Eyes Of A Girl

We were driving by the Escuela Americana (the "American School"), in the San Benito, an area next to Escalon that rivals it in huge mansions, tall walls covered in spiked wire and broken bottles and security guards with large thick black and silver shotguns. As we drove past the long street that led into the school, I could remember the many mornings when my mother’s car was about to turn left by the tall red brick wall topped with large bushes and flowers and I could feel the sliding metal gate approaching and I knew that soon I would be in a classroom again, a place I perceived (and still perceive) as a somewhat benign prison, surrounded by kids that I saw as fellow prisoners, some friendly, some not so friendly and some openly hostile. I never looked forward to that turn, to that shift that signaled the end of freedom, and I could sense some part of me, a very old and tiny part, was clearly happy that today I was not going to school, not to that school in any case, and all the little chained moments of private horror which it entailed. Today I could decide where to go and so we drove past the school and up the street which had been a mystery to me for all my childhood, as if the world turned to shadows after that turn, as if there could be nothing beyond that barrier.
Flashes of memories went through my inner mind as we passed by: the kids in the first grade moving up a dark hallway that had a solid ramp instead of a stairway, the mass of them creating loud echoes of laughter and screams in the narrow enclosed space, my fight in the middle of the first grade playground when all the kids started shouting and calling our names even from far away and the boy who was my enemy was bleeding slightly from his lip and I wasn’t sure if or how I had done that and what it could possibly mean for my future, the time that someone saw a ghost in a little alleyway behind the second grade classrooms and we all rushed to figure out what it was and there were so many kids that nobody could see anything but everybody shouted in fear and wonder as if there was something there, the first time that I looked at a girl with lust and the many complex and violent stories that I constructed around it as if through the stories I could step away from the simple crushing reality of her mouth, her cheeks and her eyes, the little gang of eighth graders that became my friends when I was in fifth grade because they shared my intense interest in geometry and the many afternoons we spent together looking at textbooks that were just beyond our intellectual grasp, the three pretty girls in sixth grade that all the boys talked about as if they were sophisticated models or starlets even though they were only little twelve year olds that were just as confused as their admirers, the wide green lawn where we played soccer during the day and where I walked around with a couple of friends after school, exchanging stories and magazines and books, reclaiming our freedom after the last bell had rung for the day. All of it rolled through me like a movie in fast forward, like a quick reckless flight through a recurrent dream that repeats in almost the same way, the same characters, the same plot, the same chambers, night after night.
We drove up to the main boulevard that signaled the western border of San Benito and we turned towards the north, back to Escalon. Just as we turned northward, I looked over to the car to our left and I saw a girl looking at me. She had dark strong eyes, thick arched eyebrows, long black hair and dark brown skin. She was probably about seventeen or eighteen and she was wearing some kind of uniform that I couldn’t fully see through the window. Another girl was next to her and she was also looking at me. It seemed to me that the second girl had said something and the first one was now looking intently at me. Her eyes had an intensity that signaled not only strength but the kind of security that comes from practice. She was accustomed to looking and she was used to people backing down from her wide open gaze. I looked directly into her eyes and she looked back at me and I kept on looking and she kept on looking and I saw that her eyes were like deep black wells of curiosity and lust that bubbled under the pliable surface of her black pupils and her dark skin, and as I looked at her, as I allowed my attention to open, I dived deep into her black depths and I saw her strength and I also saw her softness and I kept on exploring and digging deeper and she noticed that something was happening and she tried to hold the unexpected contact a moment longer, but then she had to look away. She lowered her face and she blushed, a full sincere blush that traveled all the way to her surface from the bottom of her being, and she looked down for a moment and then she looked back at me, embarrassed at the weakness she had shown me, ashamed that I had seen her innocence, her soft core that was hidden beneath layers of image and personal armor. I smiled softly at her, letting her know that I was not an enemy, that I was not trying to conquer her will or cut across the real muscle of her strength, letting her know that when I had dived inside her I had done it with tenderness and not with anger. She took in my unspoken message, carried across car windows and the no man’s land of the road around us, and she smiled softly back at me with an innocent hint of flirting and a flowering sense of discovery. Then her car turned away and drove up a side street and another car moved next to us and I couldn’t see her anymore, not even to say goodbye, and we kept on going on our way back home.
My heart was touched by her, by the momentary breakdown of her image, by the soft loving real girl that came out from under the thick armor of the sophisticated secure fake woman. I could see the place in me where I wanted her to be mine, where I would have wanted to know more about her, follow her, talk to her, kiss her, touch her. But like the tiny place in me that was still afraid to turn towards the school, this voice was already diminishing, and I could see that both were attempts to alleviate the real pain of a heart that is open, the spiraling rays of heat that have no apparent objective and which hurt in a way that has no center and appears to have no end. The beautiful dark skinned girl was gone, like all other Salvadorean girls I had ever known were gone, like all my friends from school, like almost all my friends that came later, like everyone would eventually go in their time. But the heat and the pain and the love would still be there. There was no way to avoid it. I was beginning to understand that there was no reason to try.

