we could possibly make them, because as great as they were, they stood under the weight of something so much greater that they would always fail to touch it or change it or shake it in any conceivable way. This was not expansion of the mind, even though the mind would think so, this was not hallucination even though language would say so, this was not religion even though the dogma would try to hold it and wrestle it down to size, this was not progress for there was no movement, this was not death for it was full of color, this was not life for there was no time, this was not happiness for there was no object, this was not fear for there was no danger, this was not final for it would soon be over, this was not birth for it had never started, this was not a word for the words could only banish it, this was not light for there could be nothing else, this was not darkness for it was full of light, and this was not me, because I couldn’t understand it, and this was not the Other for I was looking at myself.

* * *

Life in the garden was mostly long stretches of solitude, heavy transparent boulders of time that rolled forward without much effort, an afternoon that slowly followed another afternoon, each of them almost indistinguishable from each other, all transfixed in the strange world of wars and secret dealings and betrayals that stretched upon each other like a thick wet canvas and I dived into them like one of those men who dived off the cliffs of Acapulco, except I didn’t dive into water but into the solid ground covered with grass, and I didn’t dive as far as they did, because the white walls were short in proportion to the size of our tiny country and to the people who lived in it, and nobody saw me do it, other than the little plastic soldiers, and they couldn’t understand the nature of my movements for their plastic eyes couldn’t reach that far. For them there was only the anxious moments of desperation and the long stretches of silence in which the whole world stood still.
The long heavy boulders of time that inhabited my daily days were interrupted by small pebbles of friendly visits, by Avelar, Quetglas, Mauricio, Jose… all my friends from the American School and a couple from elsewhere. And those days were different, for there would still be wars but they wouldn’t be so complex and we would play the parts of the soldiers ourselves, or we would run out into the street and hunt for metal car brands that we would pull out from their rightful placement on the car’s surface with the help of screwdrivers and knives, or we would walk to the movies (to the same movie theater that many years later I would visit with my little brown girl), or we would walk to the ice cream place around the corner, where I would get a large chocolate milk shake and slowly sip it from a wide plastic straw while sitting on the metal benches and trading little jokes with the others that were with me, or we would simply walk, without clear purpose or direction, and we would tell stories, about things that had happened and things that had not happened, and some things in between, and we would end up sitting on a stranger’s wall or on their lawn, maybe a particular lawn with short green grass on an afternoon where we had found nowhere else to go and we didn’t want to go home and, on that particular day, I looked at the grass, at my friend who was with me, at the girl who had come along, the girl who I loved above all things on that afternoon, and I looked at the street and at the trees, and suddenly I was a man that was remembering all this after many years had passed, and I was faintly sad for the things that had gone away, but most of all I had an overwhelming sense of wonder for the way that time had moved, not like a boulder just then, but like a flash of lightning that was much too sudden to capture in little weak hands slippery with sweat, and I blinked my eyes and I was back on the grass and I was still a young boy with my friends and it was getting late, and it might even rain soon, and we walked back home, telling jokes as we walked, and avoiding the fast cars on El Paseo, and planning out our further adventures on the infinite afternoons that spread before us, all full of lawns and corners and stories that could never come to a full stop.
Once in a great while, my mother would have a friend over, and a friend of hers in our small space meant restriction and a sense of limits, there were many things I could not do then, there were things I would have to hide, and I might even have to listen to adults talking about other people, people who I didn’t know and I didn’t want to know, about who was cousins with who and who was married to whom and why did they do that and what do you think of that and lots of loud laughter, which came at intervals that I couldn’t predict, since I couldn’t grasp their jokes. Sometimes I stayed there, sitting by the round glass table, listening to them, trying to make sense of their stories, even asking a few questions when something in particular stood out. Other times, I ran away to my room and tried to read a comic book while the loud explosions of laughter kept on pulling me away from the heroic storylines, right then they sounded like bursts of a thick yellow liquid that got into my ears and eyes and made it more and more difficult to think, and the room started to circle around me and all I would be able to do was stare at the ceiling and hope that my mother’s friends would be gone soon. I was usually very grateful when these people finally left, even though I had to go out one more time to give them a kiss on the cheek and to get one in return, and to hear once more the phrase I had heard so often: "Look how big he’s getting!" and I would smile and nod and I would finally breathe freely again when I heard the garage door opening and closing and the motor of their car turning on outside. Finally I had my world back again and I could slide back into its shadows.
One day, a friend of my mother showed up when she wasn’t home. I heard her footsteps walking in and I heard Cruz, the maid, telling her that my mother would be home soon so she would have to wait. Cruz then told her that I was home and then she went back to her work behind the scenes, in the little patio behind moss covered walls, next to the big wall that separated us from the hotel next door. I was left alone to play host to this half recognizable stranger. She was a young woman that went to the University with my mother and she was a member of her study group. She wore tight jeans and flowery shirts and I would probably have thought of her as being very pretty if I hadn’t previously dismissed her as a member of a class that I couldn’t really see: an adult. I sat with her in our little living room which was also my mother’s bedroom at night, and she started asking me questions, being as friendly as possible, with a voice that seemed to me as soft and smooth as little flowers falling slowly to the ground. Soon her smile and her soft laughter and her questions had won me over. I started relishing her questions and I became eager to provide her with answers. Maybe she noticed that I was talking more freely then and she asked me to show her what I did all alone in the garden most of the time. I hesitated for a moment and thought of showing her the soldiers, and their hideouts, or maybe just telling her that I liked to run around or that I liked to play hide and seek (which is all that I would have said to any other adult that would have stopped to question me), but, much against my own little secret rules, I decided to show her my discovery. I grabbed her soft white hand crowned with bright red painted nails, and I pulled her into the shadows of the garden, where her heels dug into the moist dirt and her body seemed to almost tumble over, as she tried to keep up with me in small careful steps that couldn’t completely avoid the urgent touch of the black soil. I smiled up at her and pointed up towards the little gray wall with the chain link fence over it.
"You want to see what I can do?"
She nodded and smiled as brilliantly as she ever had, eager to please this little boy who was so eager to please her.
"Yes, please show me…"
I nodded and said, "Stay right here…" and then I ran towards the little incline and jumped up on the chain link fence. By this time, all the movements had been thoroughly practiced and I had no hesitation at all as I moved quickly to the place right above her, clinging to the fence with my thin little fingers as I leaned inwards, anticipating my purposeful fall.
I heard her calling out to me, in a voice that betrayed an inner struggle, "Be careful!"
I nodded and wondered how impressed she would be when she saw what I could do. I turned myself around and smiled down at her one more time as she asked me to be careful once again. Then I jumped up and out, and I flew in a great arch through the air, the arch that gave me that one instant of utter freedom where the ground was not my prison and the sky was just beyond my own soft hands, and as I flew, I tilted forward in a sharp angle, and there was a complete silence within me and around me, no birds, no thoughts, no voice, no wanting, and suddenly my head hit the hard ground and I could smell the grass and the wet soil once again. I pushed myself up and I was surprised to find that she was kneeling beside me, the knees of her bright blue jeans pressing hard onto the wet ground. I looked up at her with pride but she was looking at me with a clear sense of shock and worry.
"Oh my god! Are you ok?" she said, and then she reached out to help me up, as if I was hurt, as if I might not be able to stand on my own, as if something terrible had happened.
I looked at her and shook my head, trying to let her know that I had not fallen accidentally, that I had jumped, that I had planned it all beforehand, that I had jumped on purpose, that I had done it all many times, that this is what I had wanted to show her. But she was still talking, in the same hurried and worried voice, and, without meaning to do it or understanding what it was that I was doing, I began to see myself through her eyes.
"You have to be really careful! You could have hurt yourself really badly doing something like that! Don’t ever do that again!"
I pointed up at the wall and I started to mumble an explanation, an explanation that I had never had to develop, an explanation, that once uttered, didn’t even make sense to myself, "I have been doing this… I figured it out when I… it’s like… when I’m jumping… and then I…"
"No, you can’t be jumping from there! You’ll hurt yourself! You will hurt yourself very badly! Your head is very delicate! You can’t be hitting it like that! Don’t ever do that again!"
And she grabbed my hand, and I noticed that her knees were dirty from where she had knelt and I noticed that her hand was shaking just a little, but it was still soft and it felt good against my own. I thought then that she was afraid that my mother would blame her, that my mother would think that she had put her little boy up to this and that now he was hurt. But I wasn’t hurt at all and I walked behind her, back to the living room, looking at her long white arm and her tight blue jeans, shifting back and forth, as she led me back out of the garden, back to where things would all make sense once again.
By the time we were back inside, and she was once again sitting on the sofa that was really my mother’s bed, and I was sitting across from her, leaning on a big soft pillow covered in colorful flowers, by then she was already asking me about other things and I was glad to forget all about what had happened. I told her a couple of stories and she asked me a little more about them and I told her more and we both smiled and she seemed happy to be with me, although it would have been difficult for me to really delve into what she was really thinking. Soon my mom came home, and, after a quick blur of explanations and greetings and a soft kiss on the cheek and a subtle but definite shift in their voices, I retreated to the darkness of the bedroom in the back of the apartment and the gusts of loud laughter came over me once again, as they usually did, with the same oppressiveness, with the same heaviness that made me desperate for air. I wondered then if she was right in saying that I should stop it, I wondered if I was right in thinking I should go on. Most of all, I wondered how I would ever come to know who was right and who was wrong, how I could I peer behind the curtain and know what was truly waiting down the road in either direction, what was there in that invisible space where the boulders of time ended and new boulders appeared, where the next garden was waiting, where the causes turned into effects, and the new effects turned into further causes. I wondered if one of the many effects would be too heavy for me to carry and I would fall helpless beneath its weight. It was all very much like flying through the open air, waiting to find out how hard the ground would be once you landed.

