What Came Before Me

What came before me
Is still present
It still swirls around me like the wind
It still weighs me down like giant ocean rocks
It still whispers at my ear like an inflamed lover
Eager to be touched once again.

I speak of the me that is today
The me that can only be today
in this moment
sweating in the old living room
that still swarms
with the old ghosts of other lives.
The memories of those lives
Are now like liquid tendrils
that pull and splash
at the edges of my vision
calling for my fire
chewing on my bones.

Long slithering tendrils
That reach out from places far away
That try to insinuate themselves
Into locked chambers
And open doors.
Tendrils of sight and sound
Of midnight moonlight
And dusty sun that seeps
Through open windows
Of haunting songs
In unknown languages
That fall like marbles
Over white sheets that blow in the wind
And slide down their soft surface
To come to rest on my hungry ears.

I stand today in the dry fountains
The dry husks of music that has long fallen silent
Empty receptacles of ancient memories
That have already been consumed,
Digested and left behind to rot.
And I remember walking here
Once so long ago,
With Dilcia at my side
Dilcia when she was the one
The one that I had found
At the end of a quest for death
That started with great gusts of fire
In the middle of desert highway,
And ended with desperate kisses
And another silent fire that burned from the inside
Where the source could not be reached
Where the flame could not be touched.

I had found her, the one
But she was also
The one that had found me
The only one that mattered
The dream that pushed all other dreams away,
The horn that sang so loudly
That all other instruments had to fall away quietly
Defeated and finally at rest.

And I remember that my heart was pounding
As we walked together
Crashing against my ribcage like
A giant ball of heavy stone
Against fragile pillars of thin wood
And as my heart pounded
Harder and harder
I remember that suddenly it opened
Completely
Painfully
Irrevocably
Finally breaking down the walls
That took so long to build
And letting the storm come through
Fierce, powerful and unrepentant.
It opened
To her
To her sliding voice
To her words of silver
And her silences of gold
To her childlike wonder
And her womanly lust.
To her laughter tinged with sadness
And her honest tears of joy.
My hard and heavy heart
Opened
To her
It opened for her
And it opened with her
With her little heart that was so fragile
That at any moment,
It threatened to simply slide off her chest
And burst on the ground
Like a giant teardrop
Made of shiny golden dust.

As we walked down the dirt path
The dirt path of the fountains
The same that I had walked to dream
The same that I had walked to escape
The same that I had walked to return
The same that I had walked to continue
Our arms were interleaved
And we moved forward
In a solid careless march
And as we marched, she sang:
"The one who doesn’t stand aside,
we will knock down!"
And she laughed
In great golden goblets of ecstatic abandon
And I laughed as well
In sympathy and in wonder
At this crystalline creature
Who gave herself to me
More with every word that left her lips
More with every time that her eyes closed
More with every smile that I invoked
More with every flutter of her eyes
More with every time she said goodbye
More with every time she said hello.

In her innocent beauty
And her beautiful innocence
She made me more loving,
She showed me how to weaken the defenses
How to stare at the simple building blocks
Of stone and cement and skin and nail
And let the Other come through,
Sliding and gnashing and howling,
Present and dripping with life,
In all its fearsome glory.

In my hunger for darkness
And my fleeting moments of light
I made her stronger,
I gave her the need and the way
To stand above her hesitations
And walk onto a world
That had pushed her and battered her
Right from the very start,
And stand solid and precise
To rest her weight on what others set aside
And find a new way forward
Into a strange new realm
Of endless questions
And unspeakable thoughts.

I love her still,
As much as my heart will allow
And my heart grows stronger by the hour
But she has turned her strength against me
And her newborn anger and hate
Digs into me ever more deeply
Because of the love that still burns
In the deepest caverns of my Being,
For her,
Through her
With her.

