Wednesday, December 24, 2008

Promises, Choices And Other Statements

The days had been passing faster and faster, with a pulsing acceleration that I readily recognized from journeys in my past. A time span that had seemed like it would last forever, quickly turned into a mad rush to completion, a quick succession of short scenes that would not allow for pauses or the simple pleasure of a deep slow breath. There were so many things to do, so many things we had written down back in San Francisco with my friends, so many things that even back then I had known I would never be able to bring to completion. Now the list seemed even more impossible, as if each item would require an entire trip in itself. As with everything, I had to make clear choices, distinct and final decisions that would determine what would happen and what wouldn’t happen on this particular trip. And, of course, not all these choices were mine. Some of them were in the hands of others, and these others were like nebulous shadows in the distance whose intentions and purposes were hidden from me by a veil of flesh, posture and time. With these others, I would take the steps necessary, I would knock at the door and they would then decide whether to answer and let me in or wait inside, maybe hiding behind a closed curtain, until I got tired of knocking. I couldn’t control what they would do. But I could make sure that I did knock, enough to be heard. Once I had knocked, I would have made my choice. Then the world would respond, in its own way, at its own pace.
I called Fanci, the father of Dilcia, and Leti, her stepmother, answered. She sounded very happy to hear from me, in fact a bit too happy, something didn’t fit just right, there was something strange in her happiness. After all, I was the bad man who had betrayed her daughter with another woman. (I knew that’s how the tale would be told, and that’s how it would always be remembered among my wife’s relatives.) I held the phone against my ear as I paced on the sun drenched terrace of my grandmother’s house, looking up at the volcano as I heard the familiar voice against my cheek. I told her that I would have wanted to talk to them long ago but that I had always preferred to talk in person. This was true. The disembodied voices on the phone could never replace the truth of a simple hand gesture or the twinkling in the other’s eyes. (Of course, I had now realized that I had waited so long to talk to my Dad face to face that the issues had become irrelevant. Maybe it would have been better to call when the kitchen was still hot and simply deal with the limitations of communication over phone lines. But it was too late to retrace my steps.)
"So many things have happened…" I said.
"We have much to talk about, don’t we?" she said.
I said yes and we both laughed about it. What were we laughing about? I would never really know. She said that we could see each other that very same day, in the early evening, when Fanci would be free from previous engagements. I felt immediately happy, knowing that I would get to see them, the thought felt like cool water running down my parched throat. I remembered the dream I had, where I saw him as an aggressive entity that I ran into by mistake, an angry creature that had stepped beyond forgiveness, and I thought that maybe my dreams were wrong, maybe it was only my fear that made me have them. It crossed my mind that Dilcia would feel isolated, set aside and forgotten, if I made peace with them. Where I had struggled to bring her back together with her father, for years on end, she would now do all she could to keep me away from him. I expected that from her at this point. It would follow the recurring pattern that I had come to understand. But what did I truly expect from them? What was really hiding under our mutual silence?
Leti called me later, when only about a half an hour had passed, to tell me that they wouldn’t be able to see me that night. We agreed that maybe we would see each other on Monday. I asked her about Fanci and how he was feeling about our meeting. She said that he was feeling good, but as she said it, as her voice traveled through the cold phone line, I heard again that same strange happiness, and this time I recognized it as the mask she would put on when she would talk to one of Fanci’s clients, to a stranger on the phone, it was the same mask she would use when she wasn’t happy at all. I suddenly heard the fake intention behind every word that she spoke, it came through in a moment of clarity that was like a crystalline teardrop surrounding the red phone in my hand with a kind of liquid brilliance. Then I thought that maybe Fanci wasn’t as happy as she claimed that he was. She said that she would call again around 7pm. I hung up the phone and I realized that the cool water I had anticipated might not be coming. But I still felt the thirst.

XXX

Avelar had been my friend as far back as I could remember. Avelar was his last name, and Francisco was his first, but I always knew him simply as "Avelar", just as I was "Mendizabal" to him. He was a strong boy that enjoyed soccer and basketball. He moved through the world with a fluid gentleness that betrayed no weakness or timid fear. Unlike some others, he was my friend and a part of our group of outcasts because of pure affinity and temperament, not out of weakness or need. He preferred to play with us rather than play with the tough sarcastic little boys that were our classmates. He could have been with them if he had wanted to but he was truly at home with me. His skin was very dark, darker than most in a society where light skin was a sign of beauty. His arms were full and muscular for a twelve year old, and already showed the signs of the strong man he would someday become. Whenever a fight broke out in the playground at school, he would run madly towards it, ready to do anything in his power to stop it. While other kids would circle the two fighters to see what would develop, calling out their names and prodding them to fight, he would stand between them and push them apart, without any regard for his own safety, while repeating over and over: "No fighting! No fighting!" He said it with such intensity that even back then I could tell that something was triggered within him at the sight of violent anger, something he would rather forget. We became friends early in grade school, in the days when walking up a little dark hallway marked a sign of newfound status and third graders seemed like strong wise giants beyond the reach of our weak little hands. Each day, after the last bell rang, we would go together to the front patio of the school and walk in circles, talking and talking, until our parents showed up to get us. Then we would say goodbye, still hungry to talk some more the next day. Other kids accused us of being girly because we talked so much amongst ourselves. But we loved each other with such clarity and such simple commitment that we disregarded their accusations easily, without shame, without anger.
When my mom and me moved into the little apartment in the middle of the dark garden, we discovered that we lived not so far away from each other, about ten or twelve blocks. From then on, he ran over to my place almost every afternoon and we would spend the time talking and playing and dreaming and roaming the neighborhood, finding ways to get in trouble. We would throw little rocks at passing cars and then run for cover if the cars stopped or the drivers got out. We searched far and wide for parked cars, with screwdrivers in our hands, to remove their metal logos and keep them for ourselves. We had no use for these heavy metal logos other than as trophies of a good afternoon’s hunt. Many years later, I still had a large bag full of metal car logos, stashed in the lower level of my bookshelf. We would go to the movies on lazy afternoons, another ten blocks away, and scream out little comments and jokes at the screen, accusing the characters of stupidity, pointing out their mistakes, laughing at them when they showed weakness. Sometimes we would throw things at the screen and at other kids that were in the theater. The kids would respond by throwing things back at us and we would laugh about it while the movie played on. We would climb over the roofs of our houses and travel from roof to roof, jumping over obstacles, traveling onto foreign roofs that signified the unknown, the undiscovered. We wanted to take a look in the places that were meant to stay hidden. Sometimes we would get a glimpse of a woman in a window or a man sitting in front of a TV. Avelar’s mother would warn us with urgency in her voice: "This is very dangerous! If people hear you walking on their roofs they will assume that you are thieves and they will shoot at you! People shoot like this all the time! You can’t be doing this!" We would nod together, letting her know that we understood, assuring her that we would never do it again, and then we would go up on the roofs again the next day, when we had made sure that she wasn’t home. We felt completely safe in our adventures, in our knowledge that bad things could happen to others, but certainly not to us.
When Amaya, a beautiful blond girl from the Basque country, came to live in the upper front apartment of my mother’s building, it was inevitable that I would fall terribly in love with her. She was just too overwhelming in her beauty, in her intelligence, in her confidence, in her poise. It was also inevitable that Avelar would fall for her as well. It took a while for us to admit it to each other, but once we did, it became our daily conversation. We would advise each other on what to do to get her attention, how to make her like us, how to make her love us as much as we loved her. Each one of us knew that if she were to like the other one, it would be like falling into a deep dark hole from which there could not be any rescue. And yet we insisted on helping each other. It was a clear attempt at demonstrating what had always been assumed between us: I will put your happiness ahead of mine, and you will do the same. He was sincere in his offer of help and so was I.
One afternoon after school was over but the day was still sunny and bright, we rested in the dark stairs that led up to the upstairs apartments. We sat on the cool gray tiles of the staircase landing, talking and joking as usual, waiting for Amaya to get home. I was wearing a pair of old ripped jeans and a short sleeve T-shirt. Avelar was wearing blue shorts and a yellow soccer shirt. I had my back against the wall and he was leaning against the metal bars of the stairway. We had nothing else to do, no other place that we would rather be. The world was complete when we were together, and it became a dense landscape filled with incomprehensible fire when Amaya was around. This afternoon, as we waited, the air was misty and calm all around us, there was something so sweet and gentle in the air, that I suddenly realized that it couldn’t last. In a moment of clarity that broke through the veil of my innocence, I saw that nothing that good could last forever.
"Hey Avelar, whatever happens with Amaya… I want us to still be friends," I said it, with more than a bit of effort, as my voice started to break when the implications of my words echoed through my mind.
"Of course Mendizabal… we’ll always be friends… nothing can change that…"
"But if she likes one of us… the other one will be hurt, you know?"
"The other one should be happy… I will be happy if she likes you. I will be happy for you."
"You won’t be sad at all?"
Avelar turned his dark face to me, even darker here in the shadows of the stairway, and he thought for a moment, looking at me in silence. His eyes were down turned as usual, in a way that radiated sadness. Maybe he was always sad and I had never noticed. Maybe that day I was able to see things that I was not meant to see.
"I will be sad… a little… but I will be more happy for you…"
I nodded. "Yeah, I would be sad too. But I would be happy for you as well…" I said it a bit too quickly, afraid to truly ponder that possibility.
We were quiet for a while, both of us imagining what the world would be like if Amaya liked us, what it would be like if she never did. In the silence, I felt a sense of dread come over me, a knowledge that if I had perceived the fragility of our love for each other, it was only because it would soon come to an end.
"Hey Avelar…"
From the depths of his thoughts he turned again towards me, again with melancholic eyes that dropped at the edges.
"What if we make an oath… a blood oath like they do in the movies… saying that we will always be friends? Would you want to do that?"
He immediately nodded, without any sign of hesitation. "Of course I want to do that. You will be my friend forever. There is no doubt about that." It was like him to simply agree to my suggestion. No need for any further questions, no need for explanations. Like stealing metal logos from parked cars, I had made a proposal and it instantly became something we would do, something we must do, something we would definitely do together.
We left the stairway then and went to our apartment in the back, forgetting all about Amaya for a brief moment. I found a sharp knife in the little kitchen. Then we went to the depths of the garden, where no one would be able to see us. We sat on the ground, under the shadow of the capulin tree that brought the bats at night, surrounded by tall grass and dark soil. We sat face to face, and looked at each other intently as I held the sharp blade between us..
"Are you sure?" I asked.
"Of course I’m sure… are you sure?"
I nodded, nervous at the sight of the knife but unwilling to back out. I grabbed his hand and ran the blade over the flesh of his thumb. A thin red line appeared at the tip and a tiny drop of red blood started to leak out. He didn’t make a sound at all. No complaint, no protest. He just looked at me. I handed the knife to him. He grabbed my hand and then cut my own thumb just as I had done with him. When both our thumbs were tainted in blood, we reached towards each other and pressed them together tightly. As we pressed, we looked at each other, right in the eyes.
"I swear that, no matter what happens, with Amaya or with anything else, I will always be Avelar’s best friend, for as long as I am alive."
I said it in a voice that echoed in the dark garden. I said it slowly and with an intent as solid as the edge of the knife that had just cut us. Avelar smiled at me, with the same sweetness that he always had, but now his smile seemed to shine among the green and brown of the garden, shining with a special significance that I could recognize even if I couldn’t begin to comprehend it.
"I swear that, no matter what happens, I will be Mendizabal’s best friend forever… for as long as I live."
We stayed in that position for a long time, staring into each other’s eyes, our thumbs pressed against each other, with only the sound of the birds and the wind to break the solemn silence of our oath. It might have been my own secret wishes, but for a moment I thought his eyes didn’t look quite so sad.