* * *

"I told my mother," she said, in a very soft voice that had just a hint of harsh treble whine tossed in among the rapid bubbles of air that made their way to my ear. I was standing with the phone in my hand, looking out the window, towards the long black electrical cords that traveled from one tall wooden pole to another, cutting the cloudy gray sky into rectangles and geometrical patterns. I was watching the black birds coalesce into little circles and then spread out again, coming together for no apparent reason, drifting apart for no apparent cause. A woman was walking out of her house across the street, she had her back towards me as she locked the door, her black hair was wet and it spread in little curls over the back of her neck. She turned quickly and stepped out of her porch and I could hear the echo of her footsteps as she walked down the street towards the subway station. I was alone with the phone and the birds, but I could picture Dascha in her own apartment, lying back on her thick futon, with a long white skirt half open, revealing her hairy legs, and her own phone next to her ear, and the long lines of thick books behind her head, and the wall covered in even more books and the sound of the freeway coming from the other side of the wooden balcony, like the constant rush of ocean waves made of metal.
"What did you tell her?" I asked, half knowing the answer already.
"I told her what we did… her friend was with her…I told them everything…"
I took a breath and felt a slight hint of regret but it passed quickly. I had never met her mother, or if I had, I had forgotten, and it really didn’t matter, not in any way that I could clearly determine or analyze, it didn’t matter what she thought of me, what she thought of us, specially since there was no "us", not anymore, and there hadn’t been any "us" for a long time, specially since the "us" that there still was had become so subtle that we could barely see it ourselves, so tentative, like the touch of her fingers in the darkness that one night, dancing over mine while the electronic music slipped gently out of the speakers, pushing away the sound of the cars outside (the freeway was always busy and she lived right next to it and its roar never stopped) and her fingers formed shapes that blurred into the shapes that my own fingers were making, and the music made us dance with the slightest touch of a fingertip, a dance that was so microscopic as to be almost forgotten, but still it was a dance, a dance of rorschach shapes sharply outlined against the darkening sky behind her window glass, and it flowed through my arm like an electrical serpent and it flowed deep into my body where it made me shake with every little sound, and our fingers kept on dancing with each other as the music flowed in ever changing shapes that, in their own way, echoed our movements, which had themselves been born from the sound, like white flowers that exploded into leaves and then into blue violets and from there into trees and once again into tiny little white flowers, all in a pure flowing motion that accepted no angles or abrupt interruptions, and all of these deep colorful visions were really our fingers, and they truly were our fingers as we had never seen them before, and our palms touched, and in the tender slowness of our microscopic dance, this was a titanic moment, and I could clearly hear her release a single loud breath that meant so much right then, and it flowed out through the room like a great cloud of thick desire, and I breathed out as well, and I could feel and see and hear my own breath combining with hers around the dance of our fingers, and I felt the sweat of her palm pressing against mine and our fingers curling around each other like tiny black wiggling worms that, in their seeming artful independence, were only vaguely related to the core of our being, the secret cauldron from which our inner wishes arose. That night of utter flowing union, that night of abandon and gracefulness, that night of subtle dances against a darkening sky, that is what could be, that is what could have been, that is what wasn’t, that is what could only be true for that one night and maybe that one night was much more than enough, certainly much more than I could have any reason to expect.
"What did she say?" I said, trying to sound as nonchalant as possible, while betraying a slight edge of worry.
"She didn’t say much, but her friend was there…"
I pictured them sitting in an outdoor café, three sophisticated women with graceful mannerisms and a comfortable air of experience, sipping tea or coffee from little cups, maybe smoking and letting the smoke come out in straight precise columns off the sides of their mouths, I pictured them all as slightly mutated pictures of the same face, worldly in a way that couldn’t be faked, noses upturned in a way that they would never recognize if it was pointed out to them (for they were smart enough to see it in others but blind enough to ignore it in themselves), and I had never really known them, not together like this, and yet I saw their naked sunburt arms, landscapes of wrinkles and the nearly invisible scars of years of use, and the heads rolling back in calculated laughter, and the comments off to the side, like discarded plastic bags rolled in little balls full of broken angles, and the shaking of the heads, as it to affirm a point by simple denial, and it all came together in ways that were not so easy to sum up and yet they were all reflections of a single impulse, and it was all there in Dascha, all of it came together within her, alive and frothing in the way that truth boils to the surface when it has nowhere else to go, it was there specially when she first opened the door when I would come to visit, specially when she shook my hand upon my initial approach, specially when she was at a loss for words, happy that I was there, unable to pinpoint the exact reason why she wanted me there in the first place.
But it was not there that night of dancing fingers, not when she turned to me, lying sideways on the floor, her face covered in the green shadows of the late sunset, and I turned to her, eager to see the open eyes that shone in the darkness and the smile that, for once, failed to curl at the sides, both of us lying on her thick rug, it was not there when her eyes opened wide in the darkness, showing a deep clear wonder that had been long lost in the jungles of academia, the wonder that I had recognized so long ago when she laughed uproariously at a single quick riff on an acoustic guitar, the wonder that came through when she blushed when attempting to sing a difficult harmony, the wonder that that came through when she looked out over the hills of Oakland and sighed at her inability to find a way to summarize the beauty that spread before us, the wonder that made me love her, painfully and without reservations, the wonder that was so difficult to reveal in its full manifestation after so many years of careful training in the art of concealment.
"What did her friend say?" I asked, not really wanting to hear the answer but unable to stop myself from asking.
"Her friend said that you were not a friend at all… that anyone who gives that to someone else is a terrible person… she said that you were horrible and that I should stay away from you…she said that you were the worst excuse for a friend that I would ever find…" her voice remained as soft as ever, and then she laughed with a little giggle, pleased that she had shocked her mother’s friend, an impulse I could certainly understand for I had indulged in the same pleasures not so long ago and I would indulge in them again. I thought of Ricardo in a car parked along a dark street in a little neighborhood off of El Camino, damning his cousin for introducing his brother to such terrible things, I thought of his threats and his wide angry eyes. I thought of myself offering a similar gift to his younger brother in a dark cabin by the ocean, with the sound of the waves rolling through our freshly opened minds. Good friend or terrible friend? Maybe both.
"What did you say then?" I asked her, settling into the resignation that our curtain had been opened and our little private theater had been revealed.
I saw her again in my mind as she was just then… with her long white skirt and the phone next to her ear, one leg crossed over the other looking up towards the big glass doors that faced the balcony and the freeway, the edges of her lips curled downward in that strange smile that seemed to imply disdain as much as pleasure, but was probably only a mask for deep sadness, a sadness so profound that it could not be fully tasted without recoiling in horror.
"I told her that she didn’t understand… she didn’t understand at all… I told her I was certainly not afraid of a flashback… in fact, there’s nothing that I would want more…and I laughed, … I laughed at her to some degree… but I laughed at the whole situation…because there was no use in trying to explain it…she would never understand…"
I nodded and stayed quiet. There certainly was no use in explanations. We could barely talk about it ourselves, even though we had been there together, even though our fingers had danced through geological ages marked by sound and music and light and shadow. With every second that passed, it grew more distant from us, more difficult to access, more impossible to fully grasp, and our words slowly broke the memories apart, turning them into shadows of themselves, shadows without a hint of color, frozen dances without rhythm, written music without sound. Up by the wooden poles outside, two birds had gathered, and, for a single moment, they flapped their black wings in unison, and then they flew apart. Soon it would be time to say goodbye, and I would hang up the phone, and years would pass without another phone call, and our fingers would never truly dance again.