Now I walk by the dry fountains
Alone
Taking pictures
Letting thoughts and visions
Slide through my consciousness
Like rapid fire movies
That end before they start.
I see the dust like I never saw it,
And the grass, and the faded paint,
And the dirty shirts and the shaking buses
And the thin little men with their thick machetes
and the forgotten stairways made of stone
And the palm trees that sway gently in the wind
and the cars that swarm down the main street,
like hell hounds on the run.
Just then
two girls call for me
To take their picture.
They stop their car in the middle of chaos
And they eagerly call for my attention.
My heart opens
Spontaneously and without hesitation
The pain is there as always
But I don’t run from it
Not like before.
Now I know that I don’t need them
Not them, not the dust, not the grass, not the leaves,
I no longer need
any of the liquid tendrils
That reach out from the past
Still pulling
Still splashing
At the edges of my vision.
I don’t need them
The bright eyes
The moist lips
The soft skin
Or the memory of their presence
I don’t need them
To keep on pushing
The bloody gates apart
The gates that let the oceans out
And bring me up from the world of shadows.
My heart will open for them
But it will not close when they go away.
I am not attracted
I am not repelled
For now, today,
My heart just opens,
Like it did so long ago
And the world is fresh and new
Once again.

The tendrils will keep on pulling
Always
Splashing and pulling
Pulling and splashing
But their need recedes into nothing
And their calls resemble nothing
And their touch, is the touch of nothing.
And as I feel the nothing against me
Under me and around me
I have come to see
Naked, open and alone,
What truly came before me.

Palm trees swinging gently in the wind,
above the silence of the fountains.

Dilcia as she was when her mask had fallen

and her heart had exploded in a rainbow of color.
A ghost of stone that still sings the dreams of glory
of a long forgotten past.

Sweet golden star opening to the
endless mystery of the darkness.

Four more Dilcias travel down
the long road of accidents,
open to possibilities,
unbelieving of defeat.

Lustful innocence that beckons
a Voyager into a world of mystery.

A shaking bus that will take you to unknown regions,
eating raw flesh and spitting black smoke
as it speeds into the deep well of desire.

Innocent lust that stands guard
at the door of real knowledge.

Two girls that called for my attention
in a moment of childlike playfulness
and flashing recognition.

A stranger that beckons
across the unbreachable wall of time.
How I would want to talk to him.
But what would I say if I could?

Years later, after she had disappeared
into the void once again.