Innocence At The Fountains

I got out of the car by the twin fountains which were now dry, the Beethoven fountains that were now known by some other name, the fountains that were marginal fixtures in so many of my old memories but which featured prominently in none. I remembered walking up the fountains as a little boy escaping from school, angry, scared and sullen. I remembered being a teenager and sitting here with Rodney for a brief moment on our way to the movies, talking about girls and sex and more girls and more sex and sometimes about our friends and sometimes about the many journeys that we would someday take together. I remembered being older and sadder and walking here with Dilcia, on the rough dirt path that runs parallel to the main street, on our way to my grandmother’s apartment which was mine for a brief moment, enough of a moment to let me taste Dilcia’s flesh and enough to make her say "my love" as she pressed her chest against me.
The fountains were twins cut apart at birth by the Paseo Escalon, one of the main boulevards of the city, connecting the edges of the dirty downtown with the heights of the Escalon. When I was very young, I thought that there must be a further mystery to their existence, something that happened here when I wasn’t looking, some ritual that I had missed or some arcane significance hidden in the circular shapes and the mirror images. Some of that perception still lingered with me this afternoon, as I walked across the little round park, looking at the women and kids selling little cheap plastic Salvadorean flags so that drivers could stick them on the side of their cars and then give the appearance of being patriotic. Some cars had one of these hanging from every window and still the old women insisted that the drivers needed more.
I walked through the grass that surrounded the fountains and I took pictures of the trees, the statues, the fountains themselves, the electrical poles, the concrete stairs, the street kids resting against the main pedestals and the edges of the circles where the colors were fading under the blazing sun. Then I asked a woman, an older woman with a dirty red T-shirt, a dark blue faded skirt and a white cloth draped over her head, if I could take her picture, and she said yes and smiled and I took her picture carefully and she said thank you as her cheeks pushed up to squeeze her eyes. I walked over the main street, El Paseo, which flowed with cars like an angry river in a rain storm and I took pictures of the fountain on the other side, which was just as dry as this one, just as forgotten.
Two men, sitting inside the bed of a pickup truck as it rolled by me, whistled loudly and asked to have their picture taken and I took it quickly as they posed smiling, hugging each other and raising their hands in a sign of success. I lifted my own hand in approval and gave them a thumbs up. They laughed and nodded with excitement. Then two pretty girls in a car called to me and said: "Us! Us! You should take us!" and I took their picture and raised my thumb again and they raised theirs and said "thank you!" and drove on. It was then that I realized that in their mind they weren’t doing me a favor by allowing me to take their picture, instead I was the one that was helping them, I was the one that was giving them the gift of my attention, the gift that said that there was something in them that was worth seeing, worth keeping forever, and the thought hit me like a sudden negative image of the world that I was accustomed to, a world where the very air is flooded in paranoia and fear of hidden agendas and whispered threats.
So it was the same with the maids who were both so shy of having their picture taken and also so grateful that I had insisted. Lorena, after she finally agreed to pose for me, said "You will take us on a long journey. Who knows where we will end up? Thank you so much," and I thought that what she said was both true and also so innocent that it made my heart shiver with a kind of gentle sympathy, and it made me happy to know that there still were people that were more innocent than I could even imagine.
To take the pictures is to make the moment eternal, and maybe the Being in its deepest simplicity welcomes that opportunity to transcend the bonds of time and flash across the frozen tundra of infinity, and maybe it is only through the process of sophistication, the complex structuring of the time based adult personality, that someone might come to see the camera as a threat, the sudden observer as a predator.
I walked towards the old church by my grandmother’s house and there was a couple sitting on a bench in a tiny park across the street from it: a tough guy in a white shirt and faded blue pants and a dark thick girl in a school uniform. They didn’t want their pictures taken. They shook their heads seriously and he narrowed his eyes and she looked away. They had allowed sophistication to rob them of their trust and of their most simple wish. They were on their way to becoming like the fountains, beautiful structures built for eternity but lacking the flow of fresh water to make them complete.

One of the many palm trees that tower over the twin fountains.


The fountain designs which implied a strange significance to me.

Statue of an ancient hero now turned into forgotten stone.

A boy reads the newspaper
resting his back against the pedestal of the forgotten statue.

The older woman that was happy to have her picture taken.

The guys who demanded to have their picture taken as their pickup truck sped by.

The girls in the next car that said: "No! Us! Take us!"
An older man in the twin fountains
who was very surprised but also very eager to help
when he realized that I wanted to take a picture of him.

A driver waiting outside the mall.
When he understood that I wanted to take a picture
he immediately turned to the left to show his best side.

Lorena when she finally posed for me and then nervously thanked me.

