It was "La Satelite" where it all started, where all the stories converged and then trailed off into oblivion, where memories merged into dreams and dreams merged into fantasies and a kiss was as true as a fiery alien vehicle blazing across the sky, where long afternoons of quiet longing turned into an ever changing trail of tales and travels and stories and quests and the Wizard that hid behind the curtain lived just around the corner, hiding behind average white walls. It was here that the true journey began, fed by the waters of distant places and touched by the laughter of skinny boys playing at war and finding their bodies torn into pieces, all threads coalescing here into the brilliant glory of discovery and the grueling pains of birth.
And if "La Satelite" was the beginning, then "La Satelite" itself must have had its own origin, and to seek out that origin was a matter of climbing under the foundations of the world only to find a tall column of turtles, turtles upon turtles, turtles all the way. For me, and this is somehow a story about me, even though not entirely, "La Satelite" started with a small empty house that lacked the complex grace of my parent’s old house in Escalon, an empty simple house made of squares and large gray bricks. Where the old house was unpredictable and seemed to stretch forever, this one was as obvious as one of my Lego buildings and it clearly ended in every direction that I could see, and in this little house I perceived the scent of things changing, a sense that I was about to face something very new and it would come in forms that I couldn’t have anticipated back in the days of the dark garden, in the days of Avelar and Amaya and Carlitos and the American School, way up in the hills, cradled in the laps of mansions that were bursting with flowers, trees, and slanted roofs, all under the protection of men with dark glasses, guns behind their belts and dark Cherokees with no numbers on their license plates. "La Satelite" then began for me as a new empty house, lacking in color or imagination, a single house that extended back towards a cliff populated by bushes, and dirty water, and little trails of mud and dirt and strange women in the distance who bathed outside by large cement vats while dressed only in thick nightgowns, by little naked kids who ran up and down the hillside, without fear of falling into the depths of the darkness below, screaming wildly like creatures from old scary legends. Here, in the quiet of empty walls, and empty rooms, and a garden of dry grass, and under a sun that seemed somehow harsher and less forgiving, here is where "La Satelite" started for me, in a place without shadows, a place where I couldn’t hide.
* * *
"La Satelite" at first was my dogs, all four of them, two of them female, both pregnant half of the time (and eager to get impregnated during the other half): "Carbonera" (charcoal girl), the half German shepherd who was younger and "Penny", the half wolf who was older and who had given birth to "Carbonera" in the first place, but for dogs these relationships didn’t last for long, so that, only months after Carbonera’s birth, they were no longer mother and daughter, but just two bitches, competing on equal terms for the attention of their one lover, their common husband, ruler, father and king, "Kim" who I called "Kin" and everybody else did as well, who was really the second "Kin", the one who came to me on my father’s arms after the first one died, and who I knew as a little puppy and who was now grown into an old rough angry dog, tiny white hairs growing around his long snout, who was master of the shadows in the house my mother built for the dog in the farthest end of the back yard. Then came "Sanson" who was not really our dog, and who came much later, who drifted up from the broad street below, the "Bernal", only two blocks away, but back then those two blocks meant a world of difference, it meant a shift from the familiar to the strangely unknown, from the clear and understandable to the edge of reason, here manifested in a dark garage, a strange maid, and a large hairy brown and black dog who looked like a lion, "Sanson" who was so strong and so proud and so loving, "Sanson" who took away Kin’s mastery with a single angry swipe of his angry fangs drenched in smelly saliva, and then Kin grew skinny and weak and old, and soon died without pride, all for reaching too high, for trying to do battle with something greater, for trying to master "Sanson" who himself, not too long after Kin’s death, tried to battle the impossible in the form of a speeding car and lost, but not without a proud fight that saw him rise twice in defiance against the metal monster that hurt him, and that morning, he came to my living room drooling thick smelly saliva, thicker and smellier than usual, and throwing up in big gasps that betrayed his indomitable nature, and sinking slowly into a pile of hair and frigid muscle, struggling to live a few more minutes on the leather surface of my mother’s couch. And then there were the puppies, the crowd of wet little black newborns that swarmed over my mother as she tried to bathe them, the ones who were so little that they could barely open their eyes, the ones who were growing and were already finding their place in the world, crawling around on the sparse faded grass of our backyard, before they got taken away to other places, other adventures, other little suburbs of San Salvador where they might become prideful and fierce and maybe someday die weak and struggling, like their fathers did before them.
* * *
"La Satelite" was the place where my mom ran in the morning, trailed by 4 large dogs, as if to make doubly sure that she was safe in this strange place far away from "Escalon" which still rang with the sense of familiarity. Here the streets were new, and the houses were new, and the people were new, and not just new to us but new to themselves, as the streets themselves were freshly built and the people had moved in not too long ago, and maybe here was the key to its power to engender novelty, maybe in its invisible freshness it cradled the gift of youth that allows for things to happen and refuses to die in the shadows. "La Satelite" was like a young teenager itself, and not so long ago it had just been a big pile of dirt and bushes and then my father came and my uncle came and their friends came and, all of them together, they made it into a flat long valley that slanted slowly towards the east, and they cut it into little pieces and they made their Lego houses, all copies of each other, and they dropped them in little rows over the big flat valley that they had themselves created, and then one of them, maybe in the middle of a drunken dream, while they sat in a smoky room made of wood, a temporary refuge in the midst of a construction site, away from wives and kids and all forms of trouble, surrounded by cases of beer, tic-tac (the national drink of El Salvador) and Vodka, and other escapees just like themselves, yes, one of them had said: "Let’s call it Satelite" and then they all laughed, and then they said "yes" and laughed some more and they called all the streets names that they thought related to "space", so that my street, the street I would come to know as my street many years later, became "Gemini" and the street that ran up from the corner became "galaxia" and the street that turned from it, back into the main street became "Sagitario" and the street that ran down from Gemini became "Venus" and so on. Only the two main streets maintained their old conservative names: "Constitucion" and "Bernal", maybe because they were already there before the men started drinking, and they extended beyond this little "Ciudad Satelite" that they were inventing among themselves, but all others became horoscope signs and planets and galaxies and stars, and I could feel that it came from a whimsical impulse drenched in beer and hard alcohol and I was grateful for it, and maybe then the streets themselves were touched by drunken laughter and they smelled of easy love and open boundaries and the freedom that comes from being among friends. My Dad then took this little line of nothing, a trail of dust that they called "Gemini" on a map of blue lines and scribbled notes, and he made it into his own line of houses, all with the same plan or similar, a plan which my mother, the sophisticated architect, would look at with contempt, "Where is the art? Where is the subtlety? Where is the space? Where is the challenge?" but maybe if the plan had been complex then there would have been no room to grow and it was growing that implied history and it was history that was made, day after day, on this little street of simple houses, houses that were never meant for us to live in, houses that my Dad intended to sell and quickly forget, except as numbers in his bank account. But then, in the midst of an angry and bitter divorce, he settled with my mom by giving her one of the little houses, along with logical arguments and quick legal maneuvers, he handed over the title and the keys to this little Lego house, and my mom felt cheated and betrayed, but she took it with a shrug of the shoulders, and, after many years of little apartments and of a dark garden and a beautiful girl from the Basque country and many dangerous trips on the roofs of Escalon, we ended up living there, in "La Satelite", on "Gemini" street, while our other house was being built, the one house that would truly be our own (the one that we only enjoyed for a brief year full of danger and fear which ended with a big military truck at the door and a soldier playing "capirucho" in my bedroom).
* * *
"La Satelite" then was a transition, a place to temporarily rest, a calm little spot under a tree where you sit and drink some water, while coming from your old home and going to your new home, maybe you will never come by here again, maybe you will see this tree only once in your life and that will be all, and there will be just a brief memory of the valleys and the treetops around you and the ants crawling over the cracks on the earth and the little clouds of dust that the breeze lifts in front of your eyes, creating a swirl of ghostly movement that soon disappears and is forgotten, and then, after resting for a while and catching your breath, you will walk away and never turn back and maybe never again remember that place where you once sat, and you will forget the rough comfort of the tree trunk and the few ant bites that marked the side of your arm. That was what "La Satelite" was supposed to be, that’s all that my mother intended, that’s all that I wished for here, that’s all that I could have imagined, but this little tree had something cradled in its branches, a gift was hanging from its trunk, treasures were hidden under the dark soil, and once I had looked, and once I had touched and once I had felt, it was too late to forget, it was too late to turn away and find solace behind gray walls and thick metal gates once again.
* * *
"La Satelite" then was a fearful walk to the store, a tentative exploration of what my grandmother called a dangerous little suburb, far away from the known chambers of Escalon, far away from the air conditioned restaurants and the tall walls and the expensive cars and the ladies with upturned noses that claimed to love her when they came by to say hello. It was a walk down a dusty street where strange kids sat by the sidewalk and talked amongst themselves and I couldn’t look directly at them but I knew that they were there, and I feared that they had to be talking about me so I looked away towards the street, towards the houses, towards my own house only a block away, and maybe they were talking about me and, if they were, they were probably saying "Look at the new rich kid that just moved in, look at how stuck up he is, see how he just looks away," but I only looked away out of shyness, I never saw them as less than me, if anything, I saw them as more.
* * *
"La Satelite" was walking out of the door one morning, and seeing the cover of the newspaper that was resting on the dirt of our new porch. It had a picture of a little boy, his pouty lips a clear incarnation of eager innocence, watering a very small tree with a little plastic sprout, and it said "1980" on the cover, and the little tree was supposed to be the new year that had just been born and I wondered what would happen in 1980, what strange things were on their way, what would I discover, what new people I would meet. I wondered what would happen in that whole decade which seemed so drenched in future, so close to a primordial cataclysmic end that seemed to forever stretch out of reach (for I had heard that the world would end in 1984, or maybe in 1900, or maybe in 2000, later it became 2012.) I wondered what things might come during that long stretch of time that spread before me and I thought of myself as the little boy who watered a year and hoped that the young year would grow strong and tall and full of life and shade, and maybe this fresh little tree was "La Satelite" itself, growing out of the bushes and the dust, but back then I couldn’t understand it or even picture it, and I could only stare at the picture and wonder at the mysteries that I would only touch with the passing of time. While I waited for the manifestations to appear, I would keep on watering and I would keep on hoping that the new tree would grow strong and tall and full of brilliant flowers, and in this year, I said to myself, I would make new efforts, I would work more, I would not be so lazy, I would not be so shy, I would let the world inside me of me a little and I would see what it carried in its arms. I walked into the house with the newspaper in my own arms and the picture got thrown out with the trash later that afternoon but the little boy stayed with me long after that, along with the little stream of water that curved through empty space and made a whole year grow from a little patch of empty soil.
* * *
"La Satelite" was hearing that my Dad’s old friend, Herman, was moving next door and that he had four daughters, and that meant fear and desire and dreams and possibilities and dizziness, all rolled into one. One of them was Cristina, the oldest daughter, and I vaguely remembered playing with her when I was very little, when my Dad would go to visit Herman and he would bring me along, and Cristina was the little girl that was my age and I remembered liking her and I remembered playing with her in the living room of her house, with cars and trains and dolls and puppets. I had not seen her again for so many years, but now here she was, living right next to me, and my heart was bursting already with an intensity I couldn’t understand. One afternoon, they came to introduce themselves to me and my mother, but I refused to come out, I stayed in my room and heard their voices in the living room, and they thought I was arrogant but I was only being shy, and they called at me when I walked on the street, which wasn’t very often, but I would not turn around, and they thought I was arrogant but I was only being shy, and finally I did turn around one day and I saw Cristina and somehow recognized the girl I had played with when I was so little that each day was an endless lifetime, and so I had indeed spent more than one lifetime with this black haired girl with a round face and wide eyes, and soon we had talked, and the new memories crowded out the old and I learned that she could be very sweet when we had the gift of silence but angry and violent when her family was around. Soon I had met her sisters, Silvia, Ada and Mabel, and I sang in my bedroom little melodies that I made up to lyrics that I had written, and to lyrics of songs that I had never heard, which came in magazines from the United States and which talked of bands I had never heard of but I liked to imagine that I knew who they were, and that I knew what music they played, and Silvia would hear me through the wall singing and she laughed and listened some more and she started to call me "Grillo" (cricket) because I sang and sang in my room. William told me that Silvia liked me and when I walked down the street I would hear call out "Grillo!" and at first I thought it was an insult but then I came to understand that she really did like me and, not so much later, when the whole group of kids was playing baseball in the empty dusty lot at the end of Gemini (an empty lot which also belonged to my Dad) I would sit on the corner, on the metal stairway that ran up right next to the last house, with my arm around Silvia who sat right next to me, and I would kiss her hungrily and she would just laugh her lusty laugh full of embarrassment and excitement and I would act the part of announcer and say who had come to bat and what they had done and what the score was and how good they were or how bad they were and what the expectations were for them and I would tell jokes about them and then, when the game resumed, I would turn to Silvia and kiss her again and she would laugh again with a flurry of deep grunts and high gasping cackles, and I licked at her lips and felt her tongue with my tongue and she laughed some more and her eyes opened very wide and she blushed hard but never ran away, she just kept on laughing, and that was the first time I had ever kissed any girl at all, and it felt so easy and so good and I wanted to do it some more because it felt so good, even though I really liked Cristina and it was her that I really wanted to kiss but she would never get this close to me, and I could only sometimes walk by her and talk to her in silence, and then, in that perfect quiet sweet silence, there would be no Silvia or anyone else, there would just be Cristina who, alone with me, would talk in a soft, easy voice that soothed me and let me know that she was like me, but female, and that I really did want to hug her tight and kiss her and let her know that I loved her and that there was no need for anger or hurt or fear, but it was all gone before it even started and Cristina would be gone, back to her house which was full of anger and shouting, and I could only imagine what could happen next, after the doors closed. But here was Silvia, saying that she liked me, and she was sitting next to me on the metal stairs with her big eyes wide open and her laughter of spurts and grunts, so I decided that I might as well kiss her and I did, again and again, and I learned that I enjoyed kissing her a lot and that her lips did feel so soft and good against my own. Later Cristina told her not to do it, not to kiss me or let me kiss her, and she would run and separate us whenever she saw me near her and I tried to do it anyway for a while but then I gave up and I didn’t kiss her anymore. But I was now like a hungry tiger, I had tasted human flesh and I wanted to taste some more.