The Wonder of Lost Fragments

I was laying down, half asleep, in the brown sofa in the living room of my grandmother’s house. My body was gently soothed by the light cool breeze that was not quite strong enough to counteract the humid heat of the early afternoon and the recurring attacks of the mosquitoes that found their way into the house. Lorena came up the stairs from the dining room and stood before me, with her metal framed teeth, her large conical breasts and her thick brown body that had a kind of earthy beauty that could not be found on any billboard or TV ad. I opened my eyes completely and I saw her standing there, smiling at me, her head framed by the bright light that came in through the open door. If she had been busy, she would have run through so quickly that her sandals would have been hitting the upper levels of the stone steps outside before I would have realized that she had been there. But she was free right now, at least for a moment, and she was ready for me to ask her questions, ready to give me answers. Without any need to say it, I understood her message and I sat up to talk.
We talked of soap operas and movies and stories. She said to me: "I have never been able to be fully interested in movies because I never see them from start to end, and the same is true of the soap operas." She saw movies in little snatches in the midst of constant work. Maybe a bit of the end of one movie while she ate, then a bit of the middle of another movie while she ironed my grandmother’s clothes, maybe she would just hear the start of one from the kitchen while the TV was still on in the dining room, maybe somebody would tell her how another movie finally resolved. She would catch soap operas in snatches as well. Sometimes her schedule would fit in just right and she would sit to watch a whole episode, from start to finish. Then she would recognize a character, understand a particular trail of a story line, maybe even manage to piece together where the whole soap was going and what the main obstacles would be. But her schedule might not match the TV schedule for another week and by the time she could watch an episode again, the stories had changed, the characters had married, died, gotten sick, gotten well, or they might have simply disappeared. So she could never feel herself fully invested in the stories themselves. Even as she saw a scene, she knew already that she might never know how the story turned out, how the pretty girl escaped certain death, how the handsome man returned to marry the beautiful woman, how the poor lost little boy found his mother again. So each scene, each moment of story, had to be enjoyed in its own terms, as sound, as picture, as emotion that came from nowhere and went nowhere. She shrugged her shoulders, as if giving up on the whole endeavor. It was just something to do when there was nothing else to do. In that time of nothing, a story was something and she could never be fully part of that something because it would quickly return to nothing.
I agreed with her that it was difficult to fully experience a movie when you had not seen the start, or when you never got around to seeing the end. I paid special attention to the way she talked about the movies, about the soaps, about the stories. I wondered what she saw as a movie. What did she think it was. Where did she think it came from. To her, these things simply existed. She could not imagine the process of creating them, she could certainly not imagine herself being part of that process. I wondered how similar her experience was to a pigeon’s perception of a wall or a house or a telephone pole, something that has always been there and always will be there, like a tree or a mountain or the sky, and because these things had always been there, because they simply existed outside of any pigeon intervention, then they could not have involved any effort of any kind, certainly no effort that a pigeon could understand. These things, these movies, these houses, these mountains, these stories, these things were not planned, they did not carry intentions, they did not fulfill a purpose, they simply were and they had always been and there was no need to explore them further, anymore than you would explore the wind.
I thought then of comic books, the ones I read when I was little, the ones I looked at before I could even read, and how I also experienced them as lost fragments that existed in tense isolation. Back then, I could never be sure of getting the continuation of a story. I could never even be sure that I would ever find that comic book title again. The people that placed them in the stores probably treated them like grains of rice, completely interchangeable with each other and beyond any conscious notice. So the comic books would simply appear in random batches of color, text and story, without any plan, without any promises, without any past, without any future. I remember reading the words "to be continued" at the end of these little books and feeling them fall upon me like a giant stone mallet. In the final panels of the comic, I would sense a door that would probably never be opened, a mystery that would never be completely solved. Without knowing it, these careless comic book suppliers were teaching me how to live in a world without complete answers, where questions rose over my head like shiny balloons that never ran out of air and never touched the ground again.
I remembered reading Kaliman and realizing that I did not truly know who the villainous Zulma was, why she was with the awful Radames and why they were in search of the sacred stones of Kali. I saw their actions and I recognized them as evil and I could fill in the possible pasts that could have lead to this terrifying present. Sometime in her youth maybe Zulma had learned to be evil, maybe she had grown in a dark city of the desert, maybe she had simply learned to hate from her family of rich and selfish lords. Somehow she had encountered Radames and seduced him, tempted him with her full bronzed body and her deep black eyes and pulled him into her world of reckless desire. Somehow they had brought together the savage gang of killers that they called the Knights of Terror. And somehow they had come to learn of the precious stones of Kali and they were slowly getting all seven of them, one savage massacre at a time. Even more mysterious was Kaliman. Who was he? How did he come to serve Kali? How did he gain his subtle powers that set him apart from ordinary humans? Why was there a little boy with him? Why did they put themselves in danger, time and time again, to save the stones of Kali? Was Kali a real creature that could reach out from the sky to strike out her enemies or was she some form of subtle presence that could only defend her servants through the actions of a strange man in white clothes and the little brown boy that followed him everywhere? All these questions were open and vibrant and, as the story traveled from chamber to chamber, from danger to danger, from daring escape to daring escape and back to the jaws of death, other details were introduced that only added to the tension, to the multidimensional past that spread open behind every tiny move of Kaliman’s hands. Back then, I would have thought that the stories, as good as they were, would have been even better if I had known the answers. I had now come to understand that it was the questions themselves which kept the stories suspended in mid air, flying from mystery into mystery, always avoiding a lethal final answer that would make them come crashing helplessly to the earth. The endless questions that bounced around inside me didn’t push me away from the stories of Kaliman and his little apprentice. Without my conscious knowledge, their nature as disconnected fragments pulled me in and filled me with ever expanding spirals of wonder, filled me with the infinite possibilities that extended in colorful webs through my mind, and beyond, to the furthest reaches of the vast savage world outside the tall windows of my room.