XXX

I called Leti again and she answered with the same happy voice as before. I asked her if they were coming that night and she said that she didn’t know, she said that Fanci wasn’t there. I asked her then about his reaction, what had he said or done when she had told him that I wanted to see him. She said that he didn’t say anything.
"Nothing at all?"
"Nothing."
I asked her to please tell me the truth. I told her that I would rather know clearly if Fanci really didn’t want to see me. I would rather know it than just wonder. She responded with a question:
"Why do you think that he wouldn’t want to see you?"
I answered clearly, calmly and without hesitation: "Because of what has happened with Dilcia…"
"Right," she said, "but we really have to hear the other side of the story, don’t we?"
"Right," I responded, "and you have never heard it…you haven’t heard it at all." I said.
She then promised to call me again later that night. Then she would tell me exactly what Fanci wanted to do. I asked her to call me, no matter which way the decision went. That way things would be clear. She promised to call me no matter what. I hung up without fully believing her promise.

XXX

I stopped the car by the corner of Mission and Fifth, double parking momentarily while cars swerved around me. Dilcia, still my wife in those days, ran towards me, with only a hint of the enthusiasm that she once had had for me. The sound of car horns was all around us, people talking, motors rumbling, buses screeching to a halt. She opened the door and stepped inside. She looked as beautiful as she ever did. She wore a long dark brown skirt, a black jacket and a white shirt. She was carrying an attaché case and a stack of papers that threatened to fly away. I hugged her warmly and she hugged me back, kissing my cheek. We had been separated for over six months but in a moment like this, we could be almost as close and as loving as we once had been. Almost. I felt happy to see her. She seemed hesitant but eager to find the warmth of our mutual embrace.
"Happy birthday!" she said and she handed me a little certificate in an envelope. I opened it and smiled. She had bought me a new car stereo, knowing the last one had been stolen weeks ago. It touched me that she would still care whether I had music or not while I drove. I kissed her and hugged her again.
"Thank you…thank you…" I moved back into my seat and we drove away. She looked out the window, at the same buildings that had once scared her out of her mind, and we carefully began to talk.
Talking with Dilcia at this time was like walking through an intricate and delicate maze made of crystal figurines, each one perfect and complex, each one ready to fall over and break into a million little pieces if I made the tiniest mistake. I had to pick our topics of conversation with extreme care, taking note not just of their basic content but of their implications, their further tangents, their possible ramifications. I had to think ahead two or three moves, making sure that the subject that I started wouldn’t lead to the subject that would end it all. So we talked of what she was doing, of her work, of TV shows, of other people. Carefully skirting around the subjects that would prove painful, we managed to slide through the city, together again, loving each other again, even if it was only for a brief moment. We laughed many times as we drove to the restaurant. And more than once, I felt the deep resonance of real love in her voice.
Sitting across from her at the little round table, I noticed that she looked more and more like a confident executive, the kind I had met when I worked in an office many years ago. She would flip her head from side to side, signifying an air of abandon, of certainty, of heavy presence in a world that had been clearly determined and clearly understood. We were back in a place we had visited many times before, but the difference in her made it all brand new. I wondered how different I looked to her. I wondered if every new gesture she saw in me made her wince with pain, if every new habit in me made her wonder where I had learned it, made her wonder who I had truly become. I continued to restrain myself from dangerous tangents in our conversation. I knew it was more important to let her talk, to let her lead the way, she knew where she wanted to go, I would simply follow her there and listen.
It was early evening, and the sun was still out, but the wind was starting to make its presence known. We sat inside the little Italian restaurant and ordered what we usually did, what we had ordered so many times together in those occasions when I wanted to please her and she wanted to be pleased, when she would be so happy because for a moment it seemed that we were a respectable couple out on the town, a married couple that had a clear and respectable place in the human world. The illusion would break sooner or later, but for those brief spaces of comfort, she would be very happy and very grateful. Her happiness today was not as open, not as forthcoming. I could see her restraining herself as well, as much as I was or maybe more so. I could feel the hardness in her voice that she tried to hide to no avail. I could see her eyes were not as innocent, her smile was not as true.
She started talking about Ricardo and Carlos and all my other friends, the ones that had stuck with me since childhood. As soon as she did, I knew I should have stirred the conversation elsewhere. This was definitely dangerous territory as I knew that she partially blamed Ricardo for what had happened between us, but the gravity of the memory would surely eventually lead her back to me. But my curiosity triumphed over my caution and I urged her onwards. She told me the things they said when I wasn’t around, how they saw me, how they saw her, she told me what they wanted and what they didn’t tell me and she lightly laughed as she said all these things, as if she was pleased with the subtle look of shock on my face.
"That’s right… you have to understand, Juan… you trust people too much… just like now you trust her too much… you trust everyone too much…People are not like that… people will betray you…" and her eyes narrowed into coldness as she said it.
I nodded, reminding myself to simply let her speak, to let her say what she needed to say. For me, the simple act of careful listening did not imply agreement or acceptance, although maybe it did for her. I couldn’t stop myself from feeling the pain of imagining these secret conversations, these unimaginable sentences in the mouths of the people that I had always held so close. I couldn’t help but feel the restaurant become a little tighter, the wind become a little colder. And as I felt it, I just kept on listening, as closely as I could.
"That’s something that I saw in you all along… you hear me? You trust everyone too much. You think they’re angels. But people are not angels! You just can’t trust people… not in the way that you do. Nobody is worthy of that kind of trust. Not even me. You hear me? Not even me." She paused and looked me straight in the eyes, and our contact was full and intense for a moment. As the air began to crackle with the familiar electrical impulses, she leaned towards me and said: "Listen, you want to know what I did today?"
I nodded and said: "Yes, please tell me." I said it in the softest voice I could muster.
"You see all these papers in my hands… they’re from a lawyer… my brother asked me to go see him… see all this stuff… "she pointed to a stack of folders and papers that she had carried into the car, papers I had assumed were related to her work. "It’s all from the lawyer. He’s the kind of man I would always avoid… the kind of man I would never want to have anything to do with… he’s horrible. He’s a horrible brutal gringo with a sweaty red face. The kind of person I despise. But I went to see him… because my brother asked me to. This is where I’ve ended up…you see?" And she pointed to the papers again, as if they would explain everything, as if the mysteries of cause and effect were all hidden in the small type of the wrinkled white pages.
I kept on looking at her and nodding, feeling a wave of coldness rushing up my body, making my bones shiver.
"I talked to him about you and me, about your mother… he tried to convince me to sue you, to get money from you…he said that I wasn’t thinking of myself enough… that I deserved a lot of money from you…He said that I was trying to protect you, both of you… but that I should stop caring about you… that I should only care about myself."
"And what did you say?" I asked, as softly and as calmly as I could.
"I said I would think about it…"
There was a long silence between us. I knew she had more to say and I would wait until she came around to say it. Outside a bus honked loudly at a small convertible that had stopped to drop off some passengers. Women in stylish dresses, their high heels clicking on the slanted sidewalks of North Beach, walked by the window of the restaurant, talking and laughing in loud shrill voices. I kept on waiting.
"I won’t do it…" she said, "I won’t do that to you or to your Mom… I simply won’t. Even though I could… it would be my right to do it… but I won’t."
I nodded at her, my eyes on hers, feeling the icicles that had formed around the thin silver cord that joined us.
"I promise you… I won’t do it."
I smiled at her with an attempt at tenderness and waited for her to speak again. As I waited, as another bus honked and more high heels clicked outside, all I could hear in my mind was her voice saying: "You can’t trust anyone that completely, not like that. Not even me."

XXX

As the night approached, I realized that she wouldn’t call. I realized that I could wait all night to confirm it or I could leave and trust the message that had already come through her voice. I waited for another hour and then I drove away into the darkness, on a night of slight drizzle and strong winds. My Dad told me what streets to avoid if I came back late, he told me the places where he had heard that there were assaults and car-jackings. Then he said "good luck" in a voice that sounded worried. I drove away and, as soon as I turned the corner, I felt the rightness of my choice coming over me with the solid weight of a heavy stone.
I drove straight to my old neighborhood, the "Satelite". As I drove, I thought about Fanci, I thought about all of Dilcia’s accusations, years upon years of stories, of him, of Leti, of her sisters. I had struggled for years to repair Dilcia’s contact with him. I wanted to do it for her and I wanted to do it for him. Now the structure had been flipped on its back and, apparently, Fanci had jumped at the chance to close the door and ascertain that I was the one that had broken the pact, I was the one that was evil and I should be removed from the picture. He had never talked to me since Dilcia and me broke apart. He had never even made an attempt. From what I knew of him, from what I knew of both of them, they never would. The years would go on and someday Fanci would just be a tombstone that would decay through the ages in silence. Fanci had truly been my second father but now he was only a man, a man who was angry in the distance, a shadow fading in the darkness of the Salvadorean night. I had no recourse and I had no solution. I could only take their anger and let it drip into me slowly, hoping to somehow transmute the black thick oil of their dismissal into a new creative gesture, a new attempt at life. I was the sacrificial goat and I would have to accept my fate in silence, without a murmur of complaint.