* * *
But "La Satelite" was a space before kissing Silvia, long before there were games on the street or wet kisses on a metal stairway on the corner of an empty lot, before there was a group of kids playing baseball and before I narrated their games, there was a mountain of sand and some bricks and some toy soldiers, all gathered in my empty garage. My mother was an architect and she liked to bring her work home with her, so she was always building more, adding rooms to the house, rearranging walls, opening holes, paving a section, lifting a fence, creating and recreating that building in which we lived, transcending its Lego nature, without any sign of an end in sight, as if the little house itself was only an excuse to keep on building and building, and so my memories were always sprinkled with large mountains of gray sand, and the mountains of sand were raw matter for workers to manifest my mother’s plans, but they were also raw matter for me to work with, and here is where I manifested my own plans, using my own little materials, big and small bricks, plastic figures, Legos and blocks of plastic, cardboard and little sticks, and here I created a city, a world in which stories could happen, a multi-level maze that was open and waiting for the pulsing, living manifestation of endless tales to come. Then came a little boy who could barely talk, due to some kind of speech impediment that made his mouth open wide with each word that came. This little boy saw me creating a world all by myself, in the empty garage full of sand and bricks, and he came to ask me what I was doing and he asked me if he could help and I said yes and we worked on it together, quietly and methodically and carefully, and he never asked why, and I never had to explain, and it was all understood, by him and by me, and it was clearly something that needed to be done so there was no need for any further questions. His name was "Rodian" and he was soft and sweet and he always wore long shorts and striped shirts and he liked to swing around the block in his roller skates and he spoke so strangely that he couldn’t even say his own name quite right and other kids made fun of him for it, but I just played with him and he helped me build a world and the world was bigger because he helped me and we both worked hard at making it come alive, there in my garage, while cars drove by and women carrying huge loads of kindle walked by and stray dogs ran by and old drunk men stumbled by and sometimes fell over and landed face down on the gutter, only to stand up once again a few hours later and stumble away. We, Rodian and I, just kept on working because that was what we had to do; and the world grew to the edges of the garage and beyond, even sprawling out onto the street and up towards the windows and the doors. Through Rodian, I met "Balta" (which was short for Baltazar), a skinny little kid with a big oval face and scheming eyes who lived just around the corner from me, and his beautiful older sister Sandra, who was slim and white as cream and had long black hair and talked with confidence and was a year or two older than me. I immediately wanted Sandra and I immediately knew that I would never have her, it was so clear right from the start that my heart would never open as it could, knowing that it could only lead to failure. It was through them that I met the girls next door once again and that was the kernel from which the street games began, that was how our world spread out from my garage to the street, to the empty lot, and further than I could ever have imagined. Then along came my friend Jose, whose ribs had sunk into his chest and whose mother had brought him to my mother and, as she introduced him, she had said: "Maybe they can be friends, because he has no other friends, they make fun of him at school, because of his chest, maybe they can be very good friends" and we did become friends, back in the days of the dark garden and all the way to the days of a mountain of sand in the garage, and Jose and me ran over the rooftops of Satelite, like Avelar and me had done back in the Escalon, and we found that we could make it all the way from my house to the empty houses by the empty lot and, one day, when we were jumping over the side of the roof onto the metal staircase landing, Ricardo was sitting with William in the little corner where William always sat, at the edge of the empty garage, and Ricardo saw me from below, and I saw him but I didn’t know who he was, and I wanted to talk to William but I didn’t want to talk to this strange older boy who looked up with suspicious eyes, so we, Jose and me, just turned around and went back without saying hello or anything at all, and Ricardo told me later that he wanted to beat me up that day because he was so disgusted with my attitude, and he thought to himself "I wish I could beat his face in. Somebody should!" so it was probably better that I had left that day, just when I did. Maybe he saw the same stuck up little boy that walked down Galaxia, the same one that didn’t respond when the girls next door called to him, maybe he had even been there one day walking back from the store when kids were talking and I thought they were talking about me, and maybe he remembered me and then later he forgot, but that day we kept on running over the roofs with Jose and down the street with Rodian and Balta and we forgot all about Ricardo and about everything else. Sometime in the midst of running over roofs and making cities over mountains of sand, I got a yellow bicycle as a birthday gift, and for weeks and months, I rode it all around the block (which seemed like a long way to go) and sometimes farther, and I met the kids that lived all the way down Venus street and one of them was a small tough boy who was also named Juan Carlos and another one was a brown skinned fat boy named Tito and we played games in his backyard because his backyard was specially big, and one day we were playing a kind of kickball and the ball went over the back wall that protected the yard from the quebrada (the "broken" cliff made of mud that surrounded a dirty little river) and I jumped over the wall to get the ball and that’s the day I broke my legs, all because of witchcraft and my inability to understand heights and my refusal to say no or to wait for someone to get the keys or to simply acknowledge the limits of my power. That left me stranded for a while, so that I had to stay home in pain with my feet in a cast, home where I had always wanted to be, except now I didn’t, because the street was full of friends and adventure and pretty girls and strange boys and I had a bicycle that could take me all the way around the block, and sometimes even father. Around that time, still with the cast around my broken legs, I talked to Sandra and I met "Luis el Negro", so called because of his very dark skin (and some kids called him "Chorro de Humo", Puff of Smoke, but not to his face) and he was a very muscular older boy who liked to play soccer and ride around in a mini motorcycle and he played with all of us even though we were younger and he would beat us at every game, and maybe that is why he liked to play with us, and his word was law because nobody could beat him at anything, and he had an even older cousin named "Sigis" who had a strange ugly face that seemed to always be angry and both of them rode on their little motorcycle every afternoon and the sound would travel all through the houses, like a loud mechanical fart that echoed around corners and filtered through open windows, and when I was in my room I could hear them rolling around the block with the echoing thunder of the little motor, which was like a song of power along the little streets of a lost dusty neighborhood and it just made me want to be out there, with Luis, with Sandra, with Cristina, with Silvia, with all of them in the sun with the breeze blowing all around us and not in my room, laying quietly with my big feet of white clay.
* * *
But "La Satelite" was really the other Luis, the shorter skinnier younger boy, also very dark skinned like "El Negro", who came to play with us one day, like a feather that blew in from other regions and then decided to stay. He spoke softly although not as softly as Rodian, and one afternoon I saw that the older kids from Galaxia were throwing rocks at him, so maybe he came to us to find sanctuary from the fearsome bullies that lived around the block or maybe he just liked us or maybe both; and once he had arrived, we had become too many for a backyard and that is when the baseball games started in the little empty lot (and it was not really baseball as it involved a very thick plastic bat and large plastic balls that were almost impossible to miss and a lot of the times the ball would roll over the cliff into the dark "quebrada" behind the lot and then someone would have to go and find it and they only sometimes returned with it and if there was no ball, then some other kid had to run home and find one, and somehow there would always be a ball to play with) and, with the same plastic balls, we played soccer, and the goal was two bricks about 4 feet from each other, and the goal was so small that we didn’t really need a goalie, but if we had enough people then we had one anyway, and ruling over all this sport of plastic bats and plastic balls and little goals without a net was shirtless older man named William, who laughed and ruled and pointed fingers and made decisions and laughed some more.
* * *
"La Satelite" was where my Dad still owned two empty houses in the corner of Gemini, just down the block from the house where I lived with my mom, and he owned a little apartment at the end of the metal stairs in the corner of the empty lot, which was also his, and he was building two more little apartments above the roofs of the parking lots of the two empty houses and all of this meant a lot of emptiness and a lot of bricks and sand and cement and metal, all valuable materials that could not be left unguarded for too long, and so William was the one man to guard it all, and he was a simple man looking at him through the years that now separate us, but he was wise and all knowing when I came to see him back then, as he would lean back on the corner of the empty garage on a couple of pieces of cardboard, without a shirt, his long chest and stomach all sweaty and covered in hair, and I would sit with him and he would tell me stories of the countryside and of the people he had known through the years, and he said once that he didn’t believe that men had gone to the moon and I tried to convince him with pictures and photographs but he shook his head and said to me, "No, no way, until they bring me a big lizard from the moon, that’s when I will believe that we have gone to the moon!’ and there was no way for me to explain that there were no big lizards on the moon and so there would never be a way to prove that we had been there and that argument was closed forever (and many years later he became a devout Christian which made me understand that it was possible to believe that the one son of God had landed in Israel and had died for the sins of all mankind but it was still impossible to believe that men had traveled in giant metal ships to a little gray piece of rock floating in the sky, but this was all many years later and William was certainly not a Christian when I met him or at least he was not a good one which made him a better friend.) I saw him many mornings there, in the garage of my father’s empty house, next to the dusty little empty lot, laying on his two pieces of cardboard, doing his job of simply being there, and once we ran around getting the ingredients to make "chipilin" soup, simply because it was the day to do so, and he told me what to get and what to do and we made it all in an old banged up pot in his backyard (which of course was not his but my Dad’s, so the house was kept empty except for a little cot where he slept) and we put a big beef bone inside, with the remains of some meat and some potatoes and a bunch of green leaves and it tasted like hot water with just a hint of spices, but it was the best hot water I had ever tasted, and we drank a lot of it while he sat back on the two pieces of cardboard, without a shirt as always, and he told me more stories of the places he had seen and told me dirty jokes and sometimes, when Cristina came to play with us, he would point out that her pubic mound was growing under her shorts and he would make a gesture with his right hand that signified the growth of her pubic hair and Cristina would get embarrassed and she would go away or tell him to shut up and her face would get all red and he would laugh with a loud trebly laugh that rang all around the empty garage and he would keep on making the gesture and I tried to understand what he was talking about but I could only barely imagine what Cristina would have under her shorts, even as I tried to compare her crotch to William’s hand. He was the one that played referee for all our games and sometimes he played with us as well, and even through he was two to three times our age, he was just another player then and we all liked him and we all liked his loud trebly laugh, and maybe it was him that told me that Silvia liked me and maybe it was him that told me to kiss her and maybe he was there that day when I did kiss her and when he saw it, he laughed and I laughed and Silvia laughed and we all laughed and I kissed her some more and the next day William would be sitting on his two pieces of cardboard early in the morning, and I knew that if I ever felt like talking, I only needed to walk down the block and I would find him there, always laughing, always ready to tell another story, always ready to give me the precious gift of another dirty joke.