In the same way, I followed the adventures of Ultraman on TV, faithfully and voraciously. When the time would come for the show, a black and white Japanese series dubbed into Spanish, I would sit in front of the TV and I would not allow anything or anyone to disturb me. Nothing could be more important than knowing what great danger Ultraman was about to face and finding out how he would manage to deal with it. I knew that there was something here that meant more than I was seeing, something that called from beyond the blanket of the stars, and said that there was more to our daily life than could be seen with the common human eye. Ultraman was a defender of the human race but he wasn’t quite human. There was a man, a young fearless pilot, that was not Ultraman but could summon him and, in summoning him, would become him, and the two, alien and human, space warrior and pilot, would become as one. In one fateful episode, Ultraman gave his life to save the Earth, battling against overwhelming forces to the death, and light beings from the heart of the galaxy came to the Solar System to give him burial among the stars. They had complex shining emblems and silver horns and mystic amulets that meant more than I could even manage to ask, they implied more than I could dare to imagine. I never knew where they came from or how Ultraman had been sent here. I never knew how these deep space warriors learned what they knew, how they were taught the power to travel among the golden suns that spread far beyond the reach of my knowledge. I never knew of their childhood, or their dreams, or their secret stories. I only knew that they were out there, and the unanswered questions vibrated around them like an aura of strange magic from a dark world that I didn’t know and couldn’t comprehend.
I came to understand that, more than James Bond movies, I adored the initial sequences with which they began. After a shocking prologue that would show me the true nature of this ruthless English spy, the music would begin and it would be clothed in psychedelic waves of sex and violence. The confluence of these three impulses -the shamanic expansion of consciousness that traveled outwards into the pure Universe of archetypes, the burning heat of sexual desire and the heavy dark hunger for blood and destruction- they crashed within me and filled me with a tingling excitement that was tinged with fear and drenched in possibility. The silhouettes of naked women would dance around black guns that swam in an ocean of colors and dreams. The women would be threats and temptations and they would also be lovers and saviors and the spy was the only one that could swim deep into their hidden recesses and discover the truth. It was a call to the lustful exploration of the esoteric underpinnings of reality and it was drenched in the chromatic tension of the movie theme that made my heart beat intensely with an uncontrolled anticipation of new doorways to be opened and new chambers to be discovered. The movie itself could never live up to the far flung expectations of the credits, like Schroedinger’s Cat, it would always fall into a distinct final reality the moment that the box was opened and the poor little kitty would either be alive or dead, but always the taste of those opening credits remained, and that taste was more than enough to make me come back, again and again.
The questions were there in the proto-metal of Black Sabbath, where strange chords and ghostly sound effects and lyrical references to underground grottoes and ancient gods of war and death, evoked a world that expanded outwards, far beyond the limited reach of a distorted guitar playing pentatonic riffs, far beyond the reach of an old little tape recorder and its tinny little speaker that threatened to break apart every time that Ozzy would scream, far beyond my little room filled with books, cassettes and newspapers, all remains of other stories, other dreams, other lost fragments floating in a sea of unanswered questions. It was in the loud clear bell at the very start of a song, and the sounds of a foreboding storm and ghostly winds, it was in the acoustic guitar playing a strange exotic scale for what then seemed like hours and it was really only a few seconds, before the electric guitar came in, it was in the string orchestra that descended on the blaring power chords to create the shining structure that would rise up towards the sky, designed by spiral architects, possessors of long forgotten knowledge, gatekeepers of the House Absolute where ancient unknowable symbols still charted the hidden secrets of Creation. But it was then far beyond me to understand that these tiny suggestions, these elusive touches of the dark mystery all around me, were indeed the center of my adoration. Where I would have thought of them as little touches that completed the picture, they were actually the heart of the picture itself, everything else was adornment, everything else could be taken away and the picture would still remain the same. In these lost fragments of dreams was the truth that could never be spoken, the secret that could never be said, the question that could never be answered.
Lorena shrugged her shoulders again and then she said: "These things keep you entertained." I nodded and she smiled and I said: "Yes, they do." Then she said: "I should get back to work." She turned around and walked away towards the stone steps outside. I looked at her walking away from me, her long blue skirt pressed around her full round ass, her white shirt semi transparent in the sunlight showing the outline of her bra. I imagined her naked and vulnerable, her brown skin glistening with sweat and her large nipples hard and eager to be touched. She walked up the steps and I knew clearly that the question posed by her physical presence and her careful smile tinged with sadness was yet another fragment lost in a world of shadows. Where did she come from? Where was she going? What were the dreams that she kept secret even from herself? The trails of possibilities extended in all directions, but it was this fragment called Lorena that offered the question today and I now knew that this fragment was all I needed. The sunlight kept on shining through the doorway after she disappeared and the light breeze kept on caressing my sweaty skin as I leaned back on the brown sofa, and once again, I closed my eyes.