XXX

We were sitting in the overgrown foundation of an old mansion, overlooking the gray cliffs of the Bay, the burnt out remains of the Sutro Baths and the Cliffhouse. Fanci and Leti were there with us, and so was my mom and Celeste who was still little and just wanted to run in every direction she could find while Dilcia trailed behind her. They ran over the wide open lawns and somersaulted over and over on the wet grass, laughing like hyenas, and their voices trailed into each other, and commingled in their sweetness and their innocence, so that one couldn’t be distinguished from the other. They ran all the way down to the restaurant below us and then back up again, gasping for breath but still smiling and ready for another adventure. While Celeste and Dilcia ran, the rest of us, the sober adults, sat under the shadow of a thick strong tree that stood close to the center of the abandoned tower.
"There is such a difference here… being here with all of you." Fanci said, in his voice that always seemed to resonate a bit louder than all the others, his head always leaning backwards as if still reciting for an audience, as if still preening with heroic confidence on a stage. "Over there, with Paco and Mili, they have no culture, they have nothing, they talk about the same things over and over…" Paco was Fanci’s first born son, who lived in Los Angeles, with his wife Mili.
Leti, sitting cross-legged next to Fanci, just nodded and pursed her lips in a slight gesture of discontent. When Fanci paused momentarily, she spoke up, only to repeat Fanci’s words: "There is a great difference… no comparison at all."
"It’s very good to be with you all here, the level of conversation is so heightened, the breadth of culture, it all tastes different, it’s so much better…"
I nodded and smiled at them, unsure of how to respond. Dilcia came back with Celeste and sat next to me while Celeste tried to climb the tree. Dilcia was sweating and breathing hard. She was wearing a little cloth hat and a soft little brown sweater. She looked so sweet and innocent that I wished we were alone on that gentle afternoon by the edge of the ocean. She leaned over close to me and kissed my cheek. I turned and kissed her back on the lips, smiling. The air crackled with our easy fluid contact. Then I whispered: "You should listen to this…"
Fanci continued as if there had been no interruption. "I was just talking about Paco and his family… the boy only plays video games… they just sit night after night watching television… sometimes he will want to talk to me and, when he does, it’s just to complain about the past… a past that is long gone! And then it’s back to the daily grind… it’s hard to be there… hard for us… isn’t that right, Leti?"
Leti nodded again, her lips still pursed tightly, her face a tight brown mask of judgement, a mask I had known well in the past, back when I had faced it as a blasphemer and as a fornicator. In this case, the judgement was not directed at me so I could simply sit back and enjoy the display. "They have no cultural life… they have a nice house and they live well… but there’s nothing else there, nothing at all."
He looked at me, as if wondering what I was thinking. I smiled more widely than before and simply said: "I’m glad you are having a good time here Fanci… I want you both to have a good time with us."
He spread his arms wide, signaling to the great vast blue sky above us, to the soft winds that came in from the ocean, to the grass and tall weeds that danced around us, to Celeste still trying to climb the tree, to all of us. "Look at this… we don’t have this over there… we wouldn’t come and just sit like this… under the sky, just to talk… this is so precious… I really appreciate this. Thank you for bringing us here."
As much as I struggled against it, I couldn’t help but feel a rush of pride at knowing that Fanci was happy with us, that he liked what we did for him, that he was pleased by our lives and our work. Without even looking at her, I knew Dilcia was vibrating with strong pride, knowing that she had won a small battle with her older brother. Our place was better, our place is the one they liked the best. I pressed my arm around her shoulders and pulled her towards me. She melted into my arms and I kissed her once again.
Many months later, after Fanci and Leti had returned to El Salvador, Dilcia went to visit her brother Paco in Los Angeles. When she came back, she told me that when Fanci and Leti had been there they had been terribly pleased with Paco’s house, to Paco and Mili they had said that their house was so much better than our place in San Francisco, that they enjoyed their stay with them much more, that we had found them a bad motel to stay in, that we hadn’t treated them well at all. Dilcia said it to me with clear anger and disappointment in her eyes. She pressed her body against me as I was laying down in our room and I pulled her into me, cradling her head in my arms.
"They’re such hypocrites!" she said softly into my chest, her lips brushing against my ribs.
"It’s ok Dilcita, that’s just the way they are. That’s the way most people are. They’ll say one thing one day, then another the next. It’s nothing to worry about."
I shrugged my shoulders and kissed her forehead, feeling the pain surging through her little brown body. I looked at the decaying roof of our broken room and I saw it for a moment through their eyes. Ultimately, I knew it had been my mistake to be proud of their kind words. The more I fell for their praise, the more it would hurt when it turned out to be untrue.
"Let them think whatever they want, Dilcia…as much as they may imagine that they know, only you and I know what we’re doing together, only you and I know what we are to each other…"
Dilcia was crying and her tears were falling on my naked skin. As she heard my words, she nodded in agreement, but her tears didn’t stop.

XXX

As I approached the "Satelite" neighborhood, I could only barely recognize the old corners, the old houses, the old windows, the old streets. Everything had changed so much. The walls were a different color, the grass was no longer there. It all looked so much more like the dirty downtown, there was more garbage, more darkness, more signs of age and decay. Yet somewhere underneath, there was a glimmer of form that still held the same shape.
I looked for Ricardo’s father, for the new house that they had bought after their return to El Salvador. Just as Ricardo had been like my brother, his father had been like my own. Our contact now was mostly based on years of silence interrupted by short evenings of instant warmth. I hadn't seen him in over a year. It was certainly time for another visit.
I didn’t know the number and I didn’t know the street. I followed my vague memory of having been there once before and I parked where I thought I should. The winds flowed through the narrow street in a strong current that made the tree branches flip back and forth, like fierce whips against the helpless bark. The sound of the wind current was like a deep drone that resonated intensely in the middle of my chest and made my whole body vibrate in harmony. A street security guard, his thick shotgun ready over his oversized stomach, came out to greet me as soon as I stepped out of the car. I talked to him for a few minutes. I told him who I was looking for and he readily agreed to help me in my search. We both looked for the house together. I told him what I remembered and he pointed out the houses that would fit my vague description. There were some kids playing in a living room. I could hear their screams and their laughter and the sound of the TV and the glare of the screen against the opaque windows of the house. There was a young couple kissing each other while leaning on a car. They said "good night" to me as I passed by. I smiled at them and I asked them about Ricardo’s father. They didn’t know who he was. They couldn’t help me at all. But they were kind in their responses and they wished me good luck. The security guard pointed out several more houses that were possibilities. I knocked and called and rang. I finally realized that it was probably the wrong street. As I drove around the block, I asked another security guard that stood beside a gray telephone pole. He didn’t know either. Then I ran into a man that knew Don Ricardo. He was a slim man with a gentle voice that overheard me asking the last security guard. I was very happy when he said he knew who I was looking for and he pointed out the right house. But he also told me they were gone. The house I was looking for was empty.

XXX

I rose from a night of wonder, a night where so many boundaries had come tumbling down around me, where the sky was dark and angry, and the ocean responded with great screams of liquid angst and my arms held a young beautiful girl who sobbed with happiness, who trembled against me and kissed me every few minutes, even in her sleep. Where we lay together, there were no walls, the winds of the ocean swam through us and made the hammock rock in a motion so gentle that it was almost not there, and my weight and hers kept it from moving any further. Through the night, with her little body pressing against me, I slept very little but I felt no regret. I didn’t penetrate her then but that night we were united in a way so profound that neither of us could fully comprehend it, not then, maybe not ever.
I opened my eyes to see the gray skies already breaking into blue, and the waves crashing so close I could almost feel the pain of their final moments. I was so far away from everything I had ever known. I was immersed in the world of others and one of these others was now immersed in me. I rose to the knowledge that the world had changed, it had changed in a storm that raged over a beach of salt and rock, over two ranches that rose over the sand dunes, over long green leaves of grass that danced in the wind of the morning, over the first few skinny old men in old ripped swimsuits that were throwing their nets into the waters, hoping that the fish would be as hungry as they were. I stood up and recognized a sense of peace, something utterly alien to me in those days, something ephemeral and evanescent that would surely disappear soon. By this time I had firmly learned that such beautiful things didn’t last. But for that one moment, with people sleeping all around me, with an ocean caressing the salty flesh edge of the earth with its waves, with the sound of dark birds that flew in bursts of desire from palm tree to palm tree, for that one moment, peace had no end. I didn’t know where it had come from, I didn’t know who or what to thank, but it had descended on me as calmly as a girl that kisses without hesitation, a girl that says "my love" after only one day.
I very slowly disentangled myself from Dilcia’s sleeping form and I moved off the hammock. There was another hammock where other people were sleeping nearby and I made my way underneath it, trying as best as I could to not disturb them. I walked down the wooden steps, feeling the early winds of the ocean caressing my face with such tenderness that I didn’t want to move. I looked towards the ocean to spot a little boat in the distance, and two more skinny men in wet white T-shirts throwing nets into the shifting waters. I wondered for a moment what their life was like, what it would be like to grow up here, next to the ocean and bring up all my food from its black depths. Would the ocean become as invisible as a city street or a room with four walls and a couple of paintings, or would the ocean reclaim its own intensity, day after day, never letting you forget that you dived into mystery and mystery was always new? I turned away from my thoughts and walked the last few wooden steps to the ground below. Leti was already up and she was walking towards me.
"Good morning," I said.
She smiled softly and whispered "good morning, Juan Carlos… how are you?"
I said: "Good… very good… as good as I have ever been…"
"I’m glad," she said with welcoming eyes. "We’ll have breakfast soon, after everyone wakes up…"
I nodded. "Sure… no rush… no rush at all."
As she passed by me, I thought that here I had met a family with no secrets, a family that was as open as the ocean itself, as clear as the sand that was washed daily by the endless love of its waves. I had spent the night with Dilcia in my arms, on a hammock only a few feet away from her sisters, and only a few more feet away from her parents. They were happy. Dilcia was happy. So was I. There was no resentment, no anger, no suspicion, no pain. I saw them as a family of crystalline beings that had emerged whole from the pure strong ideals that formed Fanci’s foundation. I was awestruck and even a little envious. Next to what I saw that morning, every family I had ever known was like a muddy river, a trail of dirty water that tries to find its way back to the source, but is ravaged and hurt by the obstacles on its path. Here there was clarity and completeness. Dilcia had two parents that gave her to me in an act of pure complete sacrifice, without fear of loss, of hidden intentions or unexpected consequences. As I walked back from the bathroom, I looked again at the ocean and realized that I had truly traveled further than I ever had before.
It was months later that I came to know about Leti’s poisonous resentment and jealousy, about Fanci’s suspicions, about his anger and his hidden machinations, about the rivers of mud that extended between them, so profound as to obscure any further sighting of the sea. It was years later that I came to understand that it all lived within Dilcia (just like my family’s own mud lived within me) and it would come back to drench our life together in struggle, in misunderstanding and ultimately in a final division that would break even the magic of a night beyond the rigid boundaries of time or space.
But what I saw that morning remained within me and it always would. The words of it did not persist, they perished like little fish caught in a net and brought back to a little hut to be roasted and eaten. But the clarity was like an open window. The room was still dirty, the family was still a network of anger and lies, but the ocean was true and infinite. As much dirt and mud as there could be on land, the infinite ocean would always be ready to wash it with the touch of a wave, sometimes tender and loving, sometimes fierce and violent. But always ready. Always there.