* * *

My uncle still stood by the edge of the dark moist garage, speaking to me once in a while but mostly looking at me, following my movements, wondering what else could I possibly want from this place, what else was there to find. To him this was an apartment building, a bit neglected, with a dark garden that was even more neglected, a source of money, nothing more. And that’s all it should have been to me. It had served its purpose and now it was only a forgotten little building in a forgotten little city in a forgotten little world. But I still looked for more. I knew that my time would soon be over, for there was only so long that my Uncle could stand there waiting, so I would keep on exploring, one more second, and then maybe one more.
I looked up at the windows of apartment three and I saw the sign, dusty and faded, forgotten and now used as a kind of shield by the present tenants against the unrelenting sun. The sign had two white gloved hands, one of them holding a pack of cards, both of them spreading apart from each other, to reveal their single direct message, which stated, in big bold letters: "Unete a la Magia" ("Unify with Magic") It was upside down and pressed up against the windows, among other pieces of cardboard and wrinkled brown sheets. I immediately knew that it must be Fanci’s, one of Fanci’s many signs which he used for his ever evolving magic show. If it was Fanci’s originally, that meant that it must truly be Dilcia’s, a lost fragment of memory left behind when form has escaped its vehicle and only dead traces are left to fade under the sun. Even more than that, I knew that it wasn’t Dilcia’s anymore, and that some strangers had placed it there, upside down, to bring shade to their lives and, incidentally, for me to find on this warm afternoon. I saw it, from the old terrace where once there had been a white hammock and a trellis full of long green leaves and bright orange and purple flowers and now there was only the rotting columns of the trellis and no hammock and dirty gray bricks and nothing else. I saw it as a strange beacon of a precious time that had passed, a symbol of what had happened and of what was still to come. Like a giant Tarot card, it loomed over me with promises of clear understanding, of the ancient mysteries and a final reunion with my true clan. It came with visions of pure, chaste men in long white robes sitting on wide open, empty, silent chambers and murmuring mantrams with pious respect. But it was upside down.
I walked back once more into the dark garden, without saying a word to my Uncle, counting on his patience. I walked into the dark garden, maybe for the last time. I stepped over the long weeds that had grown over the old paths, around the old capulin tree that still managed to retain its former glory, even surrounded by the chaos of green neglect and complex impulsive life. There, in the dark muddy uneven chaos of green and black and brown and red that was the remains of my long lost realm, the same place where my soldiers had once fought and explored and betrayed and lied, the same place where I would listen to the sounds of the adults dancing to a constant recurrent disco beat in the late hours of the night, the same place where I swore my undying allegiance to Avelar, the same place where I jumped recklessly to find a moment of simple emptiness, in that same place I found the direct and simple reply to the inverted Tarot card that hung from the upper windows of apartment number three. It was scratched in rough broken letters on the farthest corner of the farthest wall, the wall that signified the end of my realm, the outer reaches where only the bravest would dare to tread. Because it was just scratches on gray brick, and because it was covered in the shadows of the trees and the other walls, It was very hard to see at all unless you walked right up to it. I moved through the weeds and the mud and I stood right in front of it and I silently said the two words to myself as I read them : "Yo Soy" ("I am")
Deep In the forgotten chaos was the truth while the old promises of truth held upright by order and dogma, all those promises had tumbled over, and my shoes sank into the mud as I stared at the simple message and the garden of the ancient plastic wars and daring rescues and heartbreaking defeats gave me one last gift before I finally said goodbye.