* * *
"La Satelite" slowly became the house in the corner, the big gray house with the terrace and the brown dog that always barked at anything that passed by. The gray house in the corner was Luis’ house and he brought me in once even though I didn’t want to go in and he gave me some food even though I wasn’t hungry and I was very embarrassed because I didn’t want to be any trouble to these strangers, but he insisted, and I finally relented. Inside, it was cool and shadowy and people were very nice and sweet and welcoming, but I couldn’t take anything from them, even though they wanted to give it all to me, food, shelter, comfort, kindness, love, none of it I could accept, because I certainly didn’t want to be any trouble, and so, after a quick little meal, of a little bit of rice and some ground beef served on a plastic plate, I went back to the street as soon as possible that afternoon, because in the street I couldn’t be any trouble to anyone, and the street was the kingdom where we ruled as kids and there was no need for embarrassment or manners or precautions against the invisible judgement of adults. But still, even while enjoying the freedom of the little brick walls, and the tilted roads and the empty lot, it was good then to know that inside that big gray house it was cool and shady and people were smiling and they offered me water and food if I really wanted it, but I really didn’t want to be any trouble so I mostly just said "no, thanks." Luis then introduced me to the older boys up the street who had thrown rocks at him not too long ago, and they turned out to be his friends, even as harsh and angry as they had seemed that afternoon with rocks bouncing off the pavement and crashing against the sidewalk with loud cracks and Luis pale with fear. It took me some time to understand that these kids could throw rocks at you one afternoon and still be your friends the next day and they could even beat you up one morning and still be your friends the next day, and so they became my friends even before I could understand it completely, and except for one or two times, I avoided their harsh treatments through the sly maneuvers I had already learned in the American School many years before. This is not to say that there was no violence or pain, there was a lot of both, but it was all within a range that I could manage and withstand and so it never amounted to much. There were two boys that I met first and their names were Rodney and Manuel, and at that time I saw them as two sides of the same coin, a bit older than me, a bit tougher than me, a bit more streetwise than me, but almost indistinguishable from each other, and I liked to see them smile, and I liked to hear them crack jokes, and I liked to hear them talking. One day "Luis el Negro" brought over a toy set of golf clubs, each club about three feet long or shorter, and we created a little golf course in the empty lot by making little holes all over and sticking little flags next to each hole, and then we played golf all afternoon, and I remember that Rodney had his hair parted to the side and he made funny noises when he grabbed the gold club, noises that would somehow manifest his intense concentration and his will to sink the little ball into the little hole in the light brown dust, and I thought he was very funny and I liked him for being so funny, and then I knew that he was not the same as Manuel, and right then I almost forgot that I had seen him throwing rocks at Luis and I thought that maybe it was Manuel who was the mean one and Rodney had just been forced to go along, but Manuel was also laughing and playing, so I couldn’t really blame it on him either, and that day we were all just friends and we played golf over the thin dust of the little empty lot, with great determination and no skill. In the following weeks, we played "tiros" using William’s garage as a goal, and "tiros" meant that each kid could attempt to make a goal, using a semi inflated plastic ball as usual, and if you made a goal you got the prize of being a goalie and you held the goal as your own until someone scored on you and the game would simply repeat indefinitely until we were called for dinner or everyone just got too tired to continue, and when there were many kids there, the game could go on all afternoon, until it just became too dark to play. As a goalie you couldn’t really roll on the floor because it was all hard gray cement and the garage was big and wide so it was almost impossible to stop a good ball, but some of us threw very badly so there was still a chance that you could stop the ball with your hands or your feet without cutting your arms open on the hard pavement. While the game continued, William would report on the proceedings from his post at the corner of the garage, and so would I, sitting next to him, until it was my time to shoot, and he would describe who was doing well and who was doing badly and he would improvise nicknames and jokes about each shooter and it all turned into something much greater than you could ever have guessed if you happened to drive by and saw some kids kicking a plastic ball into an open empty garage in the corner of a little lost street in a little suburb, driving by and passing the corner in the wink of an eye, you could never have imagined the glories that were being achieved and the legends that were being born that afternoon, and what you forgot in a minute, some kids would carry for the rest of their lives. I was sitting by William one particular afternoon when there were many kids playing, and the day was sunny and clear and it was wide open and the air itself seemed to imply an eternity that was dressed in dust and pebbles, and on that afternoon, an older boy showed up who was skinny but with the body of an adult, and he walked with a certain grace that I immediately recognized even if I couldn’t name it, and as he approached the garage, everyone turned to talk to him, and I saw that everyone knew him well, and everyone seemed to like him and I wondered why I had never met this boy before, even though now I knew everyone else, and the boy talked with William on the street just outside the garage, and he said that he had been working on his body by doing special exercises that were better than lifting weights and then he took off his shirt and showed off his new wiry muscles and he showed how far he could puff out his chest, and his skin was white and his body was thin but finely shaped and his hair was parted in the middle in a style they called "the butterfly", and William laughed his high trebly laugh and applauded with glee when he saw the boy puffing out his chest, and then the boy said that he had been kissing Sandra just a little bit earlier and I couldn’t believe it because Sandra was like a dream beyond reach for me, with her dark hair and puffy soft cheeks and soft generous dark eyes, and if this boy had kissed her, then this boy was like a creature out of a storybook and I wanted to be his friend, but I also didn’t want to, and there was no resolution to that dilemma that day because he left after a while because he said he was going to take a class with Fanci the Magician and I wondered what kind of classes those were and what kinds of things a Magician would teach him. Later, on mornings when it was only the two of us sitting in the corner of the garage, William told me stories about the mysterious boy and he became another character in William’s endless stories and I found out that his name was Ricardo and I also found out that he was Luis’ older brother and that became another reason not to go into the big gray house in the corner, even though that wasn’t really a reason and there really was no reason at all, but as far as I was concerned I had found a reason and I stayed away, even though I liked it inside, knowing that it was cool and shady and people there would always greet me with a smile.
* * *
"La Satelite" was my room full of magazines and books and comics and more books piled on top of books and lots of kids laying out on the floor slowly perusing my secret treasures which were stacks of Playboy magazines, some of them taken from my Dad’s library and some of them bought at the American school from my classmates who had rich Dads who traveled often to the United States and maybe liked the look of naked American women as much as we did, except that for us they weren’t even American women, they were just women, and they were naked, and that’s what mattered, and every page of nakedness offered another surprise, another rush of warmth, another explosion of desire. Rodney was there, laying on his back on the floor of my room, pointing out a gorgeous tanned brunette with pointy dark nipples and Manuel was there, with his back against the white wall, pointing out a blonde with big full breasts and buttocks, and Luis was there, sitting on my unmade bed, just staring at a young Latina with her ass up in the air and a hint of black hair peeking from in between her thighs, and I could only barely imagine that these boys did the same thing that I did, something which I still didn’t fully understand as masturbation but I still understood enough to hide the magazines full of naked women from adult eyes, by placing them over the false roof of the room, in the upper cubicle of my closet, so that only rats could possibly find them. (I never openly asked them if they masturbated and it was only years later that Rodney freely confessed to me that he did.) Ricardo was there as well, along with everyone else, leaning against my bookshelf with his thin legs curled up against his chest, and he also looked at the Playboy magazines, and he pointed out the women he liked with a soft gentleness that seemed somehow calm, feminine and strange, but right now he was very happy that he had found a big stack of "Los Agachados" (The Squatters), a subversive little comic book from Mexico which hid its communist tendencies with smart jokes and funny characters, and I showed him that I had lots more of those and I also showed him my Mad magazines and I helped him with his English a little and he began to learn it just by reading all the funny magazines that I let him borrow and asking me about some word here and there that he couldn’t quite understand and then trying to talk with me in English. Through these furtive broken conversations that started in English but ended in Spanish, we discovered that we liked to talk to each other, and we found that, besides liking naked women intensely, we also liked other things as well, and we talked about books and philosophy and science and history and I found that, to my surprise, here was a boy that could understand things that other boys didn’t and he was willing to talk about them, and he could also listen carefully and wait for a point to be finished before saying what he thought, and he didn’t need to make a joke about everything or dismiss an idea or a question if it was too hard to think about, so talking with him became an endless pleasure, a flowing linguistic delight that felt like a deep well that could be never be extinguished. I liked him so much then that Ricardo stopped being Luis’ brother and instead Luis became Ricardo’s younger brother and the change was permanent and strong and all the other people in the house in the corner became defined by Ricardo, there was Ricardo’s brothers, Ricardo’s sister, Ricardo’s older brother who was away, Ricardo’s mother and Ricardo’s father, Don Ricardo, whose voice was thick and raspy and who laughed in deep explosions of dark air, a mysterious mirth that was touched by a deep sadness. I would go in the morning to knock at Ricardo’s window, inside the garage of the big gray house, where I could squeeze in between the metal bars because I was small and thin enough and because the bars were a little bent, and he would come to the door and let me in and we would sit up on his terrace drinking milk or soda or water, with the volcano towering behind us, enjoying the cool breeze of the morning, and the view of the white rooftops, while talking and talking and talking, or we would walk to the store and sit on a little brick wall, and it didn’t matter whose brick wall it was, because all brick walls belonged to us unless somebody said otherwise and usually nobody did, and then again we would talk for hours without end, and all subjects lead to all other subjects and when we encountered a circle it was only a spiral and when we ran into dead end, we found a way around it, and the afternoons would pass by and the days would pass by and our conversations never ended, they just slowed down for a moment, waiting to start again with a light knock on a long piece of glass. Rodney would walk with us sometimes, straying just a few feet behind us with his head lowered and his eyes to the ground, mostly quiet, mostly listening intently, and he later told me that he couldn’t understand most of the things we said but he still liked to listen, there was something in what we said that he truly enjoyed and maybe it was in the rhythm of the words and the sentences, or maybe it was the constant back and forth between us, or maybe it just felt good for all of us to be together, for all three of us to simply be in one place at the same time, even if it was only for a moment, and so the time passed by until everything changed, right when nobody was looking, when thick shadows sprung up from corners that had long ago been forgotten.
* * *
"La Satelite" was playing soccer on the hot broken asphalt of Gemini street, stopping every so often to let cars drive by. William’s brother was there who was just a little younger than William but still older than us, and he was tall and strong and always walked around without a shirt and with light brown pants and he would run fiercely for the ball and try to score in any way he could and every once in a while he would pee his pants and a growing dark stain would grow around his crotch and he was mildly embarrassed but he would just keep on playing and William said that it was just a problem that he had and we laughed about it and then we would all play again and everyone wanted him on their team because he played very well.
* * *
"La Satelite" was Chuz, whose real name was Jesus, and his brother, Jose, who both lived for a while in a little tin house at the edge of the empty lot. Maybe they worked for my father or maybe for one of his friends and maybe from the distance of the big houses in Escalon they were like little chess pawns that meant nothing, game pieces that could easily be lost or replaced, and they were just there to guard some tools and some materials, in a little tin hut with only a little light bulb hanging from a wire and no running water or heat. For me, they became curious creatures that had strange opinions about all things and told stories of the countryside and of the ways of the people that lived there, away from the lines and angles and wires of city life, away from rules and regulations, deep in the common cauldron that held both danger and freedom, risk and ultimate reward. Chuz told me one day that he had once liked a girl very much, and he had seen her walk by on many afternoons, all thin and brown and beautiful, and he wanted her very badly, because he had seen her so much and because he had imagined her in his own mind so many times even when she wasn’t walking by him, so one day he hid behind a bush and waited for her to walk by and then he jumped and grabbed her and pulled her towards the bushes and held her down by the throat and tied her up and took her away to a hut that was far away from everything and everyone and, once he had her there, he made her a woman and enjoyed her body repeatedly, and at first she resisted and fought against him, but then it was too late, because she wasn’t a virgin anymore, so she stopped resisting, and after three or four days had passed, she had become his woman and there was no more need for force or ropes or violence and then she returned to tell her parents that she was Chuz’s woman now and Chuz looked at me with eyes full of wisdom, as if to let me know that I should learn the proper ways of dealing with women from him and I nodded and acted like I understood while I imagined the things Chuz might have done to her in a little hut way out in the countryside where nobody could come to help and I also wondered where she was now and maybe she was still waiting in that hut, hoping that Chuz would come back soon because she sincerely missed him and the countryside was lonely and scary without him. Chuz once told me that the way to cure gays and make them real men was to inject hormones into them, that if a kid showed feminine tendencies a doctor would take him and strap him down and inject him with strong masculine hormones and all the femaleness would go away and William was there when he said it and he laughed in his high whiny laugh and told me it was probably true, he just didn’t know, at least it sounded more plausible than men going to the moon. Chuz was small but strong and wiry and he had a little thin moustache that was split in two and he had a savage confidence that I would soon learn to recognize. Chuz played soccer like it was a war to the death, and he would not surrender or concede an inch to any opponent, he was a kind of fierce warrior in search of a true battle and finding only little kids with a plastic ball along the way. He disappeared along with the hut one day and I wondered if he was back with his stolen woman, or if he had found another little dark hut where he could rest a while from his endless quiet war.
* * *
"La Satelite" was little tiny dark skinned Rene practicing soccer with Tio Juan in one of the empty garages at the end of Gemini. Rene would jump and twist his little hard head against the ball so that he could hit it with his forehead, right in the center, as his neck twisted violently to the side, and, when he hit it right, he would send it flying through an imaginary goal, and the ball flew as hard and fast as if he had hit it with his foot, and Tio Juan, who was big and tough and experienced and even played in a real soccer team, would tell Rene what he was doing right and what he was doing wrong and then they would repeat the whole process once again. I saw it all, sitting on the little brick wall next to them, wishing that someone would take the time to show me how to really play soccer, and Tio Juan probably would have taught me but I never really asked. Eventually Tio Juan became a Tio for all of us so that we all called him Tio Juan and he was very happy about it and he played soccer with us as well, right there on Gemini street, and having him on your team was even better than having William or one of his cousins and at least as good as having Chuz, who didn’t have as much technique as Tio Juan, but played with more ferocity. Tio Juan, unlike Chuz, was kind and sweet and gentle, and I liked him for spending his afternoon showing little Rene how to hit a ball with his forehead, both of them wearing little soccer shorts and cleats, both of them dead serious in their practice, and the professional ball that Tio Juan brought with him would bounce off of the metal bars that covered the windows and it would bounce against the pillars of the garage and eventually it would find Rene’s head once again, and Tio Juan would nod his approval, and sometimes, if Rene had hit it particularly hard, he would clap and whistle and Rene would smile and jump back, ready for his next turn, eager to please Tio Juan once again.
* * *
"La Satelite" was the little raised lawn, on the corner right across from the Ricardo’s house, the open lawn that belonged to the house where Rene and Tio Juan lived, and it was standing in front of them for hours, retelling movies that I had never seen, inventing horrible details for horror movies that went far and beyond anything that had ever been put on a movie screen, and seeing all their faces, ready and intent, waiting to hear more from me, letting the sun come down around me as I described another horrible murder, another decapitation, another monster finally destroyed in a way so terrible that it left even the survivors changed and scarred for life, and they asked me for more details and they requested more information, and I would give it freely, there was no detail too obscure, there was no story too tangential, there was no biography too uneventful, and blood dripped in buckets all over the green grass, and women had their bodies cut in half and men were violently castrated and the bad guys came to a bad end eventually, but not before they had fulfilled their true destiny of being terrible and bad, and I would even sing the theme songs for these imaginary movies and read out the titles as they passed over the screen of my mind and I would describe the silent street in the beginning scene and the empty room with broken windows at the end and the sounds of crickets outside the windows and the splash of raindrops upon puddles and the subtle looks that two friends would give each other, knowing that at least one of them was about to die.