XXX

I drove past Fanci’s house, and I stared momentarily at the sign: "Center of Philosophical Studies and Investigations" and at the clutter of magical equipment that could be seen through the open windows. I felt the barrier that now stood between the inner world of that house and me. There was a clown puppet in the window and I could almost see the old Fanci in his eyes. Another security guard started walking towards me when he saw me stop the car. I drove away before he could reach me.
I drove to the place where the whole story started, the corner of Gemini and Galaxia. There the houses were very different, covered by tall walls and metal gates, and the trees, which were barely saplings when I had lived there, were now full and grown. Dead leaves danced down the slanted asphalt. Broken glass was sprinkled over the ledges. Cars were parked on both sides, leaving only a narrow passageway for my car to pass through. There was no one there to greet me but I felt at home. I had come here once, back when my mother was alone and I had no father. I had come here again, now that my second father was gone.
I parked and I walked around without a clear destination. There was no security guard here. There was gang graffiti on some walls. The streetlights were few and far between so I was mostly drenched in darkness. I walked all the way up Galaxia, past Ricardo’s old gray house on the corner (now painted red) and Zonia’s house right above, and then Rodney’s house covered by a black metal gate. Around the corner, in Sagitarius, I found warmth and happy eyes where I did not expect them. I realized later that I had placed the right key into the right lock and the night finally surrendered to me its treasure trove of surprises.

XXX

I last talked to Dilcia face to face one night on a lit stone bridge overlooking a city street, one of the three bridges that interconnected the Embarcadero shopping center in Downtown San Francisco. It was only later that I realized that it was the same bridge where she had told me she would die soon, back when she was glowing with the intensity of discovery, on the very first day of arriving in this far away land. She was so overwhelmed that afternoon that her eyes were watering and her hands were trembling. She was like a golden bird that had flown far beyond the confines of her known world and now she sat helpless in my arms, here on this very same bridge, with her weak tired wings not yet strong enough to fly. Back then, she looked at me with a heart as open as the sky, as bountiful as the earth and she confessed that this was all too much for her, this place, these buildings, these people, it was all so big and so beautiful and so brilliant, and back then I hugged her and I kissed her and I told her that everything would be ok, that I was with her, that she would not die any time soon because we were together and we would live many years in each other’s arms before death finally came to pull us apart.
It was this same bridge where I now looked at her and told her that I still loved her, that many things had happened, that she felt betrayed, that she felt set aside, that she felt jealous, insecure and lost, but that she could set it all aside, just for one moment, one little moment of silence, and maybe then she would feel how much I still loved her, like the roaring of the waves lapping against a sandy beach, even now, as stormy as the night had been, as bright with the colors of tragedy and disaster, and as peaceful as the morning had been, as loving as her kisses, as soft as her arms around my shoulders, I was still here with her and we could still live a long life together, a strange life, a life unusual, a life unlike the lives of others, but still a good life, and I held her hand, and tears slid from the corners of my eyes and she shook her head and she said that she couldn’t, she would always be jealous, she would always be afraid, and then she ran away, and I saw her shadow as it got lost among the buses and the cars and the steam that slipped out from under the entrails of the city, I saw it all and I wished she would return, but she didn’t, I saw it all and I wished it wasn’t so, but it was.
I stood there for a long time, letting the cold thick air of the night flow through me like a healing salve and I looked at the lights on the buildings, the same ones I had looked at with wonder so long ago, the ones that the American girl had said only signified tired office workers working overtime, and I still saw them with wonder. Out there, there were many stories, some tragic, some funny, most of them touched from both cups, and I knew that Dilcia’s story, and my story, were only two more stories in an unthinkably wide web of stories that trailed thousands of years into the past and thousands of years into the future. Sadness and love were the ingredients out of which they were made, and so now it was our time to walk through our own trail of tears and pass through with our eyes wide open, trusting that our habits would carry us through.
I stood and waited, knowing she would not come back, but also knowing I should wait because I wouldn’t want the street to be empty if she did. As the hour passed, I finally looked down at the crisscrossed gray sidewalk and I stepped into my car. A man was washing the sidewalk across the street with a large white machine that rumbled as it moved. A homeless man was snoring on the corner, draped in newspapers and old dirty rags. It was just another night in a cold city, no better and no worse.
The next day, Dilcia told me over the phone that she had decided to sue us and that she didn’t care about the consequences. It was like a harsh blow from an unexpected direction, unexpected only because I believed, only because my faith in her innocence had never wavered, only because I still held on to a night of waves and wind and gentle kisses with the weight of years of patience. She told me over the phone, while I was parked outside of my piano teacher’s apartment complex. I said "are you sure you want to do this? Things will never be the same…" and she said, "yes, I am sure… I need to do this for myself… nobody will step on Dilcia ever again." I nodded and hung up. I came home to release myself from her presence, from the spell that still lingered from the wind of an earlier time. I let her go but I left behind a frail little silver cord, just in case the innocent girl that kissed me back then with such abandon ever doubted her decision, just in case she decided she wanted to come back. I knew it wouldn’t happen, but I didn’t want the path to be empty if she showed up.

XXX

Late that night, when I came home to my grandmother’s house, Lorena was still awake. She was sitting at the dining room table watching TV. She told me she had been a little worried about me, specially since I had been gone so long and it was so late. I smiled at her and thanked her for waiting. She shook her head and brushed my gratitude away. "Of course, it’s no problem." I asked her if anyone had called. She said that there had been two calls from the United States. She smiled knowingly as she said it. Then I asked if there was another call from Leti. She shook her head and said "no, nothing at all." I nodded and we said goodnight. One more tiny promise broken. The first step is the last step, and each step is the whole path. I felt tired but I stayed awake for a long time, writing, thinking, then writing some more. I had done my duty. I had called, I had made my presence known, I had tried to break through the now frozen barriers. It was their choice to simply remain silent. It was their choice to turn away. I would look for new doors with new keys in hand. I now knew that the old chambers had been exhausted. The walls were still there but the inhabitants had gone away.

XXX

One day I was coming home on a sunny afternoon. This was back when I was seventeen and the war was still raging all around me but the fear had diminished into a controllable substance that I could access when needed and then seal tightly in a jar and put away when it was not in use. Home in those days was in my Grandmother Tona’s house, the mother of my mother. I walked down the short alley that ended with the big gray letters: "NOVO" which signified the hotel that stood next to my grandmother’s house. As usual, there were two guards in front of the hotel, holding small machine guns, and making jokes amongst themselves. As usual, there was a small skinny man in a dirty blue shirt and ripped brown pants sitting on the curb working on fixing a pair of black leather shoes. There was also a car parked directly in front of my destination and an older woman was standing by the driver’s door, waving goodbye to another woman that was walking back into the hotel. This was unusual. The car was an old fashioned Ford, something out of an American movie from the ‘50s. In El Salvador this was not a sign of style, only a sign of resourcefulness and need. The woman seemed vaguely familiar but not enough to make me stop. I walked around her and towards the black metal gate of my grandmother’s house and then I heard her voice say: "Juan Carlos?" I turned around, wondering how she knew me. I looked at her with curious eyes and she looked at me directly and then she said: "Juan Carlos… it’s me… Francisco’s mom…" I still was not sure who she was, but I walked towards her anyway and looked at her more carefully. She was about my mom’s age, around fifty or so. Her skin was dark brown and her face was full and round. She had black curly hair and a generous open smile that made me feel at ease and reminded me of something… something I still couldn’t quite place. She looked directly at me and then said: "Francisco Avelar… I’m his mom….remember me?" Then everything fell into place within me, and I knew where I had seen those eyes and that smile, and why I felt so comfortable in walking towards her. I smiled broadly then and I hugged her and kissed her cheek. She stepped back and surveyed me from my head to my feet.
"Look at how big you are! It’s been so long! It would seem like a lie! How long has it been?"
I shrugged my shoulders.
"I don’t know… maybe four, five… maybe even six years… I’m not sure…"
"It really has been a long time… how are you? How have you been?"
I quickly filled her in on my adventures since I had last seen her, on the United States, on coming back, on living with my grandmother, on going to the all boys’ school that was just a few blocks away, on going back and forth to the United States. She listened intently, still smiling.
"How time passes doesn’t it?" she said to me and ran her hand through my hair. "Francisco will be very happy to know that you are here! You should call him!"
I felt a sense of apprehension, a dread of touching the perfect picture of the past with the rough hands of the present. It had been so long and I had no idea why. I couldn’t even answer that question for myself, much less to another. I didn’t know who Francisco had become, I didn’t know what shapes filled the dark gaps in my knowledge of the boy who had been my best friend for life. She wrote down the number on a small piece of paper and I kissed her goodbye.
Inside my room in my grandmother Tona’s house, I stared at the little piece of paper and wondered what to do. There were very few choices, if any at all, and yet the images crowded into my mind and made the moment confusing. I imagined leaving the paper alone and never dialing those numbers and never running into Avelar’s mother again and leaving once again for the United States and never coming back. It felt wrong. It felt too easy, so easy that the images dripped through my mind like syrup and made me feel a little sick. I then tried to picture talking to Avelar once again and I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t imagine him older. He was eleven years old forever in my mind and, as much as I might have grown, he would always stay the same. And so I could not be friends with an older Avelar, a strange Avelar with experiences I could never be a part of, with new habits, new gestures, an Avelar with a new voice. But the other Avelar, the one who would be my friend forever, he was an eleven year old that sat across from me in a dark garden on a sunny afternoon that was showered in light and purpose. He was still there and he was untouchable.
I walked over to the living room hallway and grabbed the phone from the shelf and placed it on the floor. I sat next to it and dialed the number. A woman answered. She said that Francisco was not there. I told her who I was and I gave her the number for him to call me back. For several hours I waited, expecting a call from Avelar at any moment, feeling very nervous about what he would have to say. It didn’t come that afternoon. It didn’t come that night. By the next day, I was starting to wonder. By the next night, I was starting to realize that maybe he had taken the first choice that I had glimpsed before I called. I decided I had to know for sure. So I tried once more. The same woman answered. I gave her the same information and she said she would pass it on. I thanked her and hung up. This time I wasn’t so sure that a call would be coming. It didn’t. After a few days had passed, it was clear that he taken the first choice. Maybe he didn’t remember who I was. Maybe he did remember and wanted to keep me as clear and as frozen as I had wanted to keep him. Maybe there were other reasons to avoid me. I would never know. I had made my choice and he had made his. I never tried again and Avelar remained perfect and frozen in the past, under the shade of a capulin tree, my best friend forever, beyond question, beyond doubt.