The Club of the Night

After my parents had separated, and after my mom and me tumbled around various apartments, and lived with my aunt for a while and lived in a little house where the little street boys flowed like pebbles through our doorway and pulled me out to play, and we lived in a long dry apartment where the maid first told me that my parents were getting divorced and I worried for the first time that they might never come together again, after all that and so much more, we came to live in a little one bedroom apartment in the back of our apartment building, in the middle of an unruly garden that offered a thousand promises of discovery and construction. Next to us there was a hotel, where people swam all day and sometimes mariachis played at night and next to that, on the other side, there was a night club, right behind the wall that formed the final boundary to my garden..
My fascination with this place started with its description. A night club. A club of the night. A place where the denizens of the night got together and played. Life there started long after I was in bed and away from the street and safe from any sign of commotion or crowds. Life there started with loud thumping music, a loud bass drum that never ended, the driving disco beat that anticipated the electronic music that I would someday come to embrace. Here the beat was loud and dark and it made the night tremble and, through its power, I could hear violin strings and thick bass and women singing in long melismas and over all that, I could sometimes hear people laughing, and these people were both men and women and I could hear that their laughter was tinged with alcohol and that gave it a sense of insanity, of danger and of lust.
Once I saw a group of women walking towards the club, one night when my Dad was bringing me back home from playing pinball at the arcade. The mysterious women were stumbling slightly through the broken sidewalks in very tall high heels. They had on very short dresses that barely covered the top of their thighs and revealed large expanses of their breasts and their backs. Their hair was shiny and curly and big, like a big black globe covered in silvery strands. They walked with a certain kind of determination and I saw them then as adults and, in knowing that these women were adults, I also knew that they wanted sex. I came to see that, somewhere in the club of the night, men and women met each other, and they laughed drunkenly and they flirted and they danced and as they danced, they touched each other lightly and sometimes they went home with each other and, like a puzzle that is on the verge of being solved but isn’t completely clear yet, I could vaguely postulate that most of the laughing drunken people that I heard at night were there to find another adult to touch and possess, even if only for a single night or even a few hours. This possibility filled me with anxiety and rushes of energy engulfed me from my crotch up into my stomach, and it was all so strong that it made my chest hurt. Sometimes I would sit on the terrace in the middle of the night, watching the bats twirl against the yellow light of the single light bulb and I would listen for the laughter and a loud man’s voice that might call for something and the female response that was more laughter and the music never stopped and I came to hear the loud thump as a raw call to nakedness and lust and I would hear it in my heart and in my stomach and I could almost see the bats dancing to it as they flashed like black lightning before my eyes and my chest was hurting so much that I wanted to run away, but I couldn’t stop listening.
One night, I was woken up from a deep sleep by the sound of gunfire and my mom ran towards me (she slept in the living room and I slept in the single bedroom at that time) and sat with me, running her hand through my hair, and then we heard more gunfire and the music in the club of the night had stopped and there were screams and shouts and then there was one more shot and more screams. I looked at my mom and wondered and she said that something was going on in the "night club" and I asked what it was but she didn’t know. In my imagination I could see the women in their miniskirts running in the dark, away from the guns and the angry men, and I could see the men running after them and maybe there were some men to protect them, but there was no music and no laughter and I was sorry for the little club of the night and I wondered if it would ever come back and serenade me with its strange sounds. To me, this had to mean the end. How could the music and the laughter come back to a place after gunfire and screams and terror had broken its magic apart?
As soon as the sun started to come up I could hear people outside, the distinct chaotic rumbling of a crowd and young men calling out and whistling loudly to each other, which has always been the way for young men to communicate in El Salvador. I ran to my mother and asked her if we could go and see. She didn’t want to but I begged and begged and told her that there were other people there and it should be ok and we would only get to the corner and if it seemed dangerous we would be right back and she still didn’t want to but she had to go out anyway because she needed to walk the dog and I kept on insisting and finally she agreed. So we walked out in the early morning and the air was very thin and cold and the sun had not come out all the way and I was wearing a thin blue jacket but I was still very cold and I didn’t care. I rushed ahead towards the corner while my mom called out for me to slow down and the little mutt that was our pet at that time barked at me to slow down and I said yes but kept on running and I made it to the top of the corner and saw the crowd of people around the stairway that lead down into the club of the night and there were several skinny young men pulling something up and having a lot of trouble. They all had their shirts off, tied around their waists, and they were whistling and the people were muttering among themselves, maids and rich women and a few men and the young men below whistled again and three of them together pulled up harder and then I saw what they were pulling.
It was a big frozen bundle of death, a shirtless man covered in blood that seemed to be as solid as a tree trunk and as dark and as heavy. The man was facing down so I could only see his back, and I wondered why it had no shirt on, and I wondered if it was cold, and then I knew that it was very cold, colder than any skin I had ever felt, cold like a big block of ice in the shape of a brown skinned man, and the young men without shirts pulled the heavy man up, the heavy man that was no longer a man, not the way he had been before that night, and one of the young men laughed and I could see the blood more clearly and it was already drying on his back and some of the women talked louder and my mom said that we should go back, that we shouldn’t be looking at this. I was too startled and confused to argue so I looked once more at the heavy cold body with its blood stained back and the three boys that were struggling to lift it and then we walked back to our apartment in silence.
By the next night, the loud thumping had returned, and again there was laughter and jokes and I wondered if some of these same people had known this man the night before, and maybe they had even laughed at his jokes, and maybe one of these very jokes had lead to his destruction. And the thumping still meant the women in their short dresses and the men with evil eyes and now I knew that the adults got together to drink and laugh and sometimes they got together for a night and sometimes some of them never came back but the music would still go on, loud, powerful, eternal. The pain in my chest was as strong as ever and the drunken laughter was a flashing doorway into the cold adult heart which someday I hoped to touch with my curious little hands, a heart as cold as a huge block of ice in the shape of a dark skinned man being carried up a stairway of dead gray stone.