* * *

How many times, laced like heavy black beads across the valleys of history, how many places all intertwined by their millennial convulsions, how many wide open mouths, eager to receive the gift that escaped the senses, how many twin sets of extended pupils, finally alert enough to explore the hidden landscape that had been blurred by lazy occlusion, by an avoidance that had persisted so long as to become simply natural, how many strenuous rituals of dance and drums and sweat , all sliding over flesh and cloth like rivers of ecstasy down parched valleys of inscrutable hunger, how many songs, cascading up and down the spectrum of sound like mathematical butterflies flapping their wings in recurrent oscillations, how many quiet spaces, where even the single movement of an eye would be too strident and you would have to slide your breath out in a single long slow release which would not allow for any sudden interruptions, how many rumbling sessions of thunderous orgiastic worship, where the mass of human bodies, all pressed together into a single gigantic creature made of wet flesh, would become unified in its unmeasurable mixture of desire, realization and shifting completion. How many?
They all extended before me, a long and wide web of complicity, lost in the remote corners of time and underground history, the history that was not taught in schools and never would be. As I saw them, I knew that they were all connected, through a subtle inner network to which I had now been introduced, a simple gift which I had received without any particular merit on my part. Maybe there was a lot more to learn, as we concluded on the car trip down from the mountain of magic with my friend, who eagerly agreed as he inhaled in a long high whistle, yes, there was a lot more to learn, and we drove on together on that glorious day while the wind slipped through my open fingers, and my hand was extended carelessly out of the passenger window, letting the wind force it to dance, and each splash of sunlight seemed as precious as the most sought after jewel, each moment so surprising, so unique, and the gentle laugh of my friend was just such a jewel when I would manage to make it come flowing out of his grinning wide mouth and the clouds all had the shapes of figures from dreams and my dreams were of clouds that had no shape and so they were beyond my sight. Maybe the wish to learn more was just a reaction to the utter simplicity of true knowledge, maybe it was simply a need for time itself to extend further, a deep ingrained need for something to happen, anything to happen, anything at all, anything that would further our voyage into discovery. Maybe it was a need to study music rather than make it, a need to grab on to the preamble so that the real show would not yet begin, and then, waiting behind the curtains, we could always imagine it, vague and fuzzy in the future, dancing freely in our minds without the tangible weight of the real encroaching upon the ever shifting veil.
Maybe they, the many beings who danced and sang and whispered and wrote and chanted and gestured and spoke through the ages, maybe they would recognize themselves in each other or maybe they wouldn’t, maybe they would be utterly surprised to see the others that danced with them, in such extreme garbs covered in strange symbols, heavy with so many blasphemous beliefs, blasphemy spoken in a crowd of pure blasphemers, subtle dogmas broken that the experienced voyagers no longer knew they had. There were so many layers to move through, so many prejudices, so many assumptions, so many linguistic skips and jumps into the land of the white and the black, that complete and constant recognition would seem impossible, impossible for me, impossible for my friend who laughed next to me, impossible for all those others that would continue to dance down the corridors of time. And yet I recognized them. I did. As clearly as I recognized my friend, my mother, my father, myself. And I recognized them because I had been where they had been, I had visited the same forbidden spaces, the same dark cave with its tiny opening of light that spiraled like an infinite kaleidoscope and implied so much more than I could ever say, I had been to the very core which they had long held in secret and I had seen the markings they left behind.
I saw then the ancient red people of the world, drunk on the organic messages that grew on the rotting shit of cows, eyes wide open to the world for the first time, maybe looking at wild figures that danced before them without restraint or pattern, impossible dances that a human body could never perform, figures that spoke of great powers beyond their understanding, figures from the other side of the seven moons, past the stretches of darkness, past the fingertips of light. I saw them give them names and I heard them tell the stories and I watched them drawing their figures and making great cities in honor of those things they had seen in the dark, those things which had no name and no stories and no cities and yet they lived in a way that escaped reason by the hidden doorway of their eyes. Maybe they saw me, or those like me, maybe they saw the strange artifacts that would make their way through the skies, maybe they saw the little tin boxes that would carry people from one strange building to another, eyes adrift in distraction, packed together like tiny little fish caught in a tight net, maybe they saw the flickering lights of the artificial brains that would send new unspeakable messages in whirring spirals all throughout the world, travelling through the bright day and the stormy night on the wings of invisible patterns, the world of the future which was so much greater than the world they knew, so much greater and so much smaller, both at once. Most of all, I saw them jump above the limits of their place in space and time and I saw them flying over the horizon, tireless explorers in search of truth, a strange truth that could not be repeated and could not be held down, a truth that once again escaped from their grasp once it had finally been discovered, forbidden again, virginal again, ready to be penetrated for the very first time, ready to break open in a shower of blood and welcoming sighs.
Why did they do it? Others that came much later, others that rummaged through the remains and tried to make sense of what was left behind, they said that it was to reveal the things that would come after them, and this was certainly possible, for who hasn’t looked into the night and wondered about things that haven’t happened, wandered about the effects that their present causes will drop like petals over the landscape of their destiny; they said that it was to solve social problems, and I had yet to meet a human that was not knee deep in problems and looking for some kind of solution, so this explanation seemed to be probably right as well; they said that it was to heal the sick, the poor wretched forms that had, through accident or hidden design, fallen into the viscous swampy trap of terrible pain and suffering, and it did indeed seem like a good thing to release them from their prison, to find some way to help them and end their loathsome plight. But all these explanations relied for their reasons only on those things that were clear manifestations of the realm that these explorers had left behind, the same realm that we left behind for a moment in a little clearing on the low skirts of a magic mountain, dancing under the stars which gyrated around us in unison, threatening to finally come down upon us in a final explosion of light. The past could not fully account for the future and neither could ever account for the now, the single moment that held the truth within its nether folds and which was permanently obscured by the illusions of consequences and causes. As simple as that and as forbidden, as ungraspable, a prize permanently in flight. In their green spaceships made of tentacles and straw, these explorers had reached for the lands beyond intelligence, beyond reason, beyond explanations, and so, all intelligence, all reason and all explanation would forever fall short, just like my plastic men would forever have to wonder what hand it was that moved them, why the war went on forever, and why it sometimes seemed to stop into an endless bubble of frozen movement and questions that could never be fully posed, for thought required time, and they had no time at all. (And just like us, they would surely have their own explanations. And just like ours, their explanations would be sensible to plastic brains and congruent to plastic rifles, and they would be touched by lipstick blood, and drenched in rain water tears, and hidden in the tall leaves of grass that were their ocean, and forgotten when the enemy came once again, guns at the ready, plastic hate in their eyes.)
I traveled into this remote region and I came back, and, settling back into the passenger seat of my friend’s car, letting the sunlight and the wind bathe me in unabashed happiness, I still needed to know more. I needed to know how this could possibly have come about, how it had all developed, how it worked in a way that my curious brain could fully embrace, how the steps followed each other like letters in the alphabet, how each naturally came from the one that came before (unable to fathom that the letters had been placed in no particular order and it was only through repetition that they now seemed like a sequence cloaked in absolute certainty, a simple truth known to poets and musicians everywhere.) In my tidal wave of curiosity, I learned about the nature of synthesis and about the substance and its derivatives, I learned of its mathematical nature, I learned of its known history and of an entire subworld of speculation, and I dreamt once again, like I had once in the days of La Escuela Americana and La Satelite, of a vast world made of geometric shapes and clean, straightforward equations, I saw them dancing with each other like animated little toys, I saw them breaking apart, like glass marbles on a smooth brick floor, I saw them fusing into a single structure and I saw them injected into their proper key holes, perfect and precise, presence with absence, absence with presence, nothing with something, something with void. I marveled at their perfection, an infinitely complex maze made of the most simple components, all present, all true, all recognizable, all following a clockwork logic that made my brain vibrate excitedly, like a hard penis engorged with blood.
And then it was time to let it come into me, to step through that doorway that I had imagined from all directions, and which I was now ready to cross. I found that all that I had imagined was true, but I found that truth came in many colors and sizes, it came with a depth that my shallow intellectual fantasies could never even begin to envision. My truth had been pale and small, but the truth that waited beyond me was deeply colorful, greater than anything I could have ever imagined, more complex than anything my brain could conceive. When it became apparent, it had always been there. When it became obscured, its existence became impossible, never to be recovered, never to be known again. Vision comes to an end, blindness never does. On the other side, my memories shifted subtly and abruptly, and I remembered the things that I had always wished for, but they were different now, because I was different, and when I was no longer different, then my wishes, and my visions, and my ideas, and my questions, and my thoughts, they would all come back, right back to being the same as they ever were, back to hard angles and gray dead ends. As long as I was me, I could not be on the other side of that eternal doorway. As long as I was me, my limits would remain. The limits were what made me. The limits defined me. The limits were my reality, and anything beyond it, was simply not for me. I was a lonely audience of one, forced to watch the same movie, over and over and over again, trapped in a theater that I couldn’t bring myself to leave. Unable to escape, unable to even conceive of freedom, unable to imagine the world outside. But now I had seen that there was an exit. Now at least I knew that the doorway was there and I could see the tendrils of light that slipped through the door’s edges. If only I could stand up. If only I could stop watching. If only I could turn around. If only I could crash my head into the screen and bring the movie to a stop.