XXX

Ultimately, the things we said, the agreements we made, the promises we sealed, the oaths we signed, they would last only as long as the thread of our consciousness lasted, and that could be as brief as a single breath or a heartbeat. Our minds would switch from moment to moment, like TV channels under the guidance of a hidden remote control, and as they switched, all the promises would be forgotten, all the intentions would be set aside for the new show that now was shining across the flat screen of our life. How many times did I say to Dilcia that she loved a mirage, that she loved a story, someone she met long ago and loved beyond all measure, someone who looked like me but not exactly, someone who had my name but whom I had never truly met, someone who lived now only in the chambers of her mind. It was that mirage that would prevent her from seeing me then. It was a new mirage that would prevent her from seeing me now.
How many times did I see a little innocent girl in a pink and white short dress, pressing herself against my body as she kissed me with passion, a passion that seemed strange in such a virginal face. How many times did I see that girl and not the woman who stood before me then? The one who may have had something new to say, the one who only looked like the one in my memories, the one who had come to replace her in the middle of the night when I was looking elsewhere, the one whose laughter grew darker as the years passed by.
I had no doubt that all these people meant what they said when they said it. I knew I did mean it when I said what I did. I also had no doubt that the being that spoke in those moments of passion, of triumph, of heartbreak… that being had vanished only moments after its brief appearance, and it was that being, which had now returned to the primordial void, that being that was beyond my reach, beyond the reach of any intelligence in this world or any other, it was that being which I had loved and which now was only a faint memory, one more fading picture in a gallery of ghosts.
When they had said what they said, they meant it. They were simply no longer there. The one who would love forever was long gone. The one who was my second father was also gone. The one who would be my eternal companion had also vanished. The one who would be my endless best friend had fallen down a trap door that neither of us could have anticipated. Never to return. In the midst of eternity, they were all present. They always would be. But here, within the endless tunnel of time, they were all castles in the sand that the waves had taken away.
To love now, would be to love what was before me, to leave behind all other illusions and focus on the images that flourished now before my eyes, the ones that loved me, the ones that feared me, the ones that hated me, the ones that would never know me. This being of Life, this Presence of the Real, before me, what was here today and would never be again, that was the only Being I could ever truly love. It would vanish as well, like the dead dry leaves of a grand old tree that had flourished one last time with grandeur during a particular moment of a particular year, when the sun had touched it in just the right way and the wind had come not too soon and not too late, like tears that slid painfully over a soft brown cheek only to disappear into the endless mystery of the resilient flesh. To maintain this thread of being through time was the quest of ages, it was the only true skill that laid hidden underneath all others. It was a quest I had only just begun. There was much black road still to travel, there were many dangers ahead. Some would travel with me and then leave. Some would come to join me. Some would become an integral part of my being as I traveled. Some I would only see from afar. But the journey would always continue. And in every journey, there were choices to be made.
One day, when my Dad traveled to San Francisco to see me, he brought me a little piece of wood that he had found in the garden of the old house, the big beautiful house into which I was born. It was a little block of wood that I had used to build little houses in the many clear afternoons when I would play alone, creating stories that no one would ever hear, imagining worlds that nobody else would ever encounter . He had found it and brought it back for me. He wanted to give me a piece of the past, to remind me of what once was. He placed it in my hands with a smile and asked: "Do you remember this?" I held it in my hands and, for a moment, I was once again six years old, and I was on my knees in the little garden under the vast shadow of the volcano, creating towns and cities on little piles of dirt. I said that I did. I thanked him profusely. I held it for a while, feeling the tenuous, almost invisible contact between that little boy and me. I turned it over and over, letting the winds of time crash through my eyes, until they filled with tears and I had to close them. Then I put it away safely, and allowed it to be forgotten once again. I had new blocks of wood that I now played with. I had new houses to build.

XXX

Sitting alone in the living room, late at night, I closed my eyes and I pictured myself as a skinny old man in an old ripped up swimsuit. I went to bed every night with the sound of waves by my window. I woke up every morning, prepared my little boat, and rowed deep into the sea. I now knew that I had indeed been born next to the ocean, and I knew that the waves would always kiss the sand dunes, and I knew the waters went on forever, and, as long as I had my boat and my net, I knew I would always have some fish. The wind blew into my grandmother’s house then, and it smelled like a salty early morning, on a calm cool beach, after a night of fierce storms. The sound of the leaves rustling in the wind had a freshness I could only barely recognize. The white walls were coming down and the ocean was coming up to kiss me. The silence was only a promise of new songs.


As she came to me,
Drenched in color and laughter,
A survivor of the 400 blows
scarred and bruised and battered.
She was still ready to jump into my arms
And offer me her love and her laughter
and the shining radiance
of her open eyes.

My parents and hers
In what I once thought
was a drastic contrast.
I came to find out
They were only further reflections
In an endless hall of mirrors.

Avelar is on the right, I am on the left.
There is a boy in between us.
The boy is lost in the swamp of lost memories,
But Avelar would always be the model
By which all other friends were measured.
Dilcia's stepmother, Leti.
Once I saw her as a loving mother
A kind and faithful companion
to the pure Being that was my teacher.
Once she became an evil stepmother
Capricious and vehement in her fierce anger
Careful and stingy in her kindness
Demanding and prudish in her belief.
Now I only saw a mirror
Of my years of failure in transmission
Of my years of fruitless wheel spinning
Of my years of hiding behind a mask.

Together on the day we became a body.
She was dressed in black as I was
In a show of loyalty and allegiance
But she never understood
What the color truly meant.

Playing in the dark garden
The same garden
Where I first had a taste of desire
Where I first heard the finality of death
Where I first glimpsed the fragility of life.

Fanci and me
When the current of our contact
Flowed twice as strong as ever
And poisonous accusations
From the left or from the right
Had no power and no weight
Against the strength of our sacred bond.

Avelar is the wraith that leans sideways
Among the other wraiths from the past.
Even through the mist of so many decades,
Our clear contact still radiates with truth.

Even towards the end,
When her laughter was no longer so innocent
And her eyes were no longer so bright
She could still evoke the thunder of pure love
With a soft kiss
Or a simple smile.

Galaxia street, in the Satelite neighborhood.
It was now a street like any other
In the intricate maze that was San Salvador.
It was only for a few of us
That this small stretch of asphalt
Would still echo with years of laughter
And the sound of solemn promises
That none of us could ever keep.

Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Maps, Epiphanies And Narrow Escapes

I stepped out onto the small terrace of my grandmother’s house and I walked over to the white ledge that overlooked the street. It was early morning and the sun was already high up in the sky. All along the edge there was a long spiral of harsh barbed wire. Over that, there were two long wires that would give you a strong electrical shock if you touched them. Extreme protection for dire circumstances and only merely adequate in this city of thieves. I stood next to the ledge, my right hand on the faded white surface of the white cement wall, and I looked up and away, towards the sky, towards the volcano, towards the world that was broken into places far and near and threaded with pockets of understanding and vast areas of wonder. I looked at it all and I felt the strangeness of being here this morning. I remembered being here before, many times, many years ago. I remembered standing in this very spot, tracing thoughts that I couldn’t quite remember, wishing for things that I didn’t really want any more. I knew it was me who had been here, but then I didn’t quite understand who I was, not now, not then. As I looked at the wide green leaves that hung over the sides of my vision, I pictured myself as an empty vessel, a strange structure made of nothingness, able to carry packets of nothing within it, able to sometimes take them to their intended destinations, but unable to hold them for long. I looked across the street at the huge houses, at the barking dog behind the metal fence, at the three levels of garden of the mansion to the left, at the blackened windows of the mansion to the right, at the white walls, at the red pillars of naked brick, at the waving palm trees, at the trails of invisible sadness that seemed to extend from the highest secret rooms to the dirty gutters that lined the edges of the broken asphalt, sadness so thick, so tangible, that I could almost reach out and caress it with my fingertips. I had seen these very places so many times before but maybe I had never truly seen them, maybe they escaped from me as I lost myself in chains of thought that never finished, maybe they hid behind the corners of my vision and only came out when they knew that I was gone. Maybe as soon as I stepped away, the houses would change, and what I had seen today, I would never see again. But what I saw I would carry with me, no matter how ephemeral, no matter how unreal, no matter how forgotten. I was a carrier of maps, of myths, of tragedies, of quiet moments, of faded memories, of facts and of fictions. I would deliver them at one destination only to pick up some more in the voyage and go on to the next. They passed through me like water and food and they left some traces of their short stay in the tenuous fabric of my being. There was nothing else. Not that I could see today. I would never fully know what life was like for the dog behind the fence (even as I stared out the fence and barked at the bearded man that stared at me from across the emptiness) and I would never know how the world looked from behind the blackened windows in the uppermost reaches of that lonely mansion (even as I opened my eyes in a dark room, my head throbbing from a terrible hangover, and resisted the impulse to open the curtains and look outside). From my very own hands to the most distant little caves at the top of the volcano, this place was full of unknowns. I knew today that the questions could only grow larger and multiply into infinity and the answers could only shrink into dust and fade into the past, the remains of liquid cargo that had already been delivered.