* * *
"La Satelite" was Fabrizio, Avelar’s little fat brother, coming over with Avelar for my birthday party and picking Rene to be his boxing opponent because Rene was so small and thin, completely misunderstanding the fact that Rene was smaller than him, but older and a lot tougher than any boy he had ever met. I tried to warn him, telling him that it was better if he fought Rodian or Balta, who were both weaker and softer but he dismissed my warnings, and I told Avelar that Rene was a tough little boy and Avelar walked over towards his little brother and warned him that this was the wrong boy to fight, but Fabrizio was insistent, and that was the way that Fabrizio was all the time, stubborn and obnoxious, and he just looked at Rene as some kind of little street kid that would keel over with a fierce punch from one of his fat little arms, and Rodney and Manuel had picked up on Fabrizio’s attitude right away and they were eager to see what Rene would do to him. So Fabrizio put on the big boxing gloves that I had received for my birthday and we put another pair around Rene’s little hands, and Fabrizio was completely confident and smiling and looking at his little opponent with a look that was already very familiar to me, as it had dripped out of luxury cars all over Escalon, and it had been there in the schoolyard of the American School, and in the eyes of my friends’ fathers and in the men that paid my mother to make their houses and their gardens and their buildings, and it was a look that was both terrible in its dismissal and terrible in its arrogance but most of all, terrible in its complete lack of self awareness, it was the look of eyes that could only look outside but could never turn upon themselves. The two little boys met in the middle of the street, and all the other kids formed a big circle around them, and I remember that Rodney had a big eager smile on his face, and William was clapping with excitement and Fabrizio tried to throw a little punch with his right arm but Rene easily avoided it with a practiced quick swing of his little neck and then he turned around and punched Fabrizio with full force on his fat round face and Fabrizio bounced back, in shock and pain, and before he knew what had just happened, Rene landed another punch, even harder than the first, and then Fabrizio started to cry but Rene kept on beating the big plastic gloves into his face and William was laughing so hard that his whole face was red and sweaty and Rodney and Manuel were clapping and finally Avelar pulled Fabrizio away and he cried for a long time but nobody really felt sorry for him because of the way that he had looked at Rene. Rene was eager to fight some more, and he seemed completely oblivious to Fabrizio’s arrogant earlier look or to his present sorrows, so he just looked around, looking for a new opponent, but after hearing Fabrizio’s loud cries, none of the other little kids wanted to fight him and we all went inside to drink some sodas and find a new game to play. That day I saw the two worlds clearly outlined before me, the world of the Escalon and the American school and the world of "La Satelite", and that day I learned the difference between the two and I thought to myself that if there were only two paths in the world, if all the infinite choices that seemingly appeared before us from day to day, if these paths could all be narrowed down to two and only two, if I could only choose to be Rene or Fabrizio, then my choice was clear. It was better to be Rene in all possible instances, but it wasn’t because he had won the fight, I would have wanted to be Rene even if no punches had ever landed, and in fact, not too far from our little quiet street, Fabrizios were directing great machines of war against little Renes that ran under bushes and crawled through crumbling tunnels of dirt.
* * *
"La Satelite" was the brick igloo that my father built on the corner of the dusty empty lot, based on ancient middle eastern principles that he had learned from a book. It was a dome made of red brick standing strange and out of place in the middle of this low middle class neighborhood where there were only houses made of legos, all simple and square and rectangular and predictable, and there were many people that wondered if it was ok to make a dome like that, and someone said that it would fall down and that the workers would get hurt, and someone said that someone would get killed, and someone said that it was very bad to be doing something like that, maybe it even offended God, and my Dad just laughed and raised his eyebrows and shook his head and called them all "Pendejos!" and kept on making his dome out of bricks and mud and cement. I saw the little kids watching intently as it was raised from the ground in a wide red spiral that seemed to emerge freely from the dust of the empty lot, and they looked at it with wonder, because they were too young to question its integrity but not so young that they couldn’t recognize its utter strangeness, and William was laughing from his post in the corner of the garage and saying that it couldn’t stay up and that my Dad was crazy, although he didn’t say it when my Dad was around, and I just shook my head and shrugged my shoulders, confident that my Dad knew what he was doing even though everyone else was full of doubts. And it did come up, solid like an ancient Egyptian pyramid, and full of darkness and shadows, standing in full spherical glory in a land of perpendicular lines and boxes, and when I saw it, all complete and shining in the midday sun, I knew that my Dad was right, and, more importantly, I knew that people could be wrong even when they all agreed among themselves, and that was very good to know. One day, when it was already completed, but the red bricks were still naked and unpainted and you could still see the lines of cement like an endless spiral around its circumference, Ricardo climbed on it by stretching his arms and legs far from his body and Silvia and Liz were inside at the time and they saw his shadow, and they screamed with fear, and Silvia called him "Arana" (Spider) from then on, because he looked like a spider with his arms and legs all stretched out, and then when she would see Ricardo walking down the street, she would call out "Uy! La Arana!" and Ricardo would laugh as Silvia ran back into her house. Many afternoons, we would walk inside the igloo together to experience the feeling of enclosed darkness within the dome and the echoes of our voices against the curved surfaces in the shadows and, sometimes we were just quiet inside, and it seemed like a whole different world in there, a special little world that my Dad had created from the dust. There still were murmurs and questions from the people that passed by but William now laughed at their questions, simply saying "look! It did stay up! It is up!" followed by more loud trebly gusts of raucous laughter and then he would say "I knew that it would! I knew that it would!"
* * *
"La Satelite" was my Dad’s little apartment at the top of the metal stairways (the same ones where I kissed Silvia, the same ones that were the final step on the rooftop journey from my house) and the sense of enclosed serenity, and the many books along the simple shelf, and "Ulysses" sitting there and me looking at it with wonder because my Dad had said that it was a book for adults and I wondered what that meant and I made a few attempts at deciphering it but was unable to penetrate its strong armor of complex words. William told me then that the secretary in front would go into that little apartment with my Dad, and that she was having an affair with him, and he told me that one day his other girlfriend found out and they had a big fight in front of the garage where William always sat and my Dad was in the middle of the two angry women and they were trying to claw their eyes out and pull each other’s hair out and my Dad was trying to stop them by pushing them away from each other and William was applauding and laughing and he laughed and applauded some more as he told it to me, his face red and his smile as bright as ever and I remember simply wishing I had been there to see it all. I remember seeing the secretary coming into the office in the sunny early mornings and staring at her ass in the tight brown pants that she wore, and wondering what she looked like underneath and imagining that she looked just like the women in the magazines or maybe better because she was real and brown and thick, and then thinking that my Dad was the luckiest man ever, just to get to see her naked and then to touch her and feel her tanned skin with his hands. William told me more dirty stories then and I would picture the secretary as the main character in all of them and her high heels would click and clack all the way up the sharp incline of Venus street and even William would stare at her full round ass as she walked into the office without ever turning to look at us. She thought we were beneath her, that we were not worthy of a second look, but we knew something about her, something that she could never hide.
* * *
"La Satelite" was watching TV in the night, waiting for my mom to come home, then hearing noise outside and turning towards the door to find a man in a mask pointing a long gun at me, just a few feet inside my room. When I saw him, I thought it was William or one of his cousins or maybe Ricardo or some other older kid pulling a joke on me, so I said "c’mon" and I laughed, but the guy kept on moving and I looked at the gun trying to figure out how real it looked and it looked pretty real but I still didn’t fully believe it so I said "yeah, right… take off the mask…" and he advanced and told me to get up. Right then I started to doubt my initial assumption and I moved towards the door of my room and I heard my mom’s voice from the bathroom saying that I should stay in my room and she said "the kind gentlemen are only going to take some things, they need them for the revolution and they will be gone in a moment" but her voice sounded like she wanted to cry or like she was already crying and that’s when I figured out that something really was wrong and I looked at the man in the mask again and then I realized that the gun was truly real and he was really threatening me with instant death. The barrel was long and brown and the man’s eyes were round and worried inside the cut up sock that he used as a mask and I heard the maid crying from the extra bedroom across the hallway and then I walked back into my room and sat on my bed and I got very worried and I remembered all the stories that I had heard of entire families getting killed in the countryside. I knew there was no way to tell if these men were guerrillas or soldiers out of uniform or death squads or just plain criminals and I knew that my mom was only making a brave guess by calling them "kind revolutionary gentlemen" and I could still hear her voice outside and she was definitely crying and I started to cry too, all alone in my room, and I was sitting on my bed and the TV was still on and the man looked around my room briefly and then he left and I waited for a while and then I peeped out the door to see my mother still outside and I walked back to the bed, unable to think of any solution. I had no phone, I had no way to call for help, and if I screamed out the window that could get us in worse trouble and nobody would hear me anyway, and finally it sounded like something was changing and they brought me out and I saw the other man who had on a long sleeved blue shirt and a handkerchief around his face and there was another one that I didn’t quite see because he was standing by the front door, and then the first man I had seen, with a white shirt and a red sock as a mask, he grabbed a bunch of my records, almost as an afterthought, and he ran out the door with the others and my mom came to hug me and we both cried for a bit and then we heard the car drive away into the night. We later learned that our young maid had jumped over the garden wall into Herman’s house next door, and I later found out that Herman wanted to do something to help us but his wife stopped him because she was afraid of what would happen, and he probably couldn’t do anything anyway but it was good to know that he wanted to, at least it was good for me. Finally, when the men left, Herman and the maid came into the house to see if we were ok and my mom called one of her friends to come and get us and we waited in the car outside for him to come because my mom couldn’t stand to be inside the house anymore and my mom told me that the man had said that they would come again, that he wanted a piece of her, and she was trembling so hard that it made my whole body shake as I hugged her and every time a car drove by, she would say "they’re coming again! They’re coming again!" and then a car came and parked right next to our car and she screamed really hard and said "It’s them! It’s them! They’re coming again!" but it was her friend that she had called, who had come to take us away. That night, we went to his apartment and I slept on a little bed by a window that overlooked a lonely dark street and I imagined that all the streets like this one were full of angry men with guns that stepped into people’s houses to threaten women and take records away. I saw a magazine on his night table that had a terrorist on the cover pointing a gun at the camera, and the terrorist had a sock on his head with holes just like the man that had walked into my room, and he was supposed to be a Palestinian terrorist, but he looked the same to me, and I pointed the photo out to my mom and she pushed it away and said she didn’t even want to see it, just like my grandmother used to do when I pointed out photos of snakes, it was something too disturbing to even contemplate for long, something that was better to lock away in the dark caves of the dream and the unknown, away from any glimmer of sunlight. Later we found out that the third man had tried to rape the young maid and in the process of touching her breasts, his mask had fallen off and, there in the back of the empty bedroom across from mine, with her light blue uniform half open, she looked up at him and she recognized him, and then she knew where he worked, and he knew that she knew, so that meant that they would definitely come back and my mom said that she could never live in that house again, that night had to be the end of "La Satelite" and that we had to move far away where these men would never find us. So we moved back to the dark garden for a while and then to the big house full of curves that my mom had built from scratch. That night, my mom left "La Satelite" forever.
* * *
"La Satelite" ended that night for my mother, but it was really only beginning for me, and my room full of books and magazines and posters and a TV and a stereo and a large comfortable bed, it all turned into an empty room with only a thin mattress and a little light and a couple of magazines. We had moved away but I refused to leave. I preferred the emptiness of our house in Satelite to my own big room in the curved house and my mom couldn’t fully understand and my grandmother couldn’t be told and my Dad only found out later, but what should have been the end was only the beginning and the mornings were still sweet and chilly and breezy and sunny and I could still walk out and find a friend or two or more even when my mom was no longer there, even when the house had become an empty shell and I only had a thin dirty mattress to sleep on. And so I lost my house but I gained the street in a clear exchange marked with a brown long gun and a mask made from a sock.