* * *

I stood in the middle of the garden, near the edge where the shadow of the wooden trellis ended, feeling the moist leaves of grass curl around me, while their dry companions danced lightly in the breeze just a few feet away. I looked up at the chain link fence, which ran all the way from one edge of the gray wall to the other, from the farthest end, next to the little incline where my first little dog was buried, all the way to the edge of the forbidden apartment, where hairy lust waited behind half closed windows. I had a plastic soldier in my hand and I had only stopped momentarily, a single instant which was like a breath in a continuous cosmic struggle between the forces of bad and evil, between the fierce and the cruel, between the unkind and the unforgiving. I looked at the very spot where I would hang, the very spot where I would look out towards the San Jacinto hill and the empty lot next door and the street marked by patches of faded white, and the street kids in their self made vehicle roaring down the sidewalk, screaming as they made their way to the corner.
I could still climb up there but now I wouldn’t jump. Not after I saw her face of worry, not after her words made their way slowly under my scalp, to gyrate and vibrate within the electrical web of options that was my mind, among the ephemeral but ever repeating structures that were my thoughts, and they came to have a home there, a new song for my neurons to sing when nobody else was listening. What I had been doing was dangerous. What I had been doing could lead to pain. What I had been doing could lead to loss. What I had been doing needed to stop. And I did stop.
I could still climb up, and make my way to the same spot and push my nose through the chain link fence, and stare at the metal roofs of the houses that surrounded me, and I could even turn around and survey the world that was only partly my creation (since even then I understood the limits of our own control over events in the wilderness), but I would not jump anymore, I would not arch through the air, flying head forward into the dense and solid finality of the grass and the dirt that waited below. I had been subtly changed by her reaction, and just like the world seemed different from up there, and just like the world seemed different in mid air, and just like the world seemed different when the ground flew up towards me and provided my hard head with a masculine cadence, just like that, the world now seemed a little different because I had allowed her presence within my hidden sanctuary and it could never be the same. There were many lessons to be learned from this occurrence, not all of them clear at the time. For now it was only her white skin and her worried round brown eyes and her long soft fingers crowned by smooth long nails, and her tight jeans wrapped around her legs and her flowery shirt and her soft voice of genuine concern which still echoed against the gray wall and bounced back all the way to the hidden caverns of my subconscious.
I could still remember the explosion of crackling vibrations that would surge through my body right then, the buzzing and the waves of sound and light, the shifting, the displacement, the double and triple vision and the smell of dirt and grass that signified a clear and solid foundation, the place that held tight no matter how far you fall. Her words would take some time to make their way through my inaccessible system, they would circulate and combine with other words, they would generate new meanings and new ideas, they would break into new fears and new hopes, but the memory of the explosions remained in a place that couldn’t be touched by such fragile melodies. It was heavy. It was strong. It was deep inside where only my dreams could reach. The memory would remain there, safely stored away, like some ancient buried treasure, buried under mountains of dirt and grass and stone. It would look up at me from that distant grave within me, like a little dog with black marble eyes, and it would remind me of the things that the others would ask me to forget. It would finally rise again from its resting site, when the long closed doorway opened, when the golden key came into my hands once again, when my tender head rumbled with new and harder blows. It would rise again when I discovered the most ancient ways to jump.

The deep green of the jungle,
merciless and kind,
beautiful and unforgiving,
full of lost plastic soldiers
that forever seek
what their plastic eyes
can never find.

Forever advancing,
Forever stepping ahead,
Habits so deep
that they have no future,
Plastic so simple
that it has no past.

Together we saw
That there was so much
yet to discover,
and so much
that would forever
escape our grasp.

"Be careful,

don't touch it with words,

it may break apart,

get heavy and old,

and we may never again find it."

A free jump into the unknown
where everything remained the same,

and yet different.

You came back from such journeys,

and not much was different,

but you were no longer the same.

Jump freely,
face first,
head forward,
and never look back.

Rodney as he was
As he will always be
Just around the corner
Ready for another game of chess,
Ready for another blast
Of heavy metal distortion,
Ready for another attempt
At breaking past the barrier
That would forever divide us
and out of one,
make two.

As the gates were pulled apart,

that which was within,

came spilling out,
and the world rushed in,
deep into chambers where
it had never before
been welcomed.

The night turned golden
And the barriers disappeared
And the stars were a huge spaceship
And the flow of tears was just a river,
A river without reasons,
A river without sadness,
A river without shame.

Carlos then wrestled
with his recurring tendency
To seek the edge of disaster,
A tendency just like my own.
And so I could live within him,
And so he now lives within me.

They said
"if you look into a mirror
long enough,
you will certainly
go crazy..."
So we ran upstairs
to stare into the first mirror
we could find.

An older Rodney,
touched by the sharp edges
of a faraway land,
but still holding on
to the warm promises of childhood,
and the visions of a future
where all boundaries and divisions
would finally come crashing down.

Maybe I truly wished
To crack my hard head open
To pull the warm bloody sides apart
And see what strange alien creature
Would come out
gurgling and spitting warm blood
from underneath the moist dead skin.

Made of plastic or black metal,
I saw them as shadows
against a light brown sky,
seeking knowledge in violence,
seeking final answers
for questions
that had become too heavy to fly.

A group of dirty long hairs,
a group I never met
and I would never meet
but somehow I find
warm and easy recognition
in the sideways tilt of the head,
in the carefree smile,
in the eyes that shine without reason.

Finding himself all alone,
in the midst of hardship
and unknown dangers,
he would make a final effort,
to find his way back home,
unaware that his destiny
had been written,
by a larger mind
that held him
with sweaty palms.

Dascha as she was
With so much armor on her tender flesh
And so much beauty hidden within it.
I could vaguely grasp then
What my friend said so much later:
“Those that hide the most
have the most to give,
when they finally surrender.”

Sophisticated lady I don’t know
What you miss, or what you still remember
What you keep locked away
Out of sight and out of mind,
What sometimes flowers again
In the depths of a midnight dream
About ethereal music
And dancing fingers.