XXX

It was a clear morning of mid December. The sun was shining as intensely as it ever did but the winter wind balanced the heat with a touch of loving ice. Standing in the middle of the little dusty street I was neither cold nor hot. Ricardo, my friend who was my brother in those days, was standing beside me. He was shorter and thinner that I was, but his thin body was covered in finely etched muscle. He wore a simple white shirt and beige pants, and shoes without socks. We were engaged in furious discussion with three older boys who had come to give us the good news of the coming of our Savior. The three boys were dressed in simple one color garments, light green short sleeve shirts and brown pants. The one in the middle was a bit taller, maybe a bit older. His skin was a dirty brown and his hair was black, combed towards the back with just a hint of vaseline. He spoke with confidence and determination. I thought then that he was someone that was used to success in similar discussions and the respectful way that the other two looked at him confirmed my suspicion. They were smaller, skinnier and full of shyness. They would talk only to corroborate what the middle boy had said, to maybe add a detail or provide the correct chapter and verse for a saying in the Bible, then they would retreat to their assigned posts at either side of him, always attentive, always full of admiration. The street was quiet and devoid of any traffic. Instead of standing on the sidewalk, we stood right in the middle of the dark blue asphalt, etched with scars left from flooding, from traffic and from the decay that was already in evidence back then, but I was too much a part of it to notice. I paced slightly from left to right. My friend who was my brother didn’t pace at all.
"The crucial thing… the thing that I most want you to understand… is that you can only reach Salvation through Jesus Christ, our Lord," the middle boy said and the other two said "amen" in the background with complacent grins. "There is no other way. If anyone has told you anything different, they are wrong, they are sent by the devil to fool you…"
"But how can you know this?" I asked, looking at him, genuinely curious about his answer.
"It says it in the Bible…" as he said it, he raised the small black Bible that he held in his right hand, as if he was lifting a heavy weapon above his head," it says it right here and I have faith that this is the word of God…"
"And how do you know that?" I asked again, unsatisfied with his answer. A woman carrying a large bundle of wood walked by on the sidewalk in front of me. Her skin was blackened by soot and her dress was dirty and covered in black spots. She walked calmly and decisively. A shirtless little boy walked next to her. Behind me, my friend’s dog, from the heights of the terrace, was barking at the passersby, threatening to jump over the edge in a raw act of aggression, something he had already done before and would probably do again. I didn’t turn to look at him, but I could imagine his snarling teeth, dripping with thick saliva, as he pushed his head through the holes under the ledge of gray cement that surrounded the wide terrace.
"I have complete and total faith in the truth of the Bible. If the Bible says that it is so, then it must be so!"
"But…" I was about to follow up, simply curious as to how he had come to believe in the Bible so fiercely. My friend who was my brother interrupted me, following a different approach.
"You have to understand that the Bible was written by men, men who had specific purposes, men like you and me, men with faults and problems…"
All three boys were shaking their heads as my friend spoke, again with wide grins painted across their face.
"You are wrong about this. The Bible is the direct and clear word of God. If someone has told you about this, then they are trying to fool you… they are…"
"How come the Bible is wrong about some things then? How come it never mentions evolution?" I said, following my friend’s approach.
"Evolution is a lie of the communists. They want you to not believe. They want you to renounce faith and become like animals. They want to turn everyone into godless amoral monsters."
"But evolution is a fact," my friend said, nodding his head as if to reaffirm his own statement. "Darwin showed that we are all like branches of a very complex tree that extends through the history of the planet, each species is a different branch… but we all come from a common trunk, we all come from the same tree…"
"But how can we come from a tree? That makes no sense!" the boy said it and the other two nodded and grinned again, happy that their leader had made a point that was beyond refute.
"No…it’s not that we… I don’t mean that…" my friend suddenly realized the boy’s complete misunderstanding. He turned to me with wide eyes of surprise. I turned to him and shrugged my shoulders and shook my head.
As they walked away, they were all grinning, very glad in their knowledge that once again faith had triumphed over logic and science, all three ready for the next battle around the corner. My friend and I sat on the curb of the sidewalk, playing with little sticks and stones, rolling them against the dirty edge of the gutter.
"What can you say after that?" Ricardo asked me.
I nodded. "I know… what can you say?"

XXX

We drove past a large ranch where many people were gathered. My Dad was quiet for a moment and I turned towards the crowd to make out what was happening. There was loud music coming from inside and all the people were clapping and singing and screaming rapturous hallelujahs. The people looked poor and thin and sad. The men wore old short sleeved shirts and old wrinkled pants. The women wore single color dresses, faded from years of use. Their faces were meant to invoke ecstatic happiness but all I could see was desperation in their wide open eyes, in their upturned faces, in their vibrant screams of exuberant faith. Someone somewhere had made some very big promises and now all these wrinkled faces were eager to see these promises fulfilled. The music was so loud inside that it overpowered the sound of cars and buses honking. I could barely see the shadow of two huge speakers towards the front. Among the thumping bass and drum beat, I could only vaguely distinguish the words: "Let’s go together, let’s go together, let’s all go together to the house of the Lord…"
My Dad shook his head and turned away with a single and final dismissal. "Idiots…"
I looked back towards them and I tried to open myself to their hopefulness. Maybe the God that they believed in would deliver them from years of hunger and suffering. Maybe it was the only hope they had left. It would then be cruel to remove it. Was it cruel to offer it if it wasn’t true? A woman with four kids made her way across the street, holding her black bag tight against her chest. She was late to the service. She rushed towards the ranch with a look of eager expectation painted across her round brown face. She had been given a map and she held on to it tightly, like her kids, like her bag. I felt a hesitant sympathy for her as my Dad turned the corner and the sound of singing faded into the loud harsh symphony of the noises of the city.
XXX

The fat older woman looked down on us from the heights of the front of the classroom. Her manner was soft and cheerful. She wore a flowery shirt and dark pants. Her hair was artificially arranged into a curly blonde ball that surrounded her face like an opaque halo. She paced a little while she talked but she mostly concentrated on the drawings she was making on the blackboard. We were all seated on small wooden desks, each one of us with a small mostly empty notebook, a pen, a regular pencil and many color pencils and a small rubber eraser. She would write down specific phrases on the blackboard and she would ask us to write them down, exactly as she had written them. She would make drawings on the blackboard and color them with chalk. We were supposed to copy these drawings just like she had made them. Ideally, our notebooks should have been replicas of each other. But it was never quite so. The maps changed as they traveled, even in the short journey from the blackboard to my notebook, from her lips to my ears. I wrote some of what she wrote and made little figures on the edges of the notebook when her back was turned towards me. Large monsters scaling up the sides of great castles. War planes swooping down to destroy a line of tanks. Soldiers making their way along the side of a river, guns out and ready. Whenever she would turn back towards us, I would look up and stop drawing and act as if I had been writing what she said all along. A skinny boy with glasses and a brown checkered shirt was seated next to me doing the same thing. He was my friend and we would look at each other every once in a while, smiling mischievously, sharing a rebellious secret. We were here, forced to stay after the regular hours of school, forced to seat in the same little cramped desks and told to still remain quiet and still. At least we would get to draw and fly away on the tips of our pencils.
There were some other kids in the class that I had never met. They might have been a grade above me or a grade below me. To me the school was still a vast world of strangeness and unknown kids were like aliens from a distant galaxy. One of the alien girls had long pigtails and thick brown glasses. She would constantly raise her hand and ask questions of the teacher. The teacher would turn then, forcing me to stop my drawing, and answer the question slowly and calmly. I looked at the girl hoping she would just run out of questions, or at least keep them to herself. I had my own questions but I had learned already that it would make no difference to ask them. Not of this woman. Not of anyone in this classroom.
"How did Moses get the commandments then?"
The teacher turned around with her usual smile and walked a bit closer to the girl with the thick glasses.
"He walked up to the mountain and God spoke to him."
I wondered then how it was that God spoke, if he spoke in a language that everyone could understand or if he switched languages depending on what country he appeared in. I wondered if he had ever spoken in Spanish. I thought that if he had never spoken in Spanish then Spanish must be a poor language, a language that even God did not love. I wondered if he had spoken in Spanish sometime and maybe that perfect Spanish divine communication had yet to be revealed.
"What did he say to him?"
"He told him the rules that his people were supposed to live by. There were ten of them."
I wondered then if people had never heard of these rules before, if before this day people had killed and robbed without punishment or guilt. I wondered what a world like this would be like and how I would have fared in it. I saw myself as a possible victim to the school bullies that I had grown to fear and hate. I saw myself getting a machine gun and ripping them into little soft bits of bloody flesh, grinning like a maniac as I did it. But then I remembered that there were no machine guns back then. But there were probably bullies anyway.
"And what happened when he came down the mountain?"
"He found that the people had forgotten all about God… they had gone back to their old customs and their old Gods… they were worshipping a ram!"
I pictured a big crowd of people, all sweaty and dark-skinned, playing strange noisy music and screaming in delight. I pictured some of the women, almost naked, their brown skins covered in sweat and wine as they writhed in the orgiastic pleasure of the strange ritual. I pictured the golden idol of the ram and wondered what it was they wanted from it. I wondered where it came from. I wondered what the world was like back before Moses and his jealous god of nothingness, when everyone worshipped the eerie golden ram and everybody was sweaty and half mad and there were no rules and the music was strange and the drums were deep and resonant. I wanted to know more about the ram and the old world before the coming of God. But I simply stayed quiet and listened, picturing naked people dancing madly over each other while a golden idol was shining triumphantly above them.
"What happened then?"
"Moses was furious and he slammed the commandments down above them! And the people cowered in fear, realizing that they had done wrong by worshipping their old idols!"
I pictured the angry face of Moses (or Charlton Heston, as that would be the face that I would see in my mind’s eye when I thought of Moses) and I saw the people run around in fear and beat themselves for having been impatient. I saw them destroying the beautiful ram. I realized that the golden idol would be lost forever. But I still wondered what it was that they were doing and why did they want to go back to doing it. I felt afraid then because I was curious about the ram and its rituals, more than I was curious about anything this teacher had to say, and that could probably mean that I would be going to hell along with all the bad people, the ones who scurried in the shadows and stole and killed in the night.
The next time the teacher turned around and away from us, I drew a pit of fire at the bottom of the page. I wondered how long it would take for me to get used to the flames.