* * *
"La Satelite" was waking up one morning back on my thin little mattress, in the same room that used to be my room and still was in the sense that I slept there, but all my things were gone except for the thin white mattress on the floor and a little night light and a magazine and maybe a book, both of them on the floor, and Luis was knocking at my window and I went to open the front door for him. He wanted to look at where I stayed and he couldn’t believe it when he saw it and his eyes were big and round and he was smaller than me and his arms were thin and brown and his hands were still small and soft and it was the same hands that he used to steal my toys and my magazines before when my room was full of things, but everyone else stole from me as well, so I couldn’t really hold it against him. He went and told his father where I was staying and that night I was standing on the sidewalk and the stars were shining above all of us like tiny fireflies spread over a black dark canvass that hung over all our heads and I could barely see Don Ricardo looking down at me from the terrace of the gray house and his head was outlined by the light of the stars and the dark of the night sky and he seemed like a friendly angel whose eyes I couldn’t quite confront, and his voice was calm and soothing even when he laughed and he laughed a lot, always with a gentle touch of sadness, always with a hint of knowing a bit too much and just not enough, and that night, in the middle of bouts of laughter, he said to me, "Juan, you should stay here, we can make a bed for you here, you don’t need to go back to an empty house" and I said, "no, I couldn’t, I would be too much trouble, I’ll just go back to my house," and Don Ricardo insisted and he said "No, there is no house there for you to go to. There is no need for you to be there right now. You can be here, it’s no problem," but I still shook my head and said, "No, I wouldn’t want to be a problem, I can be over there…" and that night I went back and I still kept on going back for over a week, back to the thin little mattress and the empty room, and the clear knowledge that I was here for one thing and one thing alone, and the bursting bubble of wisdom that would sometimes show me glimpses of what that one thing was, and then the bubble would vanish back into the maelstrom where it came from. Eventually Don Ricardo convinced me that I should come back and stay at his home and I did and, as the years passed, it truly became my home and I would just walk in and out of the gray house in the corner and I would grab milk from the fridge and I would sit and drink it alone in the dining room if there was nobody to talk to but there usually was, and I would sleep in Ricardo’s room with him, both on the same bed, with our heads facing away from each other so I could smell his feet and he could smell mine, and he probably got the worst end of that bargain, but we mostly looked up at the ceiling and talked, and when one of us was starting to fall asleep we would talk some more and then we would be quiet and it seemed like it was time to really go to sleep but someone said something and then the other would respond and it was time to talk all over again so that it became later and later and neither of us really wanted to stop so we just kept on going and sometimes I stayed in the long room that Don Ricardo had built in the back, and there were three beds there and people could just sleep there, and the beds were simply open for whoever came and I was there a lot, but mostly I stayed with Ricardo and we talked and talked and talked and for a while nothing could separate us and the gray house that was Ricardo’s house was now my home and Ricardo, because he lived in my home, and because we slept on the same bed, and because we talked endlessly without any sign of boredom or fatigue, then he must be my brother and that thought eventually settled into my mind like a bird that slowly hovers in circles as it comes down to earth to finally land with a soft little thump, and the sound of that thump was "brother" and the word tasted strange in my mouth.
* * *
"La Satelite" was sitting with Ricardo and Rodney inside the long garage of Ricardo’s gray house, and watching two pretty girls walk by that we had never seen before. They had tanned soft skin and long black hair and one had a green shirt and the other one had a short dress and I said that I wished I could talk to them and Rodney said I wouldn’t do it and Ricardo said that I should do it and I looked at both of them with uncertainty, wondering if this could be some elaborate trick. When I saw that Rodney truly did not believe I would do it and I saw that Ricardo really did want me to do it, I stood up and went after them, with a clear certainty that I had never experienced before. I saw then that my fate was not in my friends’ hands, or in the hands of these pretty girls that just happened to be walking by. My fate rested on my own actions, and right now my actions took me, step by step, towards two pretty girls with long black hair. It took me a whole block to catch up to them without running, and I certainly didn’t want to run, but I did walk a bit faster than I usually would have, and when I finally reached them, I was slightly out of breath. I introduced myself and talked to them, bidding them welcome to our little corner in the great urban labyrinth, and they talked back to me and they even stopped and told me their names and one of them wanted to go away as quickly as possible but the other one smiled at me and she was still smiling when she walked away. I came back to tell Rodney and Ricardo and I don’t think Rodney fully believed me although he acted like he did, but Ricardo did believe me and he was happy in a simple way that it would take me a few years to fully comprehend.
* * *
"La Satelite" was Urko, whose real name I never really knew and who came to replace William in the last empty house on the street. Urko always dressed in light blue dirty shirts and old ripped jeans and a little white cap and we called him Urko in honor of the evil sergeant of the gorillas in "Planet of the Apes" because his face was a gruesome mask of wrinkles and scabs and he laughed in an evil way that reminded us of the gorillas who hunted the innocent chimpanzees in the TV series. Urko would talk to me in the garage like William had before him, although I never felt that he was truly my friend. He told me once that he would open up his house so that older kids could get together there and he said that the two twin sisters of Rodney would come in there with different kids and he would leave them alone in a room and they would come out all sweaty and red in the face and I told him I didn’t believe that they could be doing anything but he said that they surely were and that Luis once came out with his pants undone and that was all the proof he needed and I imagined Luis’ dark face, sweaty and blushing, walking out of the room with his belt undone, while one of Rodney’s sisters was still getting dressed inside and I couldn’t quite believe that the story was true but Urko told it with such insistent sincerity that it was hard to utterly deny it. Urko told me that once the cleaning woman across the street had come to see him with her man, who was very weak and subservient, and they talked in the little empty living room of the house that he guarded, and Urko could tell that the woman wanted him very badly, so later the woman, who was short and shaped like a pear, with long scraggly hair that fell irregularly over her forehead, she returned without her man and it was late at night and they went into the house and he closed the door and then he told her "We both know why you’re here…" and then she started to undo her clothes and take them all off and I could imagine her silhouette in the moonlight against the windows of the empty house and Urko laughed at me because he could tell that I was imagining it and he said "MON SON! MON SON!" and he gestured with his arm, moving it up from the elbow in a straight line to signify an erection and he laughed some more and he said that he did whatever he wanted with that woman that night and the woman was not really pretty, she was older and she was very thick around the waist, even thicker when her clothes were gone, but he still relished having penetrated her and I still got very excited at the thought of Urko taking her in that little empty dark room in the empty house I knew so well. One morning, Urko told me to come into the room because he was going to show me something and I went in without any suspicion in my mind but then he closed the door and he said "now it’s the time to get serious…we both know what I mean," and I remembered the woman and I said "no! leave me alone!" and he walked towards me slowly and I pushed him away and he laughed very hard and he walked towards me again and I pushed him away again and he could have easily overpowered me if he had wanted to but he just laughed, so I ran to the door and left and, as I ran up the street on the empty sidewalk, I could hear Urko still laughing from inside the empty house.
* * *
"La Satelite" was sitting outside on a little brick wall and looking around my shoulder to catch Carlos and Oscar running down the street and then disappearing around a corner, then looking again and seeing them climbing a wall together and then disappearing again, and then looking towards my house and seeing just their shadows on the edge of the roof and then watching them disappear once again, and then looking towards the empty lot and seeing them run towards the darkness of the "quebrada" and then disappearing again and again and feeling for a moment that they were not really little kids, the two little brothers of Ricardo and Luis, but rather some kind of tiny half invisible spirits, the elves of "La Satelite" who ran through its secret passageways creating havoc and playing tricks on unsuspecting people who would hear the echoes of their laughter through the bushes but never quite spot their tiny little hands.
* * *
"La Satelite" was walking with Ricardo over to Tio Juan’s house because one of Rene’s older brothers had hit Carlos and Ricardo would not stand for it and we were all standing behind him as Tio Juan and his brother and the older women and the teenagers and everyone that lived in that house came out to see what the street kids wanted and they all stood outside their door, inside their garage, and we all stood on the tilted surface of the garage that was made of shiny red square bricks, and Ricardo looked up at them and said that nobody should ever hit Carlos again and they all promised that it would never happen again and the parents seemed really apologetic and Tio Juan was very apologetic as well, and then, they went back inside and we walked back across the street and it was all over and I wondered if they meant it or not but, whether by accident or design, it never happened again, and Carlos never came to the gray house crying because a boy from the house across the street had hit him. He did cry over other things and that was alright, because it was good to cry every once in a while.
* * *
"La Satelite" was Ricardo asking me the meaning of history. The real meaning and significance of history was the subject that had been discussed in his school that day, in his school which was a paradoxical mixture of privilege and rebelliousness, of intellectual inquisitiveness and dogmatic belief. I listened to his request and I came up with one definition after another and, each time, Ricardo listened to my answer and said, "No, that’s not it." I sat on the side of his bed and stared at the black bat that he had mummified in science class and I made it fly through the air holding onto one of the rigid black wings and then I said another definition and he said "No, that’s not it." I looked at the little sayings that he had taped to the door of his room, little bits of wisdom from old books and from new ones, all photocopied and pasted onto the back of his door with scotch tape, and then I thought for a while longer and said another definition and he said "No, that’s not it." I went away and sat by myself in the terrace and looked at the sky for a long time and wondered at the true definition of history, letting images of armies on horseback and long sailing ships flow through my mind like a sequence of quick film edits that clashed with each other in a sincere attempt to make sense of the unknowable, and I came back with a sentence that I was sure would please him and he said "no, that’s not it." So I finally just said "Ok, tell me what is it… what is the definition of history?" and he stood in the middle of the room, with his arms outstretched, and he leaned his head back and he said "facts… it’s just facts" and I shook my head and felt that his definition lacked beauty or true understanding, and I felt cheated for those words didn’t capture what I saw all around me and didn’t even begin to touch what I had seen in my mind while I sat up on the terrace, but at least it was all over and I played with the bat some more while Ricardo combed his hair because maybe we would be going to a party that night. By the time Rodney knocked on the window, I had forgotten all about history or simple definitions that lacked melody or grace.
* * *
"La Satelite" was sitting with Rodney on the little wall of an empty house, halfway up Galaxia street, playing chess for hours while bouncing a capirucho up and down between my outstretched fingers and struggling to even the score when Rodney was winning and struggling to maintain the advantage when I was ahead. One day, Ricardo came in his shiny new roller-skates, rolling up the street in shorts and a white T-shirt, and he looked at us playing chess and he made some jokes and then he said that he could get a new girlfriend before we could finish a game, and we said "no! you can’t do that!" and he said "Yes, I can!" and we said "ok, you’re on!" and then, having been dared, he flew down the street in his yellow roller-skates and we played as we usually would and we wondered what Ricardo was doing somewhere out there, out of our sight, and soon enough, before our game had ended, he came back with news that he had talked to the quiet and shy girl down the street, one that we were only barely aware of because she never came out to hang out with us or with anyone else, and Ricardo talked to her through the metal gate of her house, the metal gate that protected her from the treacherous world outside, and he told her how much he liked her and she smiled and her eyes got wide and hopeful and she said that yes, in fact, yes, she wanted to be his girlfriend and Ricardo was very proud and happy and he had clearly won the bet and we admired him for his skill and magic and only briefly did I wonder what the shy sweet girl would think if Ricardo never came back to talk to her, if she knew that he had only talked to her in order to win a bet and I could only briefly picture her, lying in her room, face up on a pink bedspread, imagining that Ricardo loved her and that the world had changed forever but it really hadn’t, and then I would picture her looking out from her garage and wondering when he would be back, when he would come to caress her hand through the bars of the metal gate, and when he would press his face against the cold bars and she would press her face against his and they would kiss ever so lightly, and maybe one day she would see him rolling down the street in his roller-skates and he wouldn’t even turn around to look at her and maybe then she would know that he wasn’t coming back, that it had all been a strange game among boys, that he had already forgotten about her. But it was all too far away and it was all too impressive and perfect for me to wonder too much and I just kept on playing with Rodney and we both shook our heads at the skill that Ricardo had and we both wanted to have it someday, but for now we just kept on playing chess and the capirucho kept on bouncing up and down between my fingers.
* * *
"La Satelite" was Tio Juan and Rodney and William and Rene and me, all of us together, leaning against the white wall of Rene’s corner house on a bright sunny morning, talking about nothing and then talking some more and wondering what the day had in store for us. In the midst of that sunny morning, Ricardo came out from the gray house that was his, and he had no shirt on and he said he could feel no cold and we all told jokes and then told some stories and then the girl they called the Zombie, because she had dark bags under her eyes, came to talk to us and she was wearing loose exercise pants and a soft thin T-shirt and the outline of her small breasts was visible through the fabric and Ricardo and Tio Juan both tried to entice her into being alone with them, while the rest of us looked on, trying to figure out who would win in that subtle struggle, and Ricardo clearly won because he took her into his house and back into his room while we all stood outside wondering what he was doing and how far he would take it, knowing that the house was empty and he was all alone in there with her. Tio Juan was annoyed and he said some things that I didn’t think were true about Ricardo and about the Zombie and he said that "a boy like that doesn’t know what to do with a girl like that," and I certainly wondered what kind of boy Ricardo was and what kind of girl the Zombie was, but I couldn’t ask Tio Juan directly because the way he was talking seemed to imply that we should know it already, so I just nodded and kept on wondering what Ricardo and the Zombie were doing inside the house. And the time passed and Tio Juan was still annoyed because Ricardo and the Zombie were still inside and he kept on saying "what a waste! What a waste!" but eventually the door opened and the Zombie walked away, waving goodbye at us as she turned the corner, and we all turned to look at her ass cheeks bouncing up and down as she walked under the sunlight, and Ricardo came over towards us, full of pride and smiles, his chest as puffed up as the day I had first met him. We all asked him what had happened and he said that he managed to take her shirt off and he kissed her breasts and licked her nipples but then he tried to take her pants off and she didn’t want to and then he tried again and she still didn’t want to and he kissed her some more and then she put her shirt back on and Ricardo gave up and he came outside and we were in awe except for Tio Juan who was very annoyed and he said that she was a slut and he shook his head, implying that he would have done a lot more than Ricardo, and I wondered what made her a slut and how they all knew about this when this was the first time I had been aware that she even existed, and it was only later that I came to realize that Mercedes, another beautiful shy girl that Ricardo had seduced on another sunny day, was just across the street and she had seen it all, she had seen Ricardo courting the Zombie and she had seen them walk into his house and she had gone into her room to cry, and for years I brought that up to Ricardo and asked him how he felt about that and as much as I asked him I could never quite grasp the answer and I still admired his skill with language and magnetism but I still felt sorry for Mercedes and for the other shy girl down the street and even for the Zombie a little, although not so much for her because it seemed to me that she would forget Ricardo as easily as he would forget her.