A closed door that vibrates with infinite possibility.

Kaliman: "All truth is simple and invulnerable,
if it is just."

The red Horned God from the stars,
the leader of the space warriors.

Zulma and the Knights of Terror
who are the manifestations of her deepest
and darkest desires.

Questions of five simple notes and their infinite variations.

The Knights of Terror in full fearsome attack.

Lorena stands ready to answer my questions.

"You are strong and beautiful, stranger.
You shall be my favorite slave."

The questions that lie behind the white veil.

"It is an evil Goddess.
She can change form whenever she wants to!"


Ultraman flies fearless towards the
ancient questions beyond the stars.

"With our last drop of blood,
we will protect the sacred chamber of
our Goddess Kali!"

A girl walks down the street of San Salvador.
Where does she come from?
Where does she go?

Bond with his magic weapon ready to
dive into the deepest mysteries of the world.


Questions of power, pain and pleasure and
the hidden places where they meet.

Bond at the heart of the woman that is his lover,
his enemy and his only true God.

"Only destroying the bridge will I be able
to stop the Black Spider."

The horned space God and the lustful Goddess of Earth.

"What a great pleasure it is to see a slave die
with the venom of my beautiful snakes."



Questions of dark English forests and of witches
that meet in dark old mansions
away from the eyes of the world.


Zulma finds all her beautiful serpents dead
and wonders who may have killed them.



Questions that remain even after
the veil has been removed.