Calling for Mother

From my father’s bedroom, on a small narrow folding bed on which I barely fit and only if I bent my knees and my head inwards, I overheard my grandmother in the next room, very early in the morning. She was alone, she was talking in a soft, thin and trembling voice. She was asking for her mother, she was saying "mama" (mother) and "mamita" (little mother) and "mamaita" (even littler mother) and her voice crackled with need and sadness, a kind of sadness and weakness that transcended the weakness of her body. This was the same grandmother who stood up to powerful men when they owed her or offended her in any way, the same grandmother who drove around during the war without fear in a tiny red car which seemed more like a toy than a car, the same one who laughed at the fake poses of others, who beat my father’s military friend with a thick broomstick when she caught him taking some of her paintings away. She was always the image of raw will and strength, even as her body deteriorated into thinness and her skin started to hang on her brittle bones like a badly measured coat and her face grew smaller and she had to groan with effort every time she was going to speak up, but then, when the energy finally rose, she spoke up clearly and surely and with the same intensity that I knew from so many years ago.
Listening to her through the closed door, I felt the weight of so many years that had fallen upon her skinny back, and I could sense how she had carried them all alone. I saw in my mind’s eye the picture of her mother which was hanging in front of her bed, a thick woman in a blue dress who was looking to the side and wasn’t smiling for the camera. It was a photograph but it was so old that it almost looked like a painting and I could see that my grandmother was staring up at it in a haze and calling her, asking her to come down from the photograph and talk to her for a while, tell her that things would be alright, that the days would grow shorter and then there would be no days at all, and when the days disappeared so would the pain and weakness and constant effort to breathe one more time. Maybe she just needed her to smile, as she always looked away without smiling, because that was how she was in the picture and maybe that is how she was when she walked under the sun but I would never know. And as I pictured her living and holding my grandmother as a child, I could hear my grandmother’s voice, and it was little and thin and soft and open like a child’s, without shame, without personality, without hesitation. "Mama… mamita… mamaita…?"
Lydia, my friend back in San Francisco, called me just then and she told me that my mom missed me and that they both felt that the house felt different without me, that she could feel it as soon as she walked in, that it was not subtle, that my absence was palpable and my mother had nodded at her and she had said that she felt the same, that the house was vacant and still and lonely without me. And as Lydia told me this, I heard my grandmother again, "mama, mamita, mamaita", and to be alone without your mother, or to be alone without your son, or to simply be alone, it all felt like a wave of cold wind that penetrated deep within my bones, a final goodbye to assumptions of warmth and love, a surge of closure that signaled that now I, the "I" that is my grandmother and my mother and me, now I must stand alone and I must now know that I was always alone even when "I" cared for "me" and protected me and held me with love even if sometimes without a smile. Even when "I" felt cared for and protected because "I" was there, even then "I" was alone.
I remembered a transdimensional journey from so many years ago, when I rose up to a space where there could be no one else beside me, where I had expanded into everything that was around me and found it to be me, and so there could be nothing that wasn’t me, and without something that wasn’t me, I was alone, and that was a terrible thought because it meant that all others were me and so I could never truly find another to love and to love me and to meld with, because underneath all appearances and characteristics, that Other was always me in another guise, me playing at being another, just like when I would play with little soldiers and make up stories in which I would play all the roles but it was ultimately just me playing, alone in a big house full of angles and edges and places to hide. I remembered then what I had realized in a moment of blue lights and electrical buzzing that roared through my skull like a thousand bees: I am alone as long as I don’t want to be alone. As long as I yearn for another, I will be alone. When I fall back into my loneliness and let the world spread out from me like an ocean of colored dreams, then I am no longer alone and someone else that is of me and part of me may step up to take my place. But only then, when I give myself to the loneliness completely and the fear evaporates like ice melting into water.
As I remembered my thoughts, my grandmother kept on asking for her mother, "mama, mamita, mamaita" and I remembered her saying to me many years ago: "why do they love you so much if they will eventually go away and leave you all alone?" and she then was wishing that her mother had not been so good to her so that she wouldn’t miss her so much right then, if our ultimate fate was to be alone, why accept the gift of caring and compassion if it had to be taken away eventually?
I felt a rush of warmth that I called love and it resonated in my chest, in the center that I call my heart, and I could feel her alone through the door but I was with her, across the wooden barrier and the barrier made of flesh and the barrier made of years and the barrier of being another which was not another. I was right then so close that I trembled with her tremors and I swam in the deep breaths that threatened to rip her little body apart. She wasn’t alone because I was there with her, but she had to be alone, terribly alone, if only just a little bit longer, just until the picture on the wall would no longer be a picture and her mother would no longer be just her mother and the little old aching body would let her free to roam in lands where her constant calls would not have to go unanswered.