XXX

I stepped into the old church with a sense of hesitation, as if I was walking into someone else’s home without knocking or asking for permission. There was nobody inside and there was a soft silence that was lightly caressed by the colored light that streamed from the stained glass windows. The roof was as impressive as I remembered it, a sequence of curved concrete columns that simulated a long tent. The main altar was surrounded by statues of the Virgin and the Saints and there was a wide stained glass window behind it which bathed it in golden light. At the top was the figure of Jesus, the King of the Jews, forever dying slowly on the cross. I walked around slowly, noticing little strange symbols, the chalice on the altar, the shocked look on the face of the Virgin Mary, the indentations in the pews made from the weight of a thousand knees that had pressed down on them to pray. As I walked out, I noticed a bulletin board, announcing a Catholic Youth Band playing for a festival, and a meeting for Bible study (every week on Wednesdays, "everybody welcome!") and a special meeting for women on Friday afternoons. Outside, a barefoot boy in ripped pants and a dirty shirt played with little pebbles by the side of a parked car. A peasant woman across the street was selling fruit and vegetables to a woman in an expensive dress. A tall man in a suit, wearing dark glasses and a somber face, stood silently by a shiny brand new silver car, parked a few feet from the church’s entrance. I turned one more time to take a picture of the giant white cross that was sharply outlined against a gray sky covered in dark clouds. Inside, Jesus would continue to die as long as the church remained standing. I made my way across the street to find my Dad’s red car in the little empty parking lot.

XXX

He walked into my room with a smile and a handshake. I was just short of twelve years old and my room walls were covered with posters of KISS and scenes from fantasy comics. I had a stack of books on my nightstand, most of them in English, and very tall stacks of magazines and comic books in the closet. There were several bookshelves full of more paperbacks along the edges of the walls. The walls of the room were curved as my mom had designed them, avoiding any corners, any disruptions of the flowing space. The furniture of the room, the desks and the nightstands, were designed to fit precisely with the curves of the walls. There was a small balcony that was just for me, that looked out over the garden, the tall wall of octagonal bricks to the left and the large swimming pool to the right.
I looked up to see him walk in and he was an apparition from another world. His name was Orbeliz and my mother called him Orbeluz ("orb of light"). He came from a place where there were no special walls, and the walls that there were, they were not made from special bricks or from bricks at all. He came from a world where there were no private balconies, a world where there was hardly any privacy at all. He came from a place where one book was a luxury and two books meant that one must have been stolen. He was thick and brown and unshaven. His hands were marked with years of hard work and his fingertips were round and flat and strong, like harsh tools made of flesh, designed for rough labor. His eyes were gentle but firm and his voice carried a sense of easy friendship and a skill for cold decisions. I sat up on my bed and shook his hand as he offered it and he sat on the little chair next to one of my desks.
"Did you bring the guitar?" I asked.
"No, I didn’t get it… but I will get it for you next time. I promise." He nodded with only a slight sense of guilt.
I smiled, picturing the electric guitar in my hands and long colorful trails of energy flowing from my fingertips like a shower of rainbows. I had never played an electric guitar at that point. I didn’t know what the two words together ("electric" and "guitar") really meant, but I was eager to find out.
"I wanted to talk to you about the work we’re doing…" he said it and he leaned closer to me, taking out a small book that said "The Bible" on its cover, written in big black letters. The book had a soft green cover and it was wrapped in transparent plastic. "This is a very important book, it is full of truths… but people don’t understand it."
"What do you mean?"
"They think it talks of a heaven somewhere else… somewhere above the clouds…" he made a face that let me know that such a thing was impossible and I smiled with him, letting him know that I agreed. "But it’s really about this place… right here….where we live…" And he reached to touch the desk, and he pushed his weight against it to confirm its reality. "This is what we need to fix… it is this place that can be heaven, it is this place that is now hell…"
"Why is it hell?""You don’t live it… but you have seen it. You have seen the way people live, the way they beg for food, the way they walk around barefoot on the hot pavement…"
"The poor people…"
"Yes, the poor… you’ve seen it. You know it. That’s hell. That’s what we need to change. That’s what needs to be cured in this world. That’s what this book is truly about. This book is not about complacency and fake gestures of brotherhood. This is the real Bible, the one that was never censored. Here you will find the hidden story of the Maccabeans, the brave people who rebelled against an empire. Like we do today. This is the Bible of rebels, of people who never let their lives just pass by without struggle. This book is for people that are willing to fight until the very end."
I nodded seriously and looked at the book once again. I had seen the Bible before, I had seen several kinds of Bibles, but this one looked different and, after hearing him talk in his voice full of memories of hardship and constant struggle, it resonated with the promise of a new discovery.
"I want to leave this with you…I want you to read it. We’ll talk about it more the next time I come back."
He placed it in my hands and I held it and looked up at him. My body resonated with gratitude, with a shifting mass of visions that transformed a guitar into a book, the colors of loud music into the radiations of secret knowledge, the strength of a man raised in hardship with the beauty of privileged art and silence. I held it tightly and said: "Thank you."
He winked and walked out of the room, saying: "I’ll see you next time."
I stared at the soft green cover and the thick black letters and I marveled at the mysteries that waited inside.

XXX

We drove down a long narrow street, littered with pieces of paper and bottles of soda and beer, grimy with the weight of years of poverty and neglect. In the distance, I could see a red flag waving in the wind, like a beacon of hope across a dire landscape. On the flag was the Che’s face, looking triumphantly out towards the world, letting the people know that the revolution was coming soon. His eyes still promised the same revolution that never happened, at least not here, at least not yet. His eyes still held on to the pure hope of another era, when the future was just around the corner and if you held on just long enough, you would be there to see it arrive. That future was now in the past and most people here could only see before them a present that slowly fell forward by inertia, a present where they slowly got old and the streets got dirtier and the jobs got harsher but nothing really ever changed. As we drove past the giant red flag, I saw many red posters with the faces of the left wing party candidates, ready to win in the coming election. Their smiles looked forced and painful, but that could have been the artist’s mistake. A couple of young pretty women stood by the posters, wearing red shirts that simply said: "FMLN". They waved red flags at every car that passed and screamed loud slogans in unison: "Now is the time! Real change is coming!". In their glowing eyes I could see a touch of the same hope that I remembered, and it was shining like a young fire starting to flare over an old stone tainted with centuries of ashes.
XXX

I sat on the old little chair, feeling my body press uncomfortably against the frail wooden backrest. I shifted a bit and then shifted again, all while keeping my attention on the man moving from side to side on the small stage about fifty feet away from me. There were many people there, about sixty to eighty, most of them much older than me. Ricardo was also there and a few other young adults. Otherwise, most of the audience was composed of middle aged women and men, who mostly managed to maintain their eyes open and their mouths shut through a talk that could last more than three hours. The man onstage was short and stocky. He talked in the loud clear voice of an actor and he emphasized his points with practiced movements of his hands, arms and body. He had a wide clear bald spot that reached back towards the crown of his head and long black hair around it that fell to his shoulders. His white pants were tight and pulled up several inches above his waistline. His smile was friendly but defiant, as if to say ‘I have a secret, but we’re all friends here anyway. Maybe I will share it with you if you stay a while.’ And it was precisely to get a glimpse of this secret that the people came.
This man was well known through El Salvador as a stage magician, an illusionist and a worker of miracles, a semi mystical figure that the people both feared and admired. In his youth, he had made his name through daring escapes in which he reproduced all of Houdini’s stunts, all except for the one that finally took his life. I had seen pictures of the young man in swimming trunks, water dripping all over his thin short body, emerging from the Lake of Ilopango after escaping from a straightjacket, a trunk wrapped in chains and certain death from drowning, surrounded by photographers, reporters and people who stared at him open mouthed. I had watched the reports on TV when he had laid for over a week on a bed of nails and people then came to see him, and they would cross themselves and pray, unsure of what this vision of calm endurance and strength could mean to them. Was it a sign from God or temptation from the Devil? He finally stopped the experiment when some people decided to come and pray at his feet, as if he was some kind of ancient idol. He said he didn’t want people to see him that way. But the mark had been made, and there were not many marks like that one in the history of El Salvador. So week after week the people came to listen, to watch him move, to laugh at his jokes, both new and old, to try to grasp from him some tiny bit of his deep knowledge and evident courage. And week after week he talked and talked, for hours without stopping, without questions, without rest, without a clear direction or theme. He would talk and the sentences would simply flow out, one after another, and people would sit and nod their heads in affirmation. I sat and listened, restless in my little wooden chair, but unwilling to leave, unwilling to let go of my curiosity, of my eagerness to learn.
"To materialists then I say: ‘Have you looked within yourselves? Have you not understood what you are actually made of?’" He turned and looked over the crowd, his eyes aflame with intense clarity. "Do you? Do all of you understand what you are truly made of?" He grabbed a piece of his own flesh, a bit of the skin that covered his thick arms. "This only seems to be real. It gives that appearance. But it is not real at all. What seems to be solid and strong and firm, it’s all an illusion. Remember: ‘What you believe to be true, that is not true! What you don’t believe to be true, that is true!’ You should always remember that!" There were whispers in the audience, quick attempts to restore caution, to listen and understand and know not to take these words too far. "This is all an illusion!" He knocked hard on the solid surface of the small desk behind him. "It only seems to be stable and firm. It is all only vibrations. Only vibrations. And that’s what you are! Only vibrations! Do you understand that?" I saw a dark skinned older woman nod and whisper to her friend: "Yes, he’s right. That’s all that we are. What else is there?" I pictured my body as a swarm of fireflies that constantly shifted position, maintaining the illusion of my own body, but never staying in one place. I imagined the rest of the room, the rest of the people sitting there, also composed of millions of tiny fireflies that buzzed and flew and jumped but always managed to maintain the apparent forms in place. The man on stage walked over to the edge of the stage and looked over his audience with eyes that turned up towards the ceiling. "Listen," he said in a voice that was still loud enough to be heard across the room but that gave the appearance of a whisper, "once you understand that you are only vibrations… and you should understand it now… then it should be clear that it is your inner vibration that determines your reality… isn’t that clear?" Again people muttered and I felt that something had clicked within me, something that I would not be able to explain a few hours later but that was clear right then as I sat on the little old chair. "If you do good, the world will be good to you. If you do evil… well?" He shrugged his shoulders and people laughed and clapped. For a moment they had been unsure of his real meaning, for a moment they had hesitated at the suggestion that what they believed was not really true, but now things were clear and bright again and they could now return home with a sense of deep satisfaction. In my mind, I wondered what "good" really meant, and I wondered what was the real color of "evil". I knew enough not to voice my questions but I would let them ring within me as people clapped and Fanci, the Magician, my old Teacher, descended from the stage to shake people’s hands and answer random questions about money, health, love and politics.
A few minutes later I stood outside feeling the cold winter wind and I still held on to that flash of realization, that fleeting moment when the golden door had opened and I could vaguely see within the hidden chamber inside. But it was still too dark. I could not see any colors and I could not step inside. I needed to fill in my maps. I needed to complete my mostly empty notebook. And my questions were still flying around my eyes like a small swarm of fireflies that refused to coalesce into a definite shape.