No hill full of soldiers,
No tower in the distance,
No enemy waiting in ambush,
No violent war at all.
Just a broken table,
An ocean of fallen leaves,
And two silent messages
written by unknown hands.

Visions of a dream long forgotten,
an afternoon long past,
a path covered in dust,
a stairway tainted by grime.

The complex image
Of the fearsome shaman
And the simple truth
That glimmers behind it.
Trying to wrestle the great mind
That feasted on the remains of life
To wrestle new forms from its refuse,
Was like trying
to hold an ocean wave
with my fingers,
Like holding the clouds
with my eyes.

To turn death into life,
the fixed into the moving,
the old into the new,
the closed into the open,
the limited into the endless,
the bright clear day
into the infinite unreachable night.

Sanctuary of Desire

"Perhaps he found it in some old books,
perhaps he inherited it,
perhaps he bought it,
perhaps he stole it from someone.
It makes no difference."
As spoken by G. in
"In Search of the Miraculous"

"…because foreplay never begins in the bed.
It begins in the head."
From "Super Sex"
by Xaviera Hollander

Because in such and in where, I would lack understanding.
Because in the vast desert of greenness, I would find you absent.
Because in the realm of metal and wood, I would find you alone.
Because in the name of playing with you, I would surrender,
I would give what I had and what I didn’t,
And I would turn back on what was mine,
And what should have been,
And what never truly was.
It all began here,
Where I sit now, where I sat then,
Where I lie in the dark core of my being,
Where the stories multiply and subdivide,
Where they spread like bubbles over boiling water
Where they turn from one tale to many,
So many that I am no longer able to see them all,
Not in a single eye opening moment,
And then, lost in their multiplicity,
They come back to one,
A single story,
A simple case of what and when and how,
In such and in where,
And it all happens
With blinding speed
With a reckless strength that leaves me breathless,
With a precision that resembles carelessness
In its infinitely careful intent.
Here it begins,
Here at the core,
The core that is not the head
but it would appear to be covered by it,
engulfed and trapped by my cranium,
pressed down tight by the soft mucus that lies within,
It does not begin at the heart
for the heart comes later
And not in any bed
Or any flat surface,
for it would take so long to arrive,
There would be so much time,
Months of waiting
Empty months that followed
Years of waiting,
Tears of painful solitude
And colorful wishfulness,
Years of dreaming of one such as you
And then dreaming that you had shown up
And then letting myself believe it.
For there is always a moment
Of purposeful falling,
A moment when I can see,
Yes, a moment
A single ephemeral moment,
When I can see
When I see what is and what isn’t,
When I see the such and the where,
When I can see it all and even more,
And then I choose to look away
For the moment is gone
And it is better that it remain hidden.
Better for me when I am blinded,
Better for me when I am dreaming,
And the visions multiply
Like weeds or flowers
And the single vision that is true,
That one is lost among all the others.
That moment is always there,
That tiny window of clear sight,
That vanishes all too quickly,
Submerged in the haze of what could be,
What should be,
What might be.
And as I allowed myself,
As I chose to allow,
As I gave in to desire,
then you were here
In the vast desert of greenness,
In the realm of metal and wood,
In a space too small to last
More than a couple of moments
And a couple more where the echoes would still linger,
A space too small and crowded
To dark to see clearly
Too easy to forget,
Too comfortable to try.