Dreams Of Places Close And Far

We arrived at an elegant corner on the eastern side of the San Benito district, where the Hotel Presidente sits just around the corner from the new National Theater, and in between the two is the new Museum of Modern Art. We drove across the black metal gate, greeted by a skinny wrinkled old man holding a thick silver shotgun at his side, who waved at us without enthusiasm and indicated that we should drive on. We moved up a white concrete ramp overgrown with tall green bushes on either side and came to a flat parking lot at the top. My Dad parked the little red car in the wide open lot which was covered in white gravel and unruly green grass. As we walked out of the little car, I noticed the unpainted tall walls in the distance, some covered over with fading half ripped billboards and some left open and vulnerable in their nakedness of red brick and tainted concrete. We walked together towards the wide gray stairway that lead down to the museum. I looked down and saw that the stairway went straight down across three stories, all the way down to street level, where the long tall metal fence separated the museum from the street. There, in the middle of a plaza that stood a few feet from the sidewalk, was a giant stone sculpture that was almost as tall as the building itself. I walked all the way down to the bottom to look at it closely before we entered the museum. My Dad waited above while I fulfilled my explorations.
The sculpture felt like the kind of great heavy stone that I saw by the ocean when I was a kid. It felt titanic, full and complete, beyond questions or hesitations, beyond the reach of time and decay. The great gray stone was carefully sculpted into the shape of many people, all held together at the core and striving forward toward some unknown destiny. The people were thick and heavy, like the stone itself, their legs were like tree trunks, their faces were round and fat like glorious farmers out of a lost dream of endless prosperity. Their bodies and their faces but, most of all, their attitude of fearless striving and unquestionable unity reminded me of the art of the Soviet Union, an art that was meant to communicate the glories of communism and of the united proletariat conquering all challenges with a clean strong face and full muscular bodies. I thought then that I had never seen people like this in El Salvador. I had never seen armies of peasants marching across the fields with sunlit destiny in their eyes. I had never seen naked mothers rushing forward with their babies at their breast, eager to encounter the future with their nipples hard and their long hair flying at their back. I had never seen tall and muscular men trampling the tall bushes of the Salvadorean jungle in their quest for unified glory and power over any fearsome enemies that they might encounter. The people I had seen in El Salvador, specially the peasants, were all skinny and brown and somewhat shy. They walked with their backs arched forward and their eyes low to the ground, looking up and around only to make sure a car wasn’t about to run them over or a thief wasn’t about to take the little bit of money that they had left. Maybe the closest I had seen to this solid bravery was in the eyes of the guerrillas who gave their lives up for a glorious dream of justice that eventually faded into compromises, interviews, books, posters and loud political ads on TV. Maybe in them there had been this unity and this strength, but even they had never marched like this, they had never pulled their heads back and raised their eyes to face the future in the way that these people did. Instead they had found the secret dark passageways of the city, of the mountains and the jungle, where they could conduct a midnight war of attrition and forbidden messages painted on dirty walls. But even if I had never met these strong people of stone, I wished them well, and I felt that their struggle was a good struggle, even if their stone dreams ended where they began, always looking towards the freedom of the street, always ready to take the next step but always maintaining their shape as hard heavy stone and thus never moving. Their beautiful dream was not in any way diminished because of its impossibility. If anything, their dreams of stone made them more beautiful to me and I wished that they would always look up towards the sky and dream of other lands, dream of a time when stone might finally move and they might rush the future together, unified in their stone heart, strong in their stone courage.
Awash in the beauty of hard full nakedness and the pure raw courage at its heart, I walked back up the stairs. There was an event going on inside which involved a lot of loud amplified speaking and a lot of enthusiastic crowd response. I looked through the long windows and saw people dressed in fine pants and white shirts and I saw several computers scattered across white desks and a man walking back and forth on a stage, with a wireless microphone in his hand. As much as I tried, I couldn’t make out what he was saying. The echo blurred it into a sonic watercolor that barely managed to convey enthusiasm and some measure of success, emphasized by the responses of the crowd. In the bare hints that the sound gave me, and in the way that the people inside were dressed and in the way that they moved, I could tell that these were the new Salvadoreans, the ones that spoke in a soft polite tone that was taught and learned in the hidden chambers of the international corporations, the ones that had learned to set aside the borrowed dreams of stone and had learned to embrace the dreams of steel, the bright Technicolor hallucinations that flowed continuously from the lands of the north, from New York and Los Angeles and Texas. These people strove to be top executives and arrange difficult deals for their bosses in the stars and look down at the new people below them with disdain and look up at the ones above them with fear and treacherous respect. They wanted a newer car, a newer computer, a newer house and maybe sometimes, a moment to be quiet, just to be able to look back at all of their success and breathe easy because for now, they were safe and satisfied and maybe a new model of Ford or Toyota was about to be released into their land of momentary joy. These loud people in their suits were as different from the Salvadoreans I had seen in the streets and the countryside as the stone people of the sculpture with their long silent stares. As I came to see this, I asked myself: who were these real Salvadoreans and what were their true dreams? Could their ancient visions be truly lost under so many layers of swimsuit billboards and loud honking cars?