Slow Decay

From the outside, the house is another impressive mansion in the upper heights of the Escalon, what was once the richest area of the city, where the millionaires lived. This was once a quiet expanse of slanted streets and curved sidewalks, where I walked from my house to the kindergarten to the big round park at the end of the main street, where there was so little traffic that even a four year old kid could cross the street with very little assistance. It was a sequence of unique designs, where architects showed what they could do and how far they could twist cement and iron into new configurations. It was a parade of tall rock walls but open driveways, where danger felt far away and kids could go out and ask for candy in Halloween while men in sweaty undershirts played with their CB radios with all the doors open. It was a concert of lonely dogs and car horns that called for maids to open the garage doors while old skinny brown men hacked at the overgrown green weeds and little blonde boys ran in circles on the third floor terrace.
Now there are no kids outside and the dogs are loud and strong and every big house has a man with a shotgun at the gate. Now each block has a small cement house for the community guard who walks around through the night, back and forth over the same curved sidewalk, looking left and right, more afraid for his own safety than concerned about the fulfillment of his duties. Now the big millionaires have moved on to greater houses with taller walls and concrete helicopter landings and some businesses have moved in where before there were only people. Now the traffic is so thick that even a car has trouble making turns and trucks honk in anger when a woman runs across the street reaching for a small opportunity to reach the other side. Now there is loud mechanical noise and the black smoke of the old buses and the smoke has started to color the white walls in the same faded gray that runs through the downtown neighborhoods and which always gave me a sense of nausea on a late afternoon. The old rich families have moved on, but the old houses are still there, still impressive, still colorful, still unique.
This house is dirty inside, there are stains on the wall that I remember seeing ten years ago, there are broken doorknobs and cracks in the paint, there is dust on books and papers, there are clothes piled on old tools and the old hunting rifle sticks its head out of the broken closet door, forgotten but calling for one more flash of burning life. There is a bad smell of human disease throughout the rooms, mixed in with hints of sadness and boredom and hopes that have lost their form. There are metal gates within metal gates that separate the garden into small cubicles and with each locked gate the sense of seclusion increases, isolation that has no end, loneliness that has no hope. The house has the look of a place that has remained the same for too long, and everything that stays the same ultimately finds that it can’t stay the same and maybe it realizes too late that all those moments that seemed the same were only the tiny drops of constant slow decay, decay of walls, decay of paint, decay of doors, decay of tables, decay of books, decay of mind, decay of body, decay of dreams.
I wonder then how many of the houses around me are also in decay, how many have cracked walls inside, how many have faded paint, how many hide old stains that that have survived decades of negligence, how many hide frail old women that cling to life by the thinnest of tendrils, how many hide old men who have lived their life in books and have resolved the way that makes things right and what people, the others, have done to make it wrong, how many hide sadness and regret, how many hide an old deception and a growing sense of futility. I wonder then how many houses have turned into tombs that mercifully allow their occupants to simply die slowly, away from the peering eyes of the passersby.
I look at myself and I know that these observations apply to me. Move or decay. There are no other options. In looking at myself and at this house, I understand the solid magnet that pulls at the roots of my flesh, I see the silver cords that bind me and hold me down, I see my secret death wish and the gentle rusty locks that hold it in place.

Barking In The Night

I am sitting in my grandma’s living room, in the middle of the night. There is silence all around me. Not the dangerous silence of solitude and hidden eyes but the gentle silence of locked doors, cutting wire and tall walls. This silence is only interrupted by the familiar recurring sounds of the lonely kitchen at night: a dripping faucet, a fridge turning off and on. I lean back on the sofa, writing and reading, reading and writing, listening for slight changes in the atmosphere, the sound of a night guard blowing on a long falling whistle, of a car passing by, a truck shivering as it slides down the slanted streets to the south of our corner. Then there is silence again.
And in the midst of this great silence, I hear screams or dogs howling, a lot of them, or people screaming like dogs, a lot of them, or dogs that have intruded into the silence of the night because people have intruded into their own silence and now they bark and howl and I see red and yellow and it is all fire and heat and dread, an explosion of intense activity somewhere nearby that comes from nowhere and bathes my fragile silence in the pulsing rhythms of flames. They are the colors of the imaginary hell I was taught to fear and I learned to love and the dogs extend downwards to become one single thing that is not dog because it is human, and there are sweaty legs drenched in fire that curl around torsos drenched in blood and the snarls of the dogs drip with thick smelly saliva that mixes with the sweat and the blood to form a pool that forms a nest for the many headed creature. It has come alive here in the middle of the night. I reach out for a reason but there can be no explanation. Somewhere out there, something has happened, someone has fallen, someone has jumped, someone is running, someone is dead and the dogs howl and bark and welcome another piece of flesh into their fold and all other dogs come to join in the celebration, dogs from blocks away that howl in response and bark with ferocious glee. The creature is alive and growing and it feeds on the silence.
Earlier I thought of walking alone in the middle of the night, of gliding quietly down the sharply inclined streets of my childhood while the houses were dark and the people slept. But I now think that out in the night of San Salvador there is only room for guards with shotguns and thieves and if I have no gun and I am walking outside, I must be a thief, the lowest of the thieves because I don’t know what I’m doing, and there is no other option, no other possible explanation, no recourse to art or perception or exploration. If I walk unarmed in the streets of San Salvador I must be a thief and the creature that roams the streets with many faces stands ready to swallow me and make me one with it.
Soon the howls die down, the barks get softer and softer, some dogs are stubborn and keep on barking long after the main wave is over, but even they grow tired and like a dark gentle cloud, the silence returns and the dripping faucet becomes once again the tender drummer of my thoughts.
When the night is most quiet and the armed guards are staring silently down the deserted dirty sidewalks, broken by grass and time and neglect, then there may again be room for the fiery explosion of dogs that howl, hoping that someone out there might hear them and come to feed them. For now they rest and I will never know what invoked this sharp fanged angel out of the silence.