* * *

"What is a master key?" I asked, in the most innocent voice I could muster, and back then my voice was very soft and innocent, like the sound a tiny bird makes when it sings outside your window, flying to and fro in quick little motions, vibrating so rapidly that it almost phases right out of sight, so my words sounded truly innocent without much effort, and I must have sounded specially innocent that afternoon, as I sat on the metal chair by the old glass table, across from my mother, and I just dropped the question into the calm air of the afternoon, as if it was just one more question among the many questions I had always asked, and the many questions I would still ask in the future.
"It’s a key that opens many locks…" she answered absentmindedly.
"So it’s a single key that opens more than one door?"
"Yes, exactly… why do you ask?"
I shook my head and shrugged my shoulders.
"No reason. No reason at all…I was just curious."
Earlier, I had seen the maid, in her simple uniform always neatly pressed and ready to be stained by another long day of house work. I had seen her opening the side door in the front of the building, the one that went up to the two upper apartments. I had noticed that she had only one key. It was a small golden key that I had seen before in her hands, and yet I knew that she had to clean not only the stairway that was just behind the side door, but also both apartments upstairs. I asked her then where she had the other keys that she clearly needed, and she responded:
"I don’t need any other keys. This is the master key."
I nodded once again and looked away towards the San Jacinto hill, framed by the vast blue sky and the long gray carpet of houses and buildings that stretched away from my little corner of the city. After enough time had passed, I looked at the key in the maid’s hand, hanging from a little piece of string and dangling from her wrist. The key was very thing, very small and the color of gold covered in black smudges. For all intents and purposes, it looked like any other key I had ever seen, but now I knew that there was something different about it.
Not long before that day, my mom had mentioned something about the man that rented the small apartment on the second floor, apartment number three. She had said that he didn’t really live there, that he was hardly ever there at all, that he only used it to bring women over and have adventures. I knew I liked adventures, so I wondered immediately what kind of adventures this man might be having in little apartment three, so close to me and yet so far, far enough to seem like alien territory hiding behind long half open windows. From the dark garden of my dream world, I would look up at the closed dark curtains and the windows, trying to find a figure among the nothingness, some kind of movement, a clue as to what went on back there in the dark, but I never saw more than a shadow of movement, trailing so faintly against the sunlight that it might as well have been my imagination. Maybe I did see a dark tanned hand, long and soft and female, reaching out to close the curtains tighter, and then maybe a different hand later, rougher and thicker and male, reaching to open the windows with the little metal handle, making the distinct sound of creaky old rusty metal rubbing against the same, all to allow some breeze to blow into the darkness beyond. It was almost at my fingertips, this strange world of this man and his adventures and his dark skinned women, but it was far enough that I couldn’t reach it and so it remained closed and sealed and contained. And I would not ever be able to reach it. Not without a key, a master key.
The maid’s name was Cruz and she was as brown as all the other maids we ever had, and like all the other maids, she lived in a little narrow room which was built for just that purpose, to hold a single woman in place, to hold her stable and safe during the years of sentence that she would suffer, washing clothes, cooking, cleaning the windows, cleaning the house, washing the bathrooms, making sure the little boy didn’t hurt himself, taking care of the dogs, going to the supermarket to get groceries. The little room where she lived was so narrow that it barely fit a little narrow cot, covered in the white manta that was the cloth of the peasants. Next to the cot, there was just enough room for one person to stand, and room for a small table that held her few possessions and her clothing and maybe a single little cross and a portrait of the Virgin Mary and a little calendar hanging from the wall. The little room had no windows, but this didn’t seem to be a problem because it was only there for the maid to sleep in, since only in sleep could she truly be away from us, and sleep came late, and sleep ended early. From the first sign of light, Cruz would be running up and down the house, arranging things, cooking breakfast, preparing whatever needed to be prepared for the day to go as planned. In the few times I visited her room, it always smelled the same. It was the same smell I recognized from the maids I had known before, all the way back to my first moments of clear consciousness, a smell that tasted of sweat and brown skin and some dirt and some coffee and things that had been left on the oven too long and were starting to burn. It was a smell that made me think of flesh and of hair and of all the things that I would usually avoid, the marks of the animal on the surface of the human, the remains of that which I wanted to forget, but couldn’t bring myself to erase completely, like a half made picture that I would never finish but I could never throw away.
The next day, the day after I realized the nature of the key that was tied to her wrist, I followed Cruz to her room, and the smell was there, as potent as ever and as strangely intoxicating. She was dressed in her light blue uniform, and, as always, she was very loving to me, like a second mother, like the only mother I would have in the long afternoons when I was out of school and my real mother was at work. I followed her to her room and asked her a few questions, noticing the sweat on her forehead, on her underarms, on her thin brown arms. And I also noticed the little nail by the patio where she hung the little golden key, the master key, the key that I needed to explore the world of adventure that had so far lain just beyond my reach. I talked a bit with her right then, about school, about her duties in the building, about a movie, about some song I had heard, and my hand moved quickly when she looked towards the clothing she was hanging, and then I just talked some more. When it seemed that I had talked enough, I left, once again acting as normal as I could, as if nothing had ever happened, as if this was just another afternoon for a little skinny kid that lived in the midst of a garden. But my skin was shivering with electrical impulses, and my heart was already beating with the strange unfamiliar rhythms of the wilderness.
The key was now like a tiny burning star in my pocket, a tiny star full of dangerous black gold, a promise of discoveries and of a moment of trepidation, a silent moment when things have gone past the barrier of normality and, all of a sudden, you realize that nothing is where it was supposed to be, everything has changed, and maybe then you are no longer an eleven year old boy with a little golden key in your pocket but an adult wondering around a garden taking pictures while his uncle looks from the sides and simply doesn’t understand what his nephew is doing or why he is doing it. ("Who could possibly want a picture of that? What could it be used for? What good would it do?") All that sense of transgression was glowing hot in my pocket and glowing so hot that I had to share it with someone, because it was just a bit too much for me to bear all alone. Soon enough, Avelar had come over, as he usually did in the afternoons. Using quick talk and little signs that he readily understood, I took him to the cool shade of the dark garden and we sat under the chipilin tree, on the mildly wet ground that surrounded the thick brown roots where many of my little plastic men had, at one point or another, met their death. I looked at him intently and I said:
"I have the key, the master key…"
He rubbed his forehead and then he rubbed his eyes in exaggerated wonder, and then he said:
"What do you mean? What is a master key?"
And I said, with my eyes opening wide, full of pride and eager anticipation:
"It’s a key that opens all doors, it’s a key that lets us go where we couldn’t go before…"
"You mean…?"
"Yes, the guy’s apartment… apartment number three…"
Up to this point, it had all been drenched in the colors of a fantasy, the colors of waking dreams to be constructed while walking in circles around the terrace or drawing great battles on a piece of scratch paper, a thing to think about, but something that would probably not ever happen. But, as I said it to Avelar, sitting under the shadow of the chipilin tree, I knew we had to do it, there was no way around it, and knowing that we had to do it, my heart started beating even more intensely, because I then realized that we couldn’t just do it another day, we couldn’t wait for the right time when we would be specially brave or specially strong. It had to be today, right then and there. Because today I had the master key in my pocket and who knew when I would have it again, and it was burning hot, and I had to return it sooner than later, so we had to do it now. I stood up and pointed the way towards the humid dark garage, but Avelar hesitated and said:
"Are you sure? We could get in a lot of trouble…"
"No, nobody will ever know… besides, you won’t get in any trouble at all… I’ll just say that it was my idea and it was all my fault and it’s my mom’s building so…"
"But still…what if he’s there… what if he’s in there right now and we can’t hear him… and…"
"He’s not there… he’s usually not there at all... and he’s certainly not there during the day…"
"But what if this is the day when he does come home in the day? Or what if he slept late from last night? Or what if…?"
"I’m telling you… he’s not there… let’s go…"
And then I just started walking, because if I kept on listening to him, then something he could say might dissuade me from what I already knew that we had to do. There was no way out now, and the sooner we got around to it the better, and if I listened anymore then I might get too scared and then I could end up paralyzed and frozen, like in one of the many dreams I had when shadows would come rushing towards me from the darkness and I would want to run but I couldn’t make myself run at all and I was just fixed in place like a strange dreaming statue and I wanted to wake up but, even if my eyes opened, I could still see the shadows coming towards me, growing in size as they approached me, and I wished so much that I could move but my legs just wouldn’t shift or budge or do anything and I didn’t like that feeling at all. Soon, if I kept on listening to my friend and his hesitations, I would have been just as frozen, standing on the edge of the garage, with a burning golden key in my pocket and a heart that was crashing into my ribs like a giant bell about to crack into a thousand pieces. So I just moved, quickly and decisively, and Avelar followed me. We walked over the large stone steps that curved around the bamboo wall that separated our garden from the apartment of Doctor Escalante, and we walked into the dark humid garage and then we walked out the door, which we closed behind us with a big clang that echoed against the walls of the dark garage, and that was when we had to stop once again, not because we wanted to, but because it happened, and because now we both knew that something was about to change.
Up to this point we had been safe. We had done nothing wrong. We were simply in my garden, in my garage, in my driveway, we were exactly where we were supposed to be. Nothing was out of the ordinary, nothing was strange or perverse or twisted. But once we opened the side door that led to the upper apartments , once we went up the steps, once we looked at the closed door with its single silver number three at eye level, then we would be in unexplored regions, we would be in severe and real risk, and once the door opened, there would be no turning back. So we had to stop, because we both sensed that we were about to cross a threshold and we had to open our eyes wide and breathe in deeply before we went any further.
"What if he is there?" Avelar said once again, because the question could not be fully answered.
"He won’t be there…"
"What if the people from apartment 2 see us… what if Amaya sees us?"
"They won’t… they’re not there… she’s not there…" there was no way for me to be certain of that, but I had to communicate certainty to my doubtful friend or we would simply run home, or he would simply stay standing, right there at the threshold, and as long as he remained standing, I would be standing too, for I was now half of a larger body, and I needed him to pull on me as much as he needed me to push.
I moved quickly and opened the side door, pushing it in and letting the coolness of the inside wash me of the Salvadorean afternoon heat. We walked into the dark narrow stairway that led up to the two upper apartments and then I closed the side door, which always closed with a big loud bang, just like the one that opened the garage, and we both looked at each other, wondering if anyone had been alerted by the noise, which was still echoing in the cool enclosed space. Now we had to move quickly. We had no business being here and people could walk up and down these shiny gray steps at any time and then they would find us here, staring at each other, unsure of our purpose, unsure of our next step. So I started walking up the steps and Avelar followed me, his brown face burrowed with worry, his dark left hand grasping the thin metal banister that ran all the way up to the second floor.
When we reached that objective, we were faced with the need for even faster movement. We were now standing in between two doors: apartment 2 and apartment 3. We could both feel the imminent opening of either door, and then the face of surprise and then the questions that had no satisfactory answers, for there was no answer that could explain two boys standing here, where there was nothing to do, where there were only closed doors and a dark stairwell. We should not have been there at all, we should have been playing in the dark garden, with its vast pits of shade and its long pathways of dirt and mud, or on the terrace, swinging softly on the white hammock, or playing with little metal soldiers on the piles of sand and bricks that formed giant mountains by the edge of the garage, or jumping off the gray walls, trying to land on our feet and whooping with the sound of victory when we did. Instead, we were standing in between two dark wooden doors and we had to move fast, faster than our worries would allow, faster than our own speeding thoughts, heavy with the burden of visions of all the terrible possibilities that opened up before us. I took out the golden little key and placed it carefully in the lock. I did it slowly, fearing the sudden turn of the knob, the sudden discovery, the wide eyes of surprise turning into anger that would greet us behind the brown door with the silver number three. Avelar could see me now, moving so slowly, there was no way to hide it. Maybe my hand was shaking, maybe the key shook against the lock as I pushed it in.
"You think he is there?"
"No, he can’t be… " I responded, "he can’t be… he’s hardly ever here…"
"But what if…"
I turned the lock and pushed the door in and it moved easily, as if it had been waiting for us all along. We were both very quiet, our conversation had been reduced to the whisper of our breaths. The smell of wood and sun baked vinyl came out to greet us. I looked inside, at the expanse of green carpet, at the closed tall and narrow windows to my right, at the long flat green sofa. I saw it all for the first time right then, but it was all so familiar, as if I was coming back home after a long day of work, as if my woman and me were coming back from the supermarket or the Chinese food restaurant or the movies, and here was our place, our own private corner where nobody could ever disturb us, where we could simply fall into each other’s arms and meld into a shapeless blob. But just then, it was a dark, shaded little apartment full of danger, and as long as the door stayed open, we could still be discovered by the people from apartment number two. I whispered savagely under my breath:
"Let’s go…"
We slipped into the cool darkness of the apartment, onto the green carpet, and I closed the door behind us. Now we were way past any threshold that we had ever known, and we had entered the dark chaotic world of the brave who manage to find themselves in deeper trouble than they can handle, in forbidden regions beyond the clear structure of the law, of custom, of courtesy, of etiquette, of acceptable behavior. Here we were. And it was quiet, and it was dark, and we were together. And we were both breathing hard and our hearts were beating so loud as to sound like deep leather drums and our faces were red and flushed. I turned towards the far end of the apartment, and, for the first time, I saw the window from the inside out and I saw the bed, and I started to move towards it.
The apartment was a long rectangle that stretched from the tall narrow windows that faced the street to the wide windows that faced my dark garden. It was divided into two rooms by a partially open partition and an open door. In the room farthest from the street was a clean freshly made large bed. At the very farthest corner was a very small bathroom. I walked in carefully and Avelar followed. I still expected the strange man to come out of the bathroom with a towel around his waist or from behind the closet door with a mask of raw anger covering his eyes, so I looked all around me and Avelar did as well. I felt the impulse to run right back out and Avelar would have certainly followed me if I did. He was breathing very hard and so was I. But I didn’t run out and I didn’t even turn.
I walked straight towards the bed and looked around myself, making sure there was nobody else present. I knew there was something here for me to find, a treasure that was guarded by danger, for I knew even then that all danger guards some treasure, and all treasure must be paid. I could sense the shining rivulets of gold and jewels that were for me as true as the green carpet, as solid as the white walls, as reachable as the bed and the closet and the windows. We breathed in the air of strangeness and it tasted of sophistication, of adults that knew what they were doing, of men with hairy chests and heavy golden necklaces around their necks, a small pistol tucked in behind their belt, right at the base of their spine, a small pistol pointing downward as if the archetypal snake of hidden power had taken form in heavy black metal and was now waiting to be fired or at least to be shown in moments of anger or distress. It tasted of women in short dresses and high heels, of dark smooth thighs, of tiny hairs on the sides of their neck, of thin little golden necklaces that plunged deep into the caverns between their small breasts that bobbed like apples floating on soapy water, of voices that whispered with hoarseness, of calls of delight and eyes that pressed together to signify pleasure, and all of it slipped into me through my nostrils and Avelar must have felt it too for we were both so quiet and only the sound of our heavy breathing disrupted the sense of sacred intrusion, of boundaries broken and forbidden knowledge gained. We had penetrated into a hidden chamber and we could only be here for a short time before we were discovered, before we were punished, before we were thrown back into the world that we knew. I knew that our time was very limited, and I knew that treasure did indeed wait, somewhere in the shade of the dark brown bed covers, in the half empty closet, in the clean counter of the kitchen, in the wide sofas by the windows, or even in the windows themselves, the windows that faced into the open driveway I knew so well, with its wide gray bricks curved around a single thick tree. From up here, it all looked so different, the houses, the tree, the street, the San Jacinto hill itself far in the distance, it had all changed shape by the disturbance of our unwelcome presence.
I sat on the edge of the bed and Avelar looked at me with wide eyes and we just looked at each other for a moment, and then he whispered:
"What do we do now?"
"We look… we look all over… there are things here for us to find… we have to look for them…"
And he looked in the closet, which only held very few clothes, further proof that no one really lived here, not in the way that I lived in the apartment in the back, or in the way that Amaya lived next door. Instead, someone just came here every so often, and he used this space, in a way that was only barely understandable to me, a way that I wanted to understand further. I pulled open the drawer of the nightstand and there I found a string of little golden packages made of aluminum foil, and inside each package was a gooey balloon that was unlike any balloon I had ever seen. Neither of us knew what these things could be or what they could be for. We ripped one open and tried to inflate it but we were not too successful. They remained a mystery which we examined with only a bare hint of comprehension. I knew they were part of the secret of this chamber, and soon my suspicions would be confirmed. For I looked under the packages, in the little open drawer, and there I found the book.