We walked into the museum lobby and we left the world of the sun and the street noise and the tall grass clumps and the dirty walls of red brick. Here there was wall to wall carpet and the soft hum of air conditioning and a long counter with fliers and brochures and announcements and a perfect glowing display describing the current show. There were two guards dressed in black pants and white shirts. Each had a gun in a holster. I thought that maybe the gun was a way of subtly saying that here it was safer, here we needed weapons but we didn’t need the thick shotguns of the streets; instead the guards were more like refined military officers and they carried their guns at their sides, ready to face danger if it was necessary but, in the meantime, pushed away from sight. Behind the counter was a dark skinned woman, thin and pretty, with long flowing black hair and strong eyes. She was also dressed in black pants and white shirt, which made her just a little less of a woman and more of a guard. When she talked to us, her voice was cold and her words were memorized. I asked if I could take pictures inside and she said yes, as long as I didn’t use my flash. Then we bought our tickets and we stepped past the open threshold that lead into the museum.
I had been in museums many times before, but living as a ghost as I was today, this museum presented itself to me as a market of individual dreams, a sequence of highly personal chambers recreated in loving detail for a stranger’s eyes to caress, for a stranger’s mind to interpret, for a stranger’s heart to love. These dreams were not the dreams of the great collective as I had seen outside. Instead they were subtle and small and contained, etched in fine colors and tiny kisses of light. I saw the bust of a naked woman that was a castle or a castle that was as if a woman, and I thought that I had been there before, resting on the tower that was her head, sliding down the ramp that was her breast, rummaging in the darkness that was her crotch. I saw a small sculpture of an aquelarre, the savage parties where the witches used to meet to invoke their gods in a tornado of intoxicants, music and sex. I could see myself playing music for these naked figures and I could see myself joining them and I could then remember a time when I had indeed played music for more than one aquelarre, and I had chanted mantrams in people’s ears as they fainted and gasped and I had made a woman into a man so that she could penetrate a man who was a woman and I had danced wildly with the one who would later dance in darkness and sweat with me and I had held hands with tall semi naked men while we circled around sweaty naked women climaxing intensely with every explosion of the insistent beat. I saw a painting of El Cipitio, with a thick long nose and a small twisted yellow stick in his hand and crows flying all around him and I remembered that I had been once to his home and I had tasted of his strange ashes to become as one with him and to recognize him in all his many elusive faces and confusing garbs. One by one, the chambers opened up to me in their glory that masqueraded as art but hid something clearer, purer and harsher. I could almost feel the last movement of the hands as they finished the process of creating and left behind the vibrant corpse that would somehow call the attentive seekers to the forgotten lost paths of the underground world of Xibalba.
We walked down a carpeted ramp and arrived at two large square rooms that held a single complete collection: The Odyssey as etched and brought to life by the work of Marc Chagall. We walked carefully through the whole sequence, the eternal cycle of the hero that leaves home, is successful in war, struggles for years in the treacherous seas and finally comes back to Ithaca and his wife Penelope. The cycle was eternal in that it repeated forever, never quite the same but never truly changing. I saw Odysseus once again fight the Cyclops and boldly say the fateful words: "I am Odysseus", thus bringing upon him years and years of desperate loneliness and heart wrenching struggle. I overheard an old man reading the story and saying "pobrecito" in a soft gentle voice and I felt that this old man knew something about the years of longing. I followed the travels of Odysseus, and saw the demon beasts and the fateful encounters and the great battles and the terrible heartbreak and the mistakes that repeat forever for the greater glory of the endless and the successes that can only be imagined and can never be quite reached by beings that end and begin in dust. I saw the final return of Odysseus to Penelope’s arms and I wondered for a moment if Dilcia was my Penelope because, in Chagall’s drawings, she looked so much like a lost little brown girl that still loved the man that first made her a woman and rushed straight into her heart like a conquering warrior without fear. I quickly realized that this couldn’t be so, for Penelope had waited for as long as Odysseus had traveled and Dilcia instead had flown away as soon as the real journey began. I saw then that I was the Odysseus that is not written of in the story, maybe one of the other warriors that left their island homes to conquer Troy, I was the one that never came back to his lost Ithaca and instead broke past the inherent fear of the mermaids and took them with him on a longer journey that could have no return. Now I wandered the oceans with them, taking its recurring and omnipresent gifts and transforming them into eternalized moments that we may then show to a stranger someday and maybe his mind would caress them and maybe his heart would love them just as my own loved these pieces today. I no longer had an Ithaca to return to. Not in El Salvador, not in Southern California, not in San Francisco, not anywhere in the world of men.