Not The Same

I returned to El Salvador, to the same place that I knew, and the place was the same but I was no longer the same.
I came down from the plane and the sky was a bit dark. There were people walking along with me: a tall blonde, thick and big, with white skin and tiny blonde hairs on her lower back which made her skin shine and stand out, a couple of Salvadorean businessmen without coats, talking in loud confident voices and laughing at their use of local slang, an American guy with a tall straw hat whom I perceived as if he saw this whole country as one big joke, and I was a bit bothered by that, but I also thought that maybe he was right, maybe this whole little country was one big strange joke. But then I remembered what I had seen from the window of the plane and the depth of the emerald jungle, so green and brilliant, so thick, so clean and clear, at least when seen from so high above, like a great green carpet with an infinite amount of detail and subtle variations. There I could see the limit of the neural net which I was able to see from the plane in San Francisco, the vast electronic net which uses people as its carriers even as people think that they bring it up out of nothingness. Up in San Francisco, it is deeper and it reaches farther, but even there, it has its limits. But here the jungle was still alive and the net was barely starting to make its mark. Here the raw power of the underworld still reached up in dark vines and tangled roots to caress the edges of heaven. Here hope was still bursting unchallenged in the dark wet shadows that cling to the swamps and the broken rivers.
So the place was not a joke, I decided, it was only covered by a web of contradictions that could be taken as a joke but which were not intended to elicit laughter. I saw the brown girls that were in charge of selling in the many duty free shops, a series of nondescript, unexceptional little stores which lined the whole length of the airport, and I wondered why they made us, the passengers, walk from one end of the airport to the other, and then I thought that maybe the stores themselves were the answer, we were a kind of hungry, tired captive audience ready to spend money as soon as we landed, and the pretty brown girls were the sleeping offer which was surrounded by little trinkets to protect it from the danger of being discovered. I went through customs without any problems and, with a few more steps, I was in El Salvador proper, in the midst of all the men in "guayaberas" (loose short sleeve buttoned up shirts) bathed in sweat which covered their brown skin like a coat of salt and women with very tight pants, wide hips, and lustful eyes which looked to all sides with a single question at the tip of their tongues.
I thought for a moment that maybe my Dad had forgotten to come but I stayed standing calmly where I was, with the small backpack over my shoulder and the large suitcase next to me and the eyes of men and women and kids which wondered over me off the side, and sometimes straight on, and I could feel them asking themselves what role was I playing in their game, how could I be useful to them, how was I harming them, how did I affect them in any way, and suddenly they would get interested in someone else if I looked back at them, and their eyes would wander away for as long as I looked. Several taxi cab drivers, also in guayaberas, asked me if I needed a ride and I declined with a smile and a shake of my head.
My Dad arrived and I surprised him by walking towards him and meeting him halfway. When he recognized me, he smiled happily and he hugged me, and then he walked me over to the wide sidewalk outside where the other people were waiting and he left me there to go get the car. I stayed there and listened to the conversations of strangers, of two drivers who had come to pick up strangers and the young one could take whomever came out first, as a gift from the older one, and the older one also said that "the heat" (described as a female presence) was always there and he also said that sometimes they leave the flight from Costa Rica at the end of the line and I thought that there was so much that I didn’t understand before because back then I would have thought: "This man, why is he saying these things? He is talking only to talk." And now I know that "talking to talk" is the primary function of speech and that the essential and "useful" content is only an added gift, an extra addendum, which is only sometimes included, but this man did have a purpose in talking which had been invisible to me in the past: to establish his presence and create a circuit of contact with the younger man. Now I have learned that to say "it fell, it fell so hard, it fell many times, it fell" is not the same as saying "it fell" and that saying that someone moved around me and hugged his relative is not the same as saying that he hugged him, and that his arms opened up and spread apart and that their bodies came together, they touched momentarily, and that they were men and they touched each other for a moment and then they retreated quickly because they were men and they loved each other but it was only a hug and, knowing that that was all that it was, they hugged each other, and, in front of me, a little boy of about ten years of age was hugging his mother or his grandmother and he was shaking and crying and moaning and I didn’t know if it was out of happiness or sadness and I saw that at a certain level of intensity the two were indistinguishable and that, as I had seen in the days that passed, within me the war was between the heart and the sex energy and that’s why, every so often, I had to look at the solid girl with wide hips and a black miniskirt and at her white and curved thighs and then I could look again towards the street to see if my Dad was arriving but it was only some other red cars which were passing by, bigger, newer, and in the distance a thin brown girl was stepping onto a microbus (a large van used as a luxury bus in El Salvador) and I thought of Dilcia who still lived here and who always traveled in the microbuses from one place to another, always with an eye on her purse so that it wouldn’t get stolen, always very aware of danger which came from all men in general, and I thought that she was still looking for someone to give her heart to and I thought of what it would have been like if that night, so many years ago, I had kissed her in her parent’s living room and she had given herself to me and we had been united forever and how we would live happily together now and maybe we would come back to El Salvador every so often with our hands together and we would love each other so much, but then I remembered that I did kiss her that night and that she did give herself to me and that she didn’t travel on the microbuses anymore and that she didn’t travel anywhere in El Salvador at all and that she was lost within the cold labyrinth of the Northern cities and that our love was a mirage, a pretty mirage like what I could feel for that skinny brown girl who in this very moment was stepping up onto a microbus, just as my father was arriving in the little red Fiat.