* * *
"La Satelite" was the darkness of Laura’s house, which was also Manuel’s house and El Chino’s house, because they were both her brothers, and it was walking by at night when Laura had Mario inside her room and people talked to them through the half open windows and they said that Laura wouldn’t let him go and she was going to make him a man and they all laughed when they said it and they shook their hands back and forth in a rapid motion, which meant that something serious was about to happen, and it looked like Mario was trying to escape but he was not really making a strong effort, and then we walked away and when we came back an hour later, he came back to the window and he said that he still wanted to escape but he had made no move to leave and the trees were dancing in the wind outside and the light was bright inside and Laura’s father was somewhere inside the house and he was completely unaware that she had a boy in her room, a boy that said that he wanted to leave but really didn’t want to and all the kids laughed and laughed and we kept on walking up and down the street and I always wondered how Mario managed to get out of the house that night without getting killed by Laura’s father, and someone once told me that he spent the whole night in her room and somehow that didn’t seem so bad to me. Laura always seemed like the toughest girl of the whole group, she was just a little taller than Tania and her skin was just as white, her hair was dark and it came down to the side of her neck, but she seemed to always be frowning, always unhappy about something, so I could never really get to know her that well. I still found her desirable, but she was like an exotic jeweled knife, sharp and lethal, something to be admired from very far away. I really didn’t know Laura’s father at all, except for one time when he was playing chess, just inside the doorway of his house, and we came in one by one to play chess with him and he was really good at the game and he beat all of us and he was very dark and serious, small but wiry, and his eyes almost never left the board, and he made comments about our moves, trying to give us advice even as he beat us, and I looked at him a lot because it was the first time that I had seen him up close and this was the man that Laura and Manuel and El Chino feared more than God himself and I wondered how mean he could be, because he was very nice that day and, even though he beat all of us at chess, he did offer advice and let us play with him all over again, to show him what we had learned. I never saw him again after that night, he simply disappeared, because fathers in La Satelite tended to disappear for long periods of time, and Laura’s house had never had a mother, so it became a house without a mother and without a father, and there was only Laura left to be the voice of stern authority, and she could only do so much, specially when she had her own concerns like trying to get Mario back into her room and locking him in there with her, so for a while the house became everyone’s house, a comfortable indoor space that was like an extension of the street itself. One day I was there with Laura and Tania and Rodney and they played some romantic ballads in their little stereo and Laura danced with Rodney and I danced with Tania and she felt so good against my body as we danced to the slow, soft music and I kissed her cheek and she kissed me very close to the mouth and my heart beat so hard that it seemed like it was going to break my ribcage and Tania just kept on dancing with me and I was so grateful that Laura’s Dad was gone, and that the house was dark and cool so that Tania, dressed in her catholic school girl uniform, could press herself against me and kiss me again, and I could hold my hands around her waist and squeeze very lightly and her eyes would half close so softly, and she would let out little sighs of pleasure, and I could feel the warmth of her breath against my neck. Later that same morning, I was talking to Manuel by the door and Tania came and pressed herself against me from the back and she rested her head on my shoulder and that felt so good that, even though I kept on talking with Manuel, I had no idea what he was saying, because all I could think of was Tania, pressed against my back, and the softness of her cheek against my shoulder and the comfortable tenderness of her eyes and her hands and her hair, and her dancing, and her smiling, and her kissing, and her talking so softly and being so beautiful and being so perfect in the cool morning darkness of Laura’s house.
* * *
"La Satelite" was letting Tania borrow one of my little horror books in Spanish after I had told her that I enjoyed reading so much. Tania would come back to me later and tell me that she had read it and we would sit and talk about it and she had in fact actually read it, because she knew the characters and she remembered the story, and that made me like her so much more than I already did, and I already liked her a lot, because her smile was so open and warm and because her eyes were so wide and fresh like water coming down from the mountains, pure and untouched, and her skin was white and smooth and her thighs were full and strong and she would sit with me when she didn’t have to, because there were plenty of other boys that would have liked to sit with her, like all the boys from Bernal street that would run up after her and corner her in Mauricio Nasser’s garage and they would try to wrestle some object from her while she tried to hide it against her body and they really just wanted to swarm all over her and they would press up against her and she was only wearing a little dress and her legs were flapping all over and pushing them away but not too hard and she was laughing so hard and her face was so red and her eyes were pressed together tightly and she kept on pushing them away and laughing and they crowded even tighter around her and Rodney shook his head in disgust, looking at the whole scene from across the street, because he didn’t want all these boys to be touching his sister, "It’s a disgrace!", but I just thought it was all so lovely and she was such a vision of pure happiness that I didn’t ever want it to end, even if it wasn’t me that was touching her, so it was even that much more perfect when I had her all to myself, sitting right next to me, and she was happy to tell me her impressions on a little horror book that I had bought from the supermarket for one colon and we traded ideas on the things that could happen and the things that couldn’t happen in life, and we both would let our minds wander, but in a way that seemed smoother and softer than my long conversations with Ricardo. One morning, when Rodney and Manuel had broken my yellow bike in two when they took it somewhere where they were not supposed to take it and my mother wanted Rodney’s family to fix the bike but Rodney didn’t want to take any responsibility for it, then Tania made sure that it got fixed. She got a welder to come and weld it together and she was standing in her garage in dark blue shorts that pressed around her upper thighs and she kissed my cheek when I apologized for all the trouble I was causing her and she said that it was her that should apologize, for Rodney and for all the trouble that he had caused me and my mother and for his inability to face up to his responsibilities and when I drove away with my Mom, she asked me who that girl was in Rodney’s garage, and I said: "that’s Tania… Rodney’s older sister…" and my Mom said: "It seems like she likes you…" and I shook my head "no, she’s older and she wouldn’t need someone like me, she can have anyone she wants… she’s just very very nice…very nice." One day I was sitting in that same garage, many years later and both Tania and Laura were sitting there, both in little shorts, Tania in red shorts and Laura in blue, and their knees were bent up towards their chest and the underside of their thighs was all exposed, even to the edge of their crotches so that I could see the indentation of the flesh were the thigh met their outer labia and I could not help but stare and Laura looked at me with eyes of disdain and said: "what are you doing there? Are you just staring at our legs?" and Tania stopped her and said "Leave him alone, Laura… " and then she looked at me and smiled and bent her knees a bit more so that I could look as much as I wanted and she smiled even more brightly than ever and I just couldn’t believe that she could be so perfect and so kind and so loving and I had to just stare into her eyes then because they held all of her beauty in a tiny sphere of translucent light. One sunny morning, in front of Ricardo’s gray house, I came up to her, and she was talking to Lorena and Laura and she was facing towards the gate of the garage and I saw her and felt that she was so lovely and beautiful and I just couldn’t stand it any more, and I reached around her without warning, without saying anything, and I kissed her cheek, very softly and very tenderly and very close to her lips and she smiled so broadly and with such clear happiness and she made no move to push me away and, instead, she told Laura and Lorena: "he kissed me! Did you see that? He kissed me!" and I didn’t dare to do anything more right then because that had been so perfect that anything else would just break the spell and that was the last thing I could possibly want to do, because just to look at her was magic and anything else was just a bit beyond my grasp. So Tania would dance with me and I would dream of kissing her deep on the lips and holding her tight against me and feeling her naked body against mine but there were only a few kisses near the lips and many hugs and a thousand smiles, that would last me for years and years, long after her body had been eaten by worms and bugs and her soft skin had turned to dark soil and memory and her voice had bounced one too many times off the side of Rodney’s garage and had faded into a final silence.
* * *
"La Satelite" was hearing gunshots in the distance, repeating echoes of battles that seemed so far yet were as close as a book, a word or a phone call, it was trying to quickly gauge whether the soccer game should stop or if we should come back from the little corner store or if we should walk down from the terrace, just like putting your hand out to see if it was raining, trying to measure if it was just a drizzle of gunpowder or if it was going to increase into a full blood soaked metal storm, and it was Ricardo’s aunt, Tia Juanita, running outside and telling all the kids to "get inside! Get inside! Right now! Get inside!" and it didn’t matter which kids they were or if she knew them or not or if their house was just around the corner, everybody should get inside right then and there and everybody did, unless someone said "It was only one… let’s see if there’s another gunshot" then Tia Juanita would respond, "No! Right now! Get inside! We’ll listen from inside!" and we would all run in and quickly try to invent a new game that could be played indoors while we determined if the shot had been a random single occurrence or if more gunshots were coming and Tia Juanita would look out the window to make sure there were no more shots and would encourage us to stay inside anyway, specially if it was dark, even though a bullet could kill you just as much in the day as in the night.
* * *
"La Satelite" was an early afternoon on the corner of Gemini and Galaxia and Ricardo talking, surrounded by six or seven kids, me among them. He told us that day that he had a very pretty cousin and Rodney had met her so he immediately agreed that she was very pretty and Ricardo said that they had been on a van together, driving to their old town of Santa Helena, and they were sitting close together and she was wearing shorts and her thighs were smooth and brown and tight and Ricardo pressed his leg against her and she pressed her leg back and everybody hooted and laughed and I wondered if I would ever see this cousin in person, this cousin that both Rodney and Ricardo had agreed was so pretty. Months later, Ricardo told me that they were moving in, Tia Juanita and her daughter Lorena, and Lorena was the cousin that he had talked about not so long ago, and her face was marked on the side by a motorcycle accident but it was still beautiful and her hair was dark brown and cut just to the edge of her shoulders and she talked off the side of her mouth and she almost always wore tight shorts that were ripped on both sides so that the rip almost reached her waist and left her thighs naked far beyond any other shorts I had ever seen and she also wore very tight jeans that clung to her ass like dark wet paint and she walked with the air of someone that knew that she was wanted and desired, someone that also knew that she was in control. She talked to Ricardo as if they were part of a secret society of two and young men from other neighborhoods came to see her and they took her away for a while and then they would bring her back, and I heard her say that she only really liked older men, and that meant I had no chance with her, and I never really thought that I did, but I could still look at her and we would sit in her room watching a little black and white TV that was on the floor, and she was laying on her stomach in her little ripped shorts and Ricardo was sitting cross-legged next to her and I was sitting behind them both, and I would look at the TV every once in a while, just to make sure I could tell what we were actually watching, but I was mostly only looking at her thighs, at her soft brown flesh, at the crease of her shorts as it touched the edge of her buttocks, at the smoothness of the big fleshy bubble that was her brown ass and sometimes, when she would shift, I would get a glimpse of her light blue panties under the shorts and then I would look at the TV for a bit because I couldn’t believe that neither Ricardo nor her could figure out what I was really looking at. But if they did, they never said a word.
* * *
"La Satelite" was standing outside Edith’s house in late afternoons that turned into cold evenings. It was always Edith’s house for us and not Rafael’s house even though Rafael was her brother or Claudia’s house, even though Claudia was her sister, it was always Edith’s house because all the others seemed to orbit around her , including Zonia, the girl who lived across the street and was their best friend. They all circled around Edith who flew just slightly above them, maybe because she was beautiful and light like a feather and her cheeks were full and rosy and her smile was warm and inviting while clearly communicating that there was barrier that separated her from everything that lived around her, or from almost everything else. She would stand on the slope of her garage with her sister Claudia who was a bit younger, not as pretty, thin but without the curves that gave Edith her beauty, without her full upturned breasts, without the slight hint of young lust in the shape of her hips, Claudia was just thin and small and a bit sullen, and where Edith was like a queen who held her court at bay in the slope of her garage, Claudia was the minister of defense that made sure that everything was where it should be and that Rafael was back when he was supposed to be back and that nobody tried to do anything that their parents would disapprove of and Edith approved of Claudia’s role and supported most of her decisions, but if there ever was a disagreement, it was clear that Edith had the last word. We would stand in a circle outside Edith’s garage and it was Ricardo and Rodney and Neto and Miguel Angel, who I thought was Neto’s brother but was just a friend, and Neto was stocky and solid and he seemed older and tougher, even tougher than Rodney or Manuel, and he liked to tell very raunchy jokes full of double meanings to see if Edith or Claudia would understand the punch lines and sometimes they did and they laughed, and sometimes they didn’t, and in either case, he would laugh hard by pressing his eyes tightly together, so tightly that he would look like an old Asian man and, when he was laughing specially hard like that, he would push Ricardo or Rodney to emphasize how funny this was and they would push him back, laughing as well, and Edith and Claudia would giggle at the sight of all these boys pushing each other on the quiet street in front of their house. Miguel Angel was older and less funny, and he looked like Pedro Infante to me because he had a small black moustache and black combed back hair and eyes of knowledge that went far past his apparent status, and he once told me that he didn’t like nuns and I asked him why and he said that it was because they hid their legs and he laughed a lot when he said that but I never got the full import of the joke, or at least I thought I didn’t. We all liked Edith so much, because her face was like a little round flower and her smile was so friendly while betraying her taste for aristocracy and we all would have wanted to kiss her hard on the lips and maybe shake the perfect mask that she had created for the world, but Manuel said that he loved her out loud to the rest of us and so we all encouraged him to declare himself to her, to do what we all wanted to do ourselves, and to declare yourself meant to say: "I love you. Will you be my girlfriend?" and he debated long and hard when and how to do this and it was difficult because Edith was always standing outside her garage surrounded by her sister Claudia and by Zonia and by some or all of us, so it was nearly impossible to get her alone. Finally he said it all in a little handwritten letter that he handed to her and which he asked her to read when he was gone. The next day, she talked to him, and I never knew exactly what she had said but it was clear that she had said no and Rodney told me that Manuel was very sad and depressed and we were both quiet for a moment, feeling sorry for him, and then he said "you want to go to the store and get a soda?" and I said "yes" and on the way to the store we both forgot all about it and Manuel himself soon forgot all about it because soon he was part of the little circle again and there were more jokes and more stories and more opinions and Edith was still the unreachable queen and nobody else ever tried to touch her again.