We passed from the eternal individual story of Odysseus to the historic and collective history of El Salvador, as told through individual creations across the years. Here, in the early paintings of the 20th century, I could sense a hint of the lost dreams of the real Salvadoreans, the ones that were so easy to spot walking on the street and yet so difficult to reach and truly understand. A green hill scattered here and there with palm trees and little white houses covered with bright red roofs. A jungle brimming with birds of all colors, their beaks open and in the middle of a song. A naked young woman, with small breasts and curved slender hips, shyly waiting for her lover to cover her in a white sheet. A voluptuous black woman with a thick full ass and pronounced lips, leaning shamelessly naked on a white podium. A man in a white manta shirt and a wide brim hat, his face covered by his loving wife who is kissing him, as he is surrounded by two loving little kids, the boy without a shirt, the girl in a simple pink dress. A woman leaning against a table, falling asleep on a lazy afternoon. As the years progressed, from the 20’s to the 40’s to the 60’s and as the gentle afternoons of love and birds and naked women got shattered by poverty, corruption and greed, the colorful dreams turned into arid nightmares. There was a tall hill of dead and almost dead bodies, looking up at a sky full of dark foreboding clouds. A man whose face had been removed, leaving a yellowish raw being that stared with wide open eyes at hordes of soldiers and crosses and fire and guns. A man with his hands tied up behind his back who was forcefully kicked away by the naked feet of a priest. A skinny poor brown man being violently strangled by a man in a suit whose eyes bulged out in lustful anger and release. All memories of a war that flowered in eagerness and hope and descended into betrayal and disdain at the hands of people that saw profit in pain and whose most secret dreams were covered in fresh warm blood.
On the first wall of the post war period, I saw a piece by Walter Iraheta, the artist who was, but also was not, the boyfriend of Dilcia before me. She had loved him from afar and had offered herself to him in ways that were not too subtle for him to recognize but too truthful for him to embrace. And so she had loved him and maybe he had loved her a little but their lips never pressed together and their tongues never intertwined and he was only her boyfriend across a dirty window in a university classroom in the dying moments of a lost afternoon, when Dilcia was like a shadow and he was like a flash of light that quickly retreats into the distance. The piece that I saw this afternoon on the wall of the museum had a shirtless man standing next to a woman. The woman was naked and her head was bundled up in cloth, hiding her eyes, hiding her mouth, hiding her ears, leaving her blind, deaf and dumb. The man leaned towards her slightly, a wooden flat wheel in his hand. There were foreign bills and foreign text on the sides and diagrams of strange bicycles on the top. It all came together to form a complex unity that vibrated in its obscurity and made the simple figure of the hooded naked woman stand out in high relief. I looked at this complex creation and asked myself if this beautiful female body with her head wrapped up in blinding suffocating cloth was actually Dilcia, the beautiful brown girl that I had known so well, the one that had lived with me for so many years but could never tell when I was serious and when I was joking, the one who loved me beyond reason and now hated me in the same way. In rational terms, it wasn’t Dilcia. It couldn’t be. In lines of logic that fit into each other like an extended puzzle that never ends and burrows forever into the fabric of the infinite, it wasn’t Dilcia. But in the land of dreams and of underground connections that extend under vast territories of fire and ice, in this land maybe it truly was her. In this twilight land where all distinct differences are lines drawn in ocean waves and dream tales blend into each other like translucent spider webs over a perfect blue sky, in this land, I saw Walter as if he was me and I saw myself as Walter, making a piece about another girl that was also Dilcia but had a different past and a different future, and just as Dilcia wanted him but got me, he ended up with her in another body and with another name, and what Dilcia loved in me was also in him, and what Dilcia grew to hate about me was in him as well. I saw then that here he made a piece of art , beautiful, detailed and strong, and he made it for me, across the gulf of the vast unknown abyss, and through this complex and honest creation, he said to her who was not Dilcia what I could never say to the one who was.
I walked through the rest of the post war years, rising to heights of bold uninhibited abstraction, to the lands of pure process where minds communicate with each other without the need of symbol or sign or purpose. In these forms of pure color and texture I felt the most subtle calling of the work that forms the foundation of my entire life. Dreams of childhood, dreams of ideas, dreams of god, dreams of space, dreams of adventure, dreams of dreams that break apart into infinite possibilities only to come together again in impossible knots. The cumulative effect was of a glowing pressing circle of fire in my chest, and it kept on growing as I walked further into the halls of the newest works. Here I saw that all dreams are worth having, the dreams of stone, the dreams of steel, the dreams of naked brown girls and the dreams of love in a room full of sweat and mosquitoes. Their worth is inherent in their existence and their forms are limitless. To create is to push forth a dream out of nothingness, out of experience, out of memory, out of process, out of chaos, out of pure raw life, and to send it forth to spawn new dreams in the beings who will come to touch them. The constant effort must be perfected. The iron discipline must be etched in the evanescent substance of our Beings. Our attention and effort must be constrained in the service of creation. But the creation itself must be as deep and fearsome as the oceans, as open and limitless as the sky. Walking back out of the museum, back into the land of the sun and the unruly grass and the guards with thick shotguns, the tension between these seemingly discordant truths was set aside for a moment and the path ahead was clear, as clear as the shy eyes of a brown naked girl waiting for her lover to help her, as clear as the eternal horizon in the eyes of the people of stone.

Eyes of stone that shine
with solid determination and bottomless hope.

The dreams of stone as they looked out
towards the impossible freedom of the street.

The savage lustful aquelarre of the witches.
The naked woman that is also a castle.
The Great Journey that never ends.Dreams of horns and wings in the midst of fire.

The dreams of returning to Ithaca.Odysseus and Penelope before the Great Journey began.

A naked black woman with her delicious broad hips,

full breasts and a complete lack of shame.

A young shy woman vulnerable in her nakedness.

Dreams of a logic that knows no bounds.
The gift that Walter gave to me
across the great abyss of the unknown.

The naked body of the Dilcia
that was not Dilcia but truly was.

The lost dream of a Dilcia
that would never be found again.

Dreams of the Absolute in its infinite forms.

Dreams of pure beauty in abstraction.

Dreams of pure process that transcends all thought or purpose.

Dreams of music that plays forever and
touches on places yet to be understood.