* * *

We rode into the city, all the way from the airport, in the back of Fanci’s blue pickup truck. Her hair was all big and highlighted and her smile was even bigger than her face and it was shining with six months of eager expectation and her whole body vibrated with it and her hand clung to mine, her warm sweaty palm pressing tightly onto my flesh. She had worn a short dress that barely covered the very top of her smooth coffee colored thighs and the dress was a rainbow of colors that outlined her small curved body, but its main purpose was to reveal her legs and her desire which poured through her wide open eyes like fire, and it made my heart ache and it made my penis harden. Here I was, finally, back with her, after so many months of communicating through carefully constructed letters and whispered phone calls full of promises and amplified memories. How many memories emerged from only a few weeks of experience, and how much she had to set aside and hide within herself, when everyone around her was a doubter (none of her sisters or her friends truly believed that I was ever coming back) and she had to stay a believer against all expressions of doubt. I fed her belief with my phone calls, every day, on the button, and she fed my belief with her letters, each unique, each a construct of unbridled imagination. And now, here I was, in the back of the pickup truck, and her hand was real on mine, and sweaty and clinging, and her smile was bigger than her little sweet face and, every once in a while, I would reach over and kiss her lips lightly and every once in a while she would turn towards me, and I would get a glimpse of the little bit of her thighs that was still covered by her short dress, and it was clear then that she wanted me to look but she couldn’t say it, and it was clear then, as it had been all along, but always in greater and deeper circles of clarity, that she wanted me to take her, against all previous inclinations, against all previously stated dogmas and rules of conduct. She wanted to be ravished without restrictions or subtle signs of cautio