He parked by my side and he helped me to put the suitcase in the backseat. Then an older man told me that the safety belt was hanging outside the car and I pulled it in and said thank you to him, more than once.
Once on the highway, it was the El Salvador that I knew, not the mystery that I had seen from the airplane window but the expected landscape, the fragments of reality that came already preconstructed and ready to digest, and I struggled against falling into that trap and I looked again and I saw that they were both there, existing one over the other, and one of them I saw with the eyes of a ghost and the other one I saw with the eyes of a human, and as I tried to focus in on the one that was truly there and was completely unknown, I also talked with my Dad about politics, and here came all the complete, total and final statements and my body responded in the expected ways, with slight pains and discomfort and a constant urge to rebuke all conclusions, but there was something else which was watching it clearly and which didn’t let it fall all the way and I spoke and I allowed the contact to flow through the words and once again the secret of language, which is nothingness, was revealed to me, even as it faded like an old poster ad for ice cream on the side of a very old store and there, next to the barred door of a dirty little pharmacy, I saw the man with a rifle, the same one that scared Pat so many years ago, and there were the young couples, brown and decisive, walking hand in hand on the side of the road, and the older women with their giant straw baskets full of merchandise and the semi naked kids playing in dirty water, and the jungle which could still be seen among the little tin huts and the stores and the gas stations and the sky and the clouds felt like incoming rain and we were still talking about the politics of the United States and of El Salvador and about global warming and gas and the multinational corporations which had the deep and clear intention of swallowing every last bit of this land before spitting it back out in the shape of a California mall.
I finally bought the map which I had so much wanted at a gas station in the city, and there was everything I had ever wanted in great detail, and we arrived at the house, but just before arriving, we saw a thin girl who sold bubble gum on the side of the road while wearing a tiny miniskirt and I wondered if she really sold bubble gum with her legs or if the bubble gum was an excuse to earn a lot more when she opened them. We arrived at the house and I went to say hello to my grandmother and she was like a shadow of the woman I had known, her skin was very white and moist and she reminded me of what my grandfather looked like right before they burned his body, and then I thought that maybe my main purpose in being here was to see my grandmother one more time and she hugged me and she offered me food many times in a very loud voice (for people that can’t hear also think that others can’t hear them) and she asked me to sit down with her and she said that I was very tall now and that soon I would be taller than my father, and my Dad laughed and he said that I had been taller than him for many years now, and then my grandmother grabbed my hand and she held it for a long time and I looked into her eyes while my Dad wondered what I was doing and then she offered me something to eat again and I declined for the twentieth time and later I showed her the video I had made of her and halfway through the video she said: "Who is that that is talking?" and my Dad said to her: "It’s you, mother!" and he put headphones on her head so that she could listen and then she just watched the whole time and later she told me that she liked it a lot and I gave her the graphic pieces and she thought that they were paintings and she liked them very much as well and later I heard her on the phone telling my aunt what she had seen and then it became even clearer to me that that’s why I was there and that that’s why I had come at this particular moment and that my grandmother soon would leave and that now I would be able to listen to her talk one last time.
I rolled out the map on the large thick wooden dining room table and I examined it carefully. As I looked at it, I started talking to Lorena, one of the maids, and Lorena told me about her life, how she spent 2 weeks caged in this house and then a single weekend free, just a little bit of time to see her son and then return, and she told me that she came from Izalco and I asked her about the famous "brujos" from Izalco and she said: "Before there were older men who knew about those things but I think they all died away. Maybe there is one still somewhere but I haven’t seen him." Then she looked at the map with me and she said: "When you look at a map like that, you get lost."
My Dad came to talk to us and we examined the map a bit more and we saw that there were lost rivers in the middle of the city and my Dad said that that’s where they dropped the dead bodies in the middle of the night and that it was very dangerous to go there and Lorena said that there was a lot of silence there, and I thought that in El Salvador, which was so full of noise, silence meant danger, silence meant lack of protection, silence meant exposure, silence killed and then you were just a body rotting on the side of a forgotten river.
I went upstairs, to my Aunt’s apartment, to be in silence and there I wrote what had happened so far and I felt that I was falling asleep and I managed to work a little but I was falling asleep even more and then I did some more and I truly did fall asleep and I started to dream and I had to surrender and I came back to fall asleep in my Dad’s bedroom.
At night there was food and more talk and Etanna called me and I felt that I was with her and I told her about the thick green carpet that I had seen from the plane which was the jungle and she read me what she had written about the jungle which was a thick green carpet and I told her how much I loved her and she said the same to me and my Dad asked me if that was my "friend" which had called me and I said that it was and I saw that she was my friend, and more than my friend, but still always my friend, and I thought what it would have been like if that night in the motel in San Luis Obispo I would have kissed her and I had pressed myself against her and I had felt her body sweating against mine and I thought that maybe I would not have been in El Salvador now or maybe Dilcia would be here with me now, laughing and arguing with her own father, but then I remembered that I did kiss Etanna and I remembered that she was now with me and that Dilcia was lost in the labyrinth and that I was a ghost, a ghost that flew over a thick green carpet which was the jungle, the jungle of the Real World which was not yet tamed, which transcended any idea of action, of place or of saviors that came in the middle of the night to announce that the world was ending. In the thick jungle, the world didn’t need to end for it had never started.
And then I saw that I was here, in the place that I knew, in the same place as always, but I was no longer the same.