* * *
"La Satelite" was learning the meaning of skydiving and becoming a practitioner of the form. In our world, skydiving had nothing to do with planes or skies or diving, it was completely removed from the hair rising jump I had once seen at the air force base outside San Salvador, which was where the soldiers learned to fall correctly when they were training to become true skydivers. In "La Satelite", skydiving involved getting a bunch of us in a car, as many as would fit and then some on top and we would all squeeze tightly together and laugh and scream because we were pressed so tightly and we would all be crushed against each other any time the car would make a turn or come to a sudden stop, and Tania was there in a soft short blue dress and Lorena was there in tight jeans and a frilly top and Laura was there in a black skirt and a yellow shirt and Rodney was there in soft brown pants and a nice silk shirt and Ricardo was there with his hair parted down the middle and a clean beige shirt, and maybe Manuel was there and maybe Neto was there as well and I was there with my glasses and the same sweaty clothes I had been wearing all day, because I didn’t have a house so I didn’t have any clothes to change into, and I probably wouldn’t have changed anyway, even if I had a closet full of clothes, and then, all squeezed together, we drove out into the city, without a clear destination, looking for the party that must be happening somewhere, we just had to find it, and when we saw a crowd of teenagers and some loud music, we knew that we had found what we wanted, and then we would park and simply walk into the party and act as if we were guests and sometimes people knew who we were and sometimes people didn’t, but it didn’t matter either way, and one time Rodney said "the Satelite gang has arrived!" as we walked into a noisy party and I felt happy and proud to be part of our group and I looked around at all of them and I knew that they were truly with me and that we were all skydivers together. Then we would spread out and I would look for a girl to dance with and I had to get over my fear of a girl saying "no" so I just went to the line of girls that were not dancing and said "would you like to dance?" to the first one that was there and some said no, but most said yes, and it didn’t really matter to me which one said yes as long as one said yes, and then I would dance and look at the pretty girl that was dancing with me, because all girls looked pretty in the dark light of a party in a house full of strangers, and all of a sudden, we would all hear a piece of glass breaking and a man in an English accent would scream "Surprise!" and it was the B-52s and everybody screamed and we all started jumping very hard up and down and we wouldn’t stop jumping for the whole record which was three extended B-52 songs all mixed together and right then there was nothing better, no music that was sweeter, no place that was more desirable than jumping up and down with a pretty girl, with Rodney on my right and Ricardo on my left and Neto behind me and Tania somewhere by the corner and Laura nowhere to be seen and Lorena somewhere by the entrance to the house and a beat that rattled the glass windows of the house and promised to never stop and me sweating in my wrinkled clothes and the sense of knowing that we had skydived well and here was the reward for our landing.
* * *
"La Satelite" was laying back on Rodney’s bedroom with my head against the backboard and looking at his copy of "The Possessed" which he said he had been trying to read for years, and I saw that his bookmark was only ten pages in and I knew then that he would never read it, and looking at a few pictures on the walls and posters of rock bands taken from the local TV Guide and listening to Rodney as he went over every little detail of a conversation with Veronica, one of Cristina’s friends whom we had recently met, of what she had had said, of how he had answered, of the tone of her voice, of the tone of his, and what it could all mean, and what it could lead to, and what further ramifications we could find maybe by looking in the spaces, the gaps of silence that opened up between sentences, between words, in the little corners where we could barely glimpse into the gaping mouth of chaos, the salivating strange monster that we desired and which manifested between Veronica’s legs but was also there, present, in the very words, in the breath, in the sound of our own voices, in the trembling echo of our desire as it traveled through the phone lines into dark crevices that lead to old forgotten places, and I felt my own heart beating, for Malena who was the one for me as Veronica was the one for Rodney in those days, and Rodney wrote his little poems and read them to me over and over, about the dying boy who the three women lamented for ages, the mother, the sister and the lover, about the hairs that remained after the boy’s untimely death, the hairs sticking out of the asphalt as a living testament to unfulfilled love, and somewhere under the asphalt was the same darkness and maybe then Rodney had found it, he had touched it, he had become one with it, maybe down there, after his death which had only really happened in a poem. In the meantime, in the space of waiting for death to come, there were more poems to write, more attempts at finding the answer that we wanted, the answer that we needed, the one where she (and the "she" was Veronica as it was Malena as it was Cristina as it was Tania as it was Edith as it was the ones I had yet to meet and the ones I had already forgotten) would finally say yes and open her lips, open that one gateway to her mystery and let us enter, let us finally step inside and caress the inner walls of her darkest secret hallways, into the heart of the silence, the moist places where only daring adventurers would dare to go, the dark dangerous dungeons beneath the earth where dragons awaited, and we knew that when the time came, we would step through that gateway together, as he helped me find the way I would help him find the way and as we traveled together, like Avelar and me had once traveled, we would hold each other by the hand and make sure we did not fall into the flaming lava, or the endless pit, or the silent rooms where tears go on forever, and we held onto each other for as long as we could, and when it ended, our hands kept on reaching and they reached for so long that we forgot that they were still there, and that’s when we finally let go. It was here in Rodney’s room that our beings were bound together, by the window that faced out into the little garage and the black metal gate, next to the room where Tania would always be naked and waiting but the door would always be closed, the same room where I found that Rodney had stolen my Playboy magazines, when he went to the bathroom and I found them here and they were magazines that I had lost long ago and I realized that he had been stealing magazines from my room all along and so I simply took them, without saying anything, without recriminations or questions, I took them and left them in my room so he would find them and so that he would know that I knew and that there was nothing left to say, for after all, the magazines were only vague guideposts, like the poems, like the lost bits of conversation, like the lyrics from a hundred heavy metal songs, and we were both lost and searching and if once he had found the way I would follow and if I found my own way, then he would follow me, and bonding with him in that room was as sweet as anything I ever tasted and sitting with him, listening to music, pointing out the details of the day’s events, there was no pushing forward, we could hold on to that deep desire forever, for there was no satisfaction greater than knowing that I understood him and he understood me, and his bent skinny fingers were still twisted and pointing towards a goal that was still shining in the distance and would never fade away.
* * *
"La Satelite" was playing soccer on Gemini street, with two little bricks to signal the goal posts, and stopping every once in a while to let a car get through. William was sometimes the referee and he even had a little whistle to help him perform his official duties and one time Mauricio Nasser got very mad at Luis El Negro and Luis got very mad at him and their faces got all red and sweaty and they screamed at each other with hatred in their eyes and Luis threatened to beat him up and Mauricio pushed towards him and dared him to do it so Luis pushed him and knocked him over, so that his head landed on the sidewalk and there was a big crack that sounded like a small explosion that I could hear halfway down the street and Mauricio whimpered like a little boy and then Luis started hitting the side of his face with his big dark fist and I could hear the individual cracks as they landed on the side of his face and William was laughing and all the other kids were just standing around and looking but then Mauricio’s brother grabbed Luis by the back of the neck and pulled him away and Luis shouted that he had a knife and that’s when William decided it was time to intervene and he pushed both boys away and Mauricio was crying and his face was still red and Luis threatened him and he threatened Luis back and soon we were back to playing and it was just a matter of time before someone else would get mad and the dance would start all over again. I had come to understand that part of playing soccer was getting angry, and I never really did get mad at soccer games and maybe that’s why I never played that well. Sometimes our little group would play against the evil rich kids that lived two blocks away in Bernal street, and Edith and Claudia and Zonia were our cheerleaders and Tania and Pati and Laura were cheering for the other side which made them look like traitors and it was very important to win against these kids because they would drive through our street with their little motorcycle and it was loud and noisy and it sounded like a long mechanical fart that never ended, just like Luis’ motorcycle had sounded before, but now it was not acceptable, and because they chased after Tania and Laura and Pati and they should stay away from them because they were ours, and because they were simply evil and they were the Other. I saw it that way even though I was good friends with Leonel, who lived right on Bernal, and also liked to drive a little motorcycle and I liked Cesar, the bigger kid in the corner whose skin was as dark as Luis’ and who was the first one to tell me that Zonia was throwing her panties at me and I didn’t even know exactly what that meant when he said it but I could tell that it was something good so I was grateful to him for saying it, and I didn’t really know the other Ricardo down there, but I thought he seemed very nice, and his eyes were calm and loyal and kind and he didn’t seem evil at all, but for this afternoon, here in the battlefield that was Gemini street, all of them faded into a dark mass and that mass was the Bernal and the Bernal was our rival which we must defeat at all costs. I played defense because my abilities in soccer were sorely lacking and Ricardo played somewhere in the middle but Rodney and Manuel and Luis El Negro, they were all very good so they would always play forwards and I would only see them when they ran back towards me, scrambling to get back the ball they had lost in the other end of the street which was our field, and lacking any trust that I would be able to stop it if it came my way. El Chino also played forward even though he was tiny and always in great risk of being stomped and badly hurt, but he was very fast and agile and tricky and he managed to get around men that were twice his size and even bigger, and we all played hard and fiercely, or as fiercely as we could, and every time we scored a goal Edith and Claudia and Zonia, all in shorts and standing up on a little grass landing, would cheer and clap and jump up and down with happiness, and every time the Bernal kids scored a goal against us, Tania and Pati and Laura would cheer and clap and jump up and down as well, and in the end, maybe we won or maybe we lost and Tania was back to being my friend and Leonel was back to being nice and William went back to his post in the corner of the abandoned garage and we took away the little bricks and the street returned to being a street and there was a kind of silence that may have predicted the great silence that would come much later, when William was gone and everyone else was gone with him, and there were no more soccer games on Gemini street.