XXX

"Have you seen him?" the Old Woman asked me and I shook my head.
"No, I haven’t. I left a message for him. I don’t know if he will call back."
"He probably will…he’s not an ordinary man…"
"I know… I have always seen him as something else, something different and special… but I have also seen a side of him that is not so different. I just wonder which side will come out with this…"
"He will rise up to the occasion. He will let go of all resentment and greet you as his son."
I nodded and smiled at her. There was a part of me that wanted to believe her.
"I hope so. We will see."
That night I dreamt of a garden where I played with my current friends, the ones that I worked with day in and day out. We were having a party and we had invited other people to come. Etanna was playing the elegant host. Lydia was playing with the children by a pool of clear blue water. My Old Teacher showed up but his face was not happy. His eyes were pressed tightly, his forehead was traced with lines of worry and anger. His wife tried to pull him towards me but he walked away, breathing hard and shaking his head. I resisted the impulse to follow. The garden was shining with the green of the grass and the many colors of the flowers. The party continued unabated. I woke up knowing that my Old Teacher would not call, not that day, maybe not ever.
XXX

There were about seven or eight of us. We ranged in age from fourteen to nineteen. We were seated around him in flimsy plastic and wooden chairs. He was seated on a old couch with thin beat up cushions, all fading into the final stages of grayness. He was a tall dark skinned man, with long black hair and a bushy black beard and a thick moustache. He wore a long orange robe and a turban of the same color. His body was thin but looked very strong. His hands were wiry and moved in intricate shapes through the air as he talked. His black eyes were full of intensity as he placed them on each of us, one after the other. He talked in a mixture of English, Spanish and Hindi. A pale thin man was sitting next to him, acting as his translator when needed. Mostly he just sat and listened as the man in the orange robe was not completely pleased with his translation and he did not like to leave anything to chance. He talked in a soft voice that allowed for many gaps of silence, many moments of pregnant expectancy that fluttered between us like waves of cool air in a hot afternoon.
"You will breathe slowly for some minutes, you will bring yourself to a space of very deep relaxation. You will imagine yourself leaving your body, flowing out of it like water, flowing up and out, towards the sky, up into space, towards the shining stars. You will let yourself fly freely among the stars like an eternal bird. You will fly like that for quite a while. You will come to see in the distance a globe of light. Fly towards it. Move towards it. Join it as it floats in space. You will flow into it just as you flowed out of your body. Now you will flow into the globe of light and become one with it. Feel yourself become the light. Feel that your body is gone, left far behind on the surface of a forgotten planet. Let the globe of light become your body. Pulse with it. Feel it breathe. It is alive with potential. It is alive with love. Be within it. Stay there and feel yourself become inseparable from it. Know, here in the middle of empty space, that you are the light. That nothing has happened before this. Nothing will happen beyond this. You are the light and this is all that there ever has been or ever will be. After some time has passed, return to your body and relax within it. Feel yourself back within the influence of planetary gravity. Open your eyes and be here again."
I took it all in, trying to remember every detail and realizing that I would forget a lot. A couple of my friends were writing notes on their notebooks. I felt that this would be more of a distraction. I couldn’t look at him if I was writing and I felt that it was important to look at him as he talked. Something was happening in the way he moved his hands, something was happening with his eyes, something I could only barely trace while looking straight at him, something that would surely be lost if I looked away. I settled in the flimsy chair, reassuring myself that it wasn’t about to break. My eyes fell momentarily on the bookshelves, the same ones that my brother who was my friend and me had arranged not too long ago, the ones that were full of knowledge, of ideas, of legends, of myths.
"One thing that is very important. You should not combine this work with anything else. Baba has given us this method as pure and as perfect as possible. It is our duty to keep it pure and perfect. Don’t try to combine it with anything else you have heard or learned. Set everything else aside and use this method. It will work when other things haven’t."
I nodded and so did the rest of the group. The man in the orange robe still slowly scanned us, one by one, making sure that we had listened, making sure that we were not holding on to questions or doubts. When he was satisfied, he stood up and signaled to his helper.
"That is all for today then. Practice this every day, morning and night. This will change you from the inside out. This will bring about transformations within you that will affect every aspect of your life. You will see results very soon."
We reorganized the chairs in silence, each one of us full of calm curiosity. One more time I looked at all the books and wondered what was really waiting within them. I resolved to follow the Dada’s instructions. I would keep the knowledge pure. I would set aside all other knowledge and work exclusively on the path that he was offering us. My strong resolve may have lasted a week. I believe now that it was even less than that.

XXX

Ana leaned sideways, as if struggling to remain calm in the face of so many sad and frightening memories. "We would shiver all night, in the little hut. We would hear gunshots outside and screams and people running. We knew that soon it would be our turn. We all get out turn sooner or later, right? So we just shivered and prayed all night, hardly sleeping at all."
I could see her, thick and brown and trembling, pressing against her mother who was probably just as thick and just as brown but more wrinkled. I could see her three brothers, all skinny, all shirtless, all equally afraid but trying not to show it. I could see the wooden windows and I could feel the cold currents of air that slid their way into the hut through the many open holes. I could hear the gunshots, the machine gun fire, the cars rumbling by on their way to another violent encounter.
"It was God that saved us. It was God that intervened for us and kept us safe. There is nothing else. God is all we have. We can’t ever turn away from him. We have to pray to him always and he will keep us safe."
I nodded and smiled. I wondered if the others, the ones who were now decomposing in the ditches around the little town of Izalco, had simply not prayed hard enough. Maybe they had turned away from the path, like I had, maybe they had forgotten about God and had turned to the ram, or to a little Old Teacher in a decaying house filled with little old wooden chairs, or to strange men in turbans who spoke with alien accents. Maybe they had simply rolled the dice at the wrong time, maybe they had left their doors open, maybe someone in the family had taken the wrong step and all of them had paid for it. Maybe there was no clear reason for what had happened to them, but we would have to find one, as quickly as possible, or we would lay awake at night, trembling, forever fearing the monsters that roamed outside. Maybe if I surrendered my need for reasons I would become one of them, forever doomed to roam beneath the moonlight in search of innocent flesh.

XXX

I was standing on the terrace, under the weakening sun of the late afternoon, under a vast sky covered in black clouds that surrounded the volcano like a thick necklace of black smoke. I was looking across the street once again, at the huge mansions that I had seen so many times before without ever really looking. I saw that I would never fully travel through the walls, but I would get closer and closer, inch by inch, to that dark room on the other side of the thick brown curtains. Somewhere back there I waited, lying on an unmade bed, staring at the ceiling, sinking into loneliness. Somewhere back there I sat in a little room where I rested for a few minutes before I had to go back to the kitchen. Somewhere back there I cleaned my shotgun carefully and wondered if I would ever need to use it. Somewhere behind the tall white walls, the pillars of red brick, the lonely terraces of cement and stone, the slanted gardens of green grass and deep purple flowers, somewhere back there I waited to be discovered. All the words I had ever heard, all the stories I had been told, all the final conclusions and the hidden knowledge, all of it could not even begin to trail the labyrinth of dark mystery that spread like bolts of lightning over the leaves that now shook lightly before my eyes.
All these maps of verbal wisdom, they were the liquid messages that I carried from place to place, from chamber to chamber, from one being to another, but the journey itself was the answer to the multidimensional questions that could not be spoken. Without the maps, I would have no sense of direction, I would be like a tiny discarded bubble gum wrapper flipping end over end as the wind took me from one corner to another corner in the noisy chaos of downtown San Salvador. But like Lorena said the day I got here, when I spread the map of the city over the thick dark wooden table: "Looking at a map like that, you can get lost." There were many maps lying behind me, discarded, dusty in the depth of my subconscious. There were still many maps ahead of me, maps that I would make out of dreams and golden thread, and maps that came as gifts from others that I would never meet, beings dead, alive and imaginary. But today, I had let the maps fly away and there was only a street and a few giant mansions and a curtain that remained closed and a dog that barked when cars passed by, old motors shaking with mechanical effort as they climbed up the steep hill. Without the maps, there was only mystery. And in the pure mystery, I could almost touch the hidden face, the heartbreaking tornado of raw creation that some had called the truth.
When the first few drops of rain started to cover the cement floor of the terrace in little moist spots of darkness, I walked back into my grandmother’s house and closed the metal door. I could smell the food cooking in the kitchen. I could hear the noise of the TV coming from my father’s room. I sat on the light brown sofa and smiled for no apparent reason. Nothing had happened out there in the terrace. Nothing would happen here inside the house.

As a child I would pray to be shown the truth,
unable to shake the suspicion
that the ones who claimed to have it,
had nothing but dust in their hands.

Jesus in the moment of Sacred Transmission
when his disciples' faith turned to knowledge
and the light of God descended into them
in an electrified shower of life.

Moses and the Ten Commandments,
the ten laws that would rule his people
and bring about the Kingdom of God.
In the valley below,
the people still remembered
their strange dark idols
and music, lust and ecstasy
still made the desert come alive.

Ricardo, my friend who was my brother, and me
back in the days of joking in the streets
while the world burned around us,
back in the days when arguments were a parlor game
and all disagreements were forgotten
by the early light of a new morning.

The Maccabean revolt of the 2nd century,
the Jewish Intifada which had been censored,
from the perfect Word of God
and which now became the inspiration
for new generations of rebels
in a legendary land very far away.

Fanci, the magician, my Old Teacher,
who sought to blast away our limitations
and show us the outer realms of reality.
With him I committed the simple sin
of walking way too far
and crossing the side of him
that still remained on land.

The man that came from far away
to give us a jewel that should have remained
pure and hidden,
untouched by curious hands
that would willingly smash it into pieces.

My Dad many years ago,
glowing with light and warmth
in the very same terrace
where I looked into the void,
and found it hidden by thick curtains.

"He who would come with me,
shall have to deny himself."
But how deeply would the denial reach,
at what point would the maps vanish,
and then there would be no further need to follow.

A picture of Christian heaven,
awash in white robes and empty smiles,
where lions have stopped hunting,
and men live without lust.
It was pictures like these that made me wonder
if heaven was truly what I wanted.


A dark window that marked
the boundaries of my knowledge.
Beyond the darkness, I could not enter.
Within the darkness, I could not leave.