Notes From A Ghost

Rip Van Winkle met the fairies in the mountains, drank from their wine and woke up twenty years later, without knowing what happened, with a long white beard and completely out of place. All his friends were gone, his wife was lost to the winds of time, the King had been pushed away and there was a new man in the town that had come to replace him. I read the old story and see myself in it.
The Faeries took me to the United States, to San Francisco, in a tornado of causes and effects that tumbled upon each other like dominos, to a dream that lasted decades and took many strange turns through darkened corridors and foggy afternoons. Now when I come back to El Salvador, I am out of place. Most of my friends are gone or lost and the few that remain are now older responsible men with whom I can barely speak. My wife is lost beyond reach through a series of daring jumps and misty misunderstandings that already fade into watercolor memories.
I am back where I am supposed to belong and yet I don’t belong, and maybe I never did. I am then like a strange ghost that wanders through old abandoned mansions, seeing things that are not there anymore, talking to people that died a long time ago, hoping for things that never happened and never will.
My ghostly nature, as I prepare to embark on a journey to El Salvador once again, can help me or hurt me. I can fade into the whiteness of the walls and simply pass the time, letting my father and the people around me decide what it is I am doing and why I am there. I can do it out of courtesy. I can do it out of kindness. I can do it out of shyness.
Or I can see that I am no longer one of them. I am no longer a Salvadoran human, maybe not a human at all, and so I can make the abrupt choices that others won’t do, I can take risks, I can delve deeply into the areas that are normally left untouched.
It will be my choice. And it will be my choice from moment to moment. I can’t sit and relax for too long or the work will slip right past me, the heat and the sweat and the sleepiness of a house that has stayed the same for thirty years or more will all take over and I will be once again the same Juan Carlos that once was, dripping with sweat on a light brown couch while mosquitoes buzz around my ears and suck blood from my flesh, and then my journey and my work will mean nothing and I will once again pass by the streets and walk to the supermarket and look away when people see me and escape from school and lose my friends and look for new ones in the streets of a lost little neighborhood where I should have never lived.
I thought yesterday of the day when I said to Chris, the Greek man who was my mother’s friend for a brief time: "It may sound corny but I think the friends I have in El Salvador are special." And he responded sharply and clearly: "That is corny." And I never said it again. Now I look back and wonder. Did I make them special because I needed to have close friends? Because my heart opens up to people and welcomes them in, just like it does right now with the ones that are close to me? In other words, as long as I encountered people and made them my friends, would any friend be "special" for me? Would I have clung to them for so many years and even pulled them to the faraway country of my exile? Or was there really something different about Ricardo and Rodney and Tania and all the others?
Going back, I can see other kids discovering the world for the first time. I can see my little nephew reaching out to what, for him, is a brand new world, fresh and just created moments ago, and I can see myself in him and I can only wonder if there behind those innocent brown eyes is me and I can only see what my language can encompass and what I see is fresh and fearsome and chaotic and strange and I can simply reach out for a friend, a true friend, in the midst of the chaos.
As a ghost I can see what is invisible to others but I have to embrace my ability. I have to seek out the side shows, the alleys that lead to places that I haven’t explored, the strange thoughts that live under the everyday conversations, the lost causes, the fervent desires that hide behind buttoned up shirts and neatly pressed long skirts. As a ghost I will hide at the edges of walls, in the cracks left behind by decades of earthquakes. I will watch once again as I meet Dilcia and as I open up to her completely and she opens up to me with the same wild abandon. I will see her with me, walking down El Paseo, kissing in front of El Salvador del Mundo, walking together to my grandma’s apartment, I will see her next to me in her short jeans skirt and I will hear her soft sweet voice telling me that she loves me above all things. I will walk with her once more to the radio and hear for the first time what a terrible father Fanci was and I will believe and not believe and I will see once again that just as she hates him then, she will hate me one day and I will see it so clearly that it will strike fear in me and I will set the vision aside, letting it linger behind my everyday thoughts, waiting for its time to become real. All of it happens now as it happened then.
Somewhere behind the businessman that is Balta is the little kid that told stories of sex and seduction behind a mountain of sand. Somewhere behind the whore that is Laura is the girl that wanted to play with the kids of the neighborhood and somehow cared who won a game of soccer. Somewhere under new houses lies that little empty lot where we played soccer and kickball for so many afternoons. Somewhere other kids still discover their own empty lots and somewhere a kid looks down a girl’s shirt for the first time or watches a girl in tight shorts lying forward so that the shorts run up into her buttocks and even expose some of her hidden underwear. Somewhere a girl finds a boy to love for the first time and writes his name over and over in the notebook where she should be doing her homework and she draws little hearts next to his name. Somewhere a boy waits outside a girl’s school hoping this time the girl will give him a kiss or at least a smile or at least a single look from her eyes which are like fountains of aching pleasure, so distant, so completely beyond reach. Somewhere a boy dances the waltz with a girl he has just met and falls in love with her as his hand touches her naked back for the first time. Somewhere there is a lonely afternoon when the radios play in the distance and the air vibrates with color and a boy’s heart hurts with an intensity that he can’t understand or explain.
As I go back as a ghost, I must not let myself fall once again into sleep and be fooled by the appearance of human life. I am now in this world but I am not of this world. I am here as an observer from a distant star and I am here to explore. That is my work as a ghost and as a ghost I will fulfill it.