* * *
"La Satelite" was Zonia who originally was Edith’s best friend and then became just Zonia, and where I had seen friends standing forever outside the slanted ramp of Edith’s garage, there came a cold wind that blew across the street, erasing the traces of all the afternoons spent together talking, gossiping and joking, and Zonia became a "whore" for them and they became "bitches" for her and for a while we had to choose to go see Zonia or to go see Edith and Claudia and the choice was very difficult because they lived right in front of each other and it was impossible to hide that you were visiting one army from the open eyes of the other army and so you simply had to choose and hope that the war would end soon. But while the cold war continued, I repeatedly chose Zonia and so we would spend long afternoons in her garage, afternoons that turned into evenings and her long hair became darker with the coming of the chilly night and the light of her garage made her white school shirt almost transparent and her breasts were so small they were almost invisible but it was still a thrill to catch a glimpse of them when she forgot to button up her shirt and she would smile and squeeze her eyes and stick out the tip of her tongue through her smiling lips, and she would walk so that her ass cheeks flipped back and forth, up and down, in a private dance that all the boys liked to watch and I would always greet her by kissing her cheek and she would smile happily when she saw me, knowing I was there to be with her and that the rest of the world disappeared when I was with her and the tip of her tongue would slide through her teeth and flicker through her lips and I would smile back at her and we would talk for hours about anything that would come to our minds, without rush, without a clear destination. But I wanted to kiss her so much and I couldn’t do it because she was my friend and I could only kiss her cheek as she offered it to me, to say hello and to say goodbye, and then one day I decided it was time to do something about it and I stood in her garage, right as we were about to say goodnight and I said: "Zonia, I have always liked you, ever since I met you, and now I like you more than ever, and I would like you to be my girlfriend… will you be my girlfriend?" and she danced around the garage floor in a fit of nervousness and she frowned and I frowned when I saw her frown and she said that she couldn’t do it, that it would ruin our friendship and I didn’t understand what that meant because right then I loved her so much that nothing could possibly be ruined by this love, but it was time to say goodnight so I let the question go and she went inside and I was sad but not too sad and the years passed between us. I went to San Francisco for a year and I came back and we were all a bit older by then, and one night Rodney and Zonia and me were all alone on the street in front of her house and I talked to Zonia about the stars and about the light that traveled for thousands and even millions of years to get here, to be here with us right this very moment, and she listened intently, trying to understand what I was saying, and Rodney somehow did understand and what he understood was that I loved Zonia and that I wanted to say it to her right then and so he left with some abrupt excuse and left just the two of us alone and that was one of the many times that Rodney proved his true friendship to me, in ways that were too subtle to fully grasp, and I looked towards Zonia and I came close to her as I talked to her of stars and black holes and light years of distance through endless black gaps of empty space and I pushed myself closer to her and my heart was beating intensely and she was so close that I could feel her breath on my face, and I told her, once again, that I loved her, and that I had liked her ever since I had known her and that I wanted her to be my girlfriend and she inhaled deeply and her eyes lit up in the darkness outside her garage, and once again she frowned and she looked down and she said that she was afraid that it would ruin our friendship and that she liked to be my friend so much that she didn’t want to risk it at all, and I looked down at the sidewalk and I was a little sad but I said it was ok and then it was time to say goodnight once again and I kissed her on the cheek and she smiled and the tip of her tongue reappeared between her teeth and that told me she wasn’t angry at all and that made me less sad and the years passed us by once again. I liked other girls and Zonia liked other boys but we still spent many afternoons talking to each other, when everyone else was busy doing other things. One night, there was a big carnival in the main street of "La Satelite", and it was called the "Carnival of the Stars" and I didn’t know how it was called that and I never found out and maybe somehow it reminded me of the night when I told Zonia about the light from the distant stars even though that night was long gone, years in the past during a time when a year was a decade and a day was a lifetime and in those days I loved another girl but she had said no to me as well, she didn’t want to be my girlfriend anymore and I had to pull away and so I went to the "Carnival of the Stars" without a girl at my side. We all went, Rodney, Ricardo, Neto, Luis, Lorena, Edith, Tania, Zonia… everyone was there, in a night when we didn’t need to skydive because "La Satelite" itself had become a huge landing strip, and they all scattered throughout the crowd that danced on the street to loud cumbias and New Wave rock and salsa and even rancheras, and that night it didn’t matter what they played because everyone wanted to just dance and be happy and I danced furiously as well, but at one point I ended up resting against a parked car on the edge of the crowd, half a block away from the giant black speakers, and Zonia was there with me and I felt so relaxed with her and we were both a little sweaty from dancing and we were talking and laughing and I didn’t feel nervous at all and without a thought or hesitation, without following through on the implications of my action or wondering at the possible consequences, I just moved closer to her and said: "Hey Zonia, what about now? Do you want to be my girlfriend now?" and she looked at me and the little tip of her tongue flickered through her lips and she nodded and said "Yes, I want to be your girlfriend" and I couldn’t quite believe what she had just said and I felt like the whole street was flipping back and forth like some strange giant carnival ride that made the whole Satelite itself tremble and there was music all around us but I felt like there was a great sphere of silence that surrounded us with a kind of transparent light, light from a star that had died thousands of years ago and now came to live again here, bubbling with heat between us, and I moved closer to her and I wasn’t sure what to do and she was smiling and blushing and I was probably blushing too and she let the tip of her tongue flicker over her lips once again and I moved closer and I said "so that means that we can…" and she nodded and grabbed my hand and lead me further away from the crowds to an empty side street and there was a black metal veranda there and she pulled me close to her and I pushed myself towards her and we rested our weight on the black metal bars, and I pushed myself against her, still unsure if I should, if I could, if I would, and then her tongue pushed out from between her lips and she reached out towards me and pulled my lips towards hers and the same tip of her tongue that I had seen so many times flickering through her smiling lips was suddenly right up against my lips and then it flickered over my tongue and I let my own tongue move against hers and her body was warm and sweaty and I cradled her in my arms and pulled her close to me and her tongue kept on moving in my mouth and we were both trembling together in our private silence, warmed by distant light, while the sound of the music resonated around the corner and her lips were so soft and smooth that I couldn’t believe that this was happening and soon we would have to separate and soon we would be two people again and, sooner than I would have wanted, she would be Zonia again and I would be Juan, but for a moment, leaning against the metal bars, the little tip of her tongue that signified happiness and laughter was inside my mouth and it became my own tongue and there was really only one flickering tongue moving between us and in an instant, our smile was a single smile, and our bodies were our only real source of warmth, and we were no longer two separate people but a single being that was pulsing and breathing intensely, content to find itself complete once again.
* * *
"La Satelite" was a move from the cold heights to the warm new borders of the urban labyrinth, to the places where the city pushed forward and turned into long rows of little white houses and little green lawns and little games of soccer, to the places which I had avoided and which I here learned to embrace, it was soda in a plastic bag, it was the darkness and mystery of the "quebrada" where Rodney could roll down into the abyss and not die, where a world of strange discovery could lie just behind our backyards and a path of mud could lead us to unexplored lands, it was Neto falling forward into a tree and grabbing onto it with arms and legs, and then turning around, knowing that I had pushed him and then smiling at me with just a hint of evil in his eyes and saying "So now we play then, Juan?", it was the edge of the sidewalk where we could always find a refuge, a quiet place for deep philosophical discussions or sexual speculations, a place where Tania could convince me that it was good to love others even if we did end up hurt, a place where Rodney could envision another epic love poem and once again pronounce the words that could never grow old: "I have loved many but nobody like this one", a place where Ricardo could once again mount his daring defense of the tribe of ants which I had decided to kill for no particular reason, it was dancing in Edith’s house for New Years Eve while Rafael and Luis reached behind me to pull on my legs and try to make me fall and I tried to avoid their attack while also focusing on Edith’s slim body swirling with the beat, it was Zonia laughing while Ricardo pointed out that Rodney was, one by one, undoing all the buttons on her shirt as we talked, it was Cristina staring away with anger when William would point out that she was becoming a woman and I would look at her and wonder what that truly meant, it was walking back from the new gray house of curves and emptiness, the brand new mansion that my mom had designed to be our true home, and leaving it after school, making my way through unknown neighborhoods and patches of dirt, so I could be at Manuel’s birthday party or to play defense at a new soccer game, it was sleeping on a thin mattress in an empty house just to have the pleasure of waking up to the sound of the wind outside and stepping out onto a morning drenched in sun and possibility, it was teaching Carlos how Dungeons and Dragons worked and smiling when he made his own manuals out of notebooks and formed his own little role playing crew out of the little kids that were too young to be part of our own games, it was a quiet moment on the terrace of Ricardo’s house, when Pirata had stopped barking, and there were no cars, and the sky was bright and blue and the volcano loomed behind me, it was as simple as the touch of a hand and as complex as the quick dance of a pink tongue across moist lips, it was green explosions on a silver surface that had never been touched before, it was the gift of noise and chaos breaking through the cold walls of my private fortress of solitude, it was a fearless jump into space and a soft landing on pliable flesh and eager laughter, it was at last the street as I had never known it and as I would never touch again, it was the street of dreams and of stories that coalesced into frozen chambers as the years passed by, it was fire in its fierce desire and it was ice in its soothing calm, it was the clear answer to a murky question posed in a night of bats and music, it was the soft spoken poetry and it was the heavy metal scream, it was life in the shape of three little streets, a few brand new white houses, and a few backyards, and there was enough there to last forever.
Everyone together for my twelfth birthday.
The three boys around me are
friends from the American School:
Mauricio, Avelar and Miguel Palacios.
The little boy in front of me
showing off his muscles
is little Fabrizio
who later that day would cry and cry,
when Rene broke the illusion of appearances.
The front line, from the left, is:
Juan Carlos, Douglas, Rodian, Luis and Jose
The line in the back, from the left, is:
Luis el Negro, little Mariza, Manuel, Rodney,
Ricardo, Rene, Sigis, Rafael and El Chino.
Carbonera,
who fought her mother
and fucked her father.
From her I learned
that rules and morals
are only for talking monkeys.
William
who knew very little
but was generous enough
to teach me everything he knew.
Rodian
who saw me building a world
and asked me if he could help,
never asking what it was for,
or what we would do with it,
knowing without knowing,
that these questions would always
go unanswered.
Herman's house next to mine,
which then became the home of "Las Bichas"
and even later became the "pupuseria",
where Cristina and her mother made pupusas for us
while Silvia screamed fresh new jokes and insults
through the open windows of her bedroom.
Herman's daughters as I knew them
when I was "El Grillo"
and they were "Las Bichas".
From the left, they are:
Ada, Silvia, Mabel, and Cristina,
who is lovingly holding her up.
It was that loving tenderness,
that I never was able to fully invoke,
even though it was eager to come out.
William, Ricardo and Luis,
in front of the igloo.
Ricardo is showing off his newly formed muscles,
William is about to explode
into a fresh new shower
of high pitched laughter.
Silvia,
who first called me "Grillo"
and then let me kiss her,
over and over,
while we laughed and hugged
and then kissed some more.
The delicious taste of her lips would linger
long after our contact had vanished.
William, Urko, Walter and Pirata.
William and Walter were shirtless as usual,
and Pirata clearly could smell something unusual
coming from Walter's crotch.
Urko was always ready to pervert
our young innocent minds,
always ready to take us out
just a little further.
The igloo that my father built,
and that people said would come crashing down
at the slightest shake of the earth.
It survived through two earthquakes,
but couldn't survive simple greed.
Carlos, Rene and Oscar.
Carlos and Oscar were the fleeting creatures of myth
that travelled along invisible pathways
in our private little corner of the world.
Rene was much older and stronger than he looked,
and he completely lacked the hesitancy
that others call fear.
Ricardo and me
back when contact had no purpose
and the street itself
was our unpredictable
invocational chamber.
Rodney and me,
playing chess outside Zonia's house.
I have a capirucho in my hand,
and the time passes slowly and easily,
and the afternoon slides slowly into the night.
Edith standing outside her house,
with a face of beauty and sweetness,
tempered by a precise aristocratic restraint.
The gate outside Edith's house,
which was once always open,
and is now permanently closed.
The group outside Edith's house.
Rafael, Rodney, me and Mauricio on the top,
two little kids, Edith, Claudia and Zonia
sitting below us
on one of our many little brick walls.
Don Ricardo and Dona Gilma,
Ricardo's parents,
who have always achieved the perfect balance
between kind and gentle concern,
and generous aloofness.
In them I found my second set of parents,
the set that never broke apart.
The gray house
at the corner of Gemini and Galaxia.
This is where we discovered the Universe
in bags full of soda,
in little jokes and stories,
in endless conversations,
in little dares and long journeys,
that reached far beyond its walls.
Ricardo,
in whose mind I finally found an equal,
and whose social finesse I sorely envied and admired.
We became brothers
in more than one sense,
and we travelled through strange dark paths together
and in some we still find each other
from time to time,
even to this day.
Tania,
who vanished much too quickly,
and now lives in an infinite path of rainbows,
flying freely
through the intricate maze
we have come to call the Dream.
Lorena,
who always held herself with quiet confidence
and a certain disdain
for the ones who stood beneath her.
I could only be quietly grateful
for the simple gift of her beauty,
for her ripped shorts and tight jeans,
and a kiss on the cheek every now and then.
Rodney,
who travelled with me
through the endless gaps of silence
into the moist mysteries of the deep unknown
and who never faltered in his simple allegiance,
and unquestioning friendship.
Our contact endured the years of deep freeze
and the ferocious challenge of novelty,
and only broke
until our travels took us to strange places
that were simply too far apart.
Zonia and me,
in a photo booth in San Francisco,
many years after our endless kiss
at the Carnival of the Stars.
Her little tongue still flickered through her lips,
and her body still danced with nervous energy,
as we evoked within us
the love of a time long past.
Galaxia street,
through the haze of distorted memories.
If you look hard enough,
you can still see me and Rodney sitting
on our little brick wall,
playing chess and capirucho
and waiting for Ricardo to come by
and dare us to challenge him again.
The little street was old now, so much older than it was when it used to be a daily occurrence and it was old even then, lined with twisted cracks and thick brown leaves and plastic bottles and crushed cans. There were large trees that lined the sides, covering half the stretch of asphalt in cool shade, and there were little lanes of grass, and bushes that overflowed with purple and green over old black and white verandas, and all the houses had the touch of old family history, even if the families were long gone, some of the marks of their previous memories remained, the steps of their old ghosts still paced slowly up the deserted paths. Some of the houses were not houses anymore at all, from mansions they had been turned into offices and schools and stores and so their opulence was fading fast and it was being replaced by glass counters, dark blue uniforms and false smiles. There were more cars passing through the little street now, even though they now only moved in one direction, and it all seemed more crowded, not as bright and fresh as it once had been. The street connected the main street that led to my grandmother Antonia’s house to the big plaza where the patron saint of El Salvador still stood among the smog and the broken fences and the overgrown grass, the big plaza surrounded by little strip malls that seemed like fading flames of vanishing hope amidst the deep dark clouds of black smoke that were expelled every few minutes from another bus passing by, another bus so heavy with old thick women and young men in T-shirts and little boys in dirty pants that they all overflowed from its narrow confines, out the doors, out the windows, out the roof, and a skinny boy was always hanging from the edge of the bus using only one hand to keep himself from falling, and he would call out "Besa! Besa! Besa! Plaza Arce! Plaza Merliot!" and he called for more passengers to come to him and they answered his call and they surrounded the bus like a cloud of thick dark ants and he pushed them inside while screaming at the ones already in there to "Make room! Make room! Let the new ones in!" and there was no room already, but somehow the new crowd managed to squeeze in and more limbs overflowed out the windows and the young men pressed tightly into the women and the women held on to their purses, pressing them against their full chests, and the little boys almost drowned in between thick buttocks and plastic bags, and the bus then pushed forward, vomiting more black smoke into the afternoon air, trembling under the weight of so much tired flesh.
Together, close and tight,
My Uncle,
All the buses in El Salvador
She reached out,
