In An Empty Maze

My uncle opened the black metal gate, the same gate that I had passed through so many times over the years, and I felt the familiar anticipation within me, the subtle vibration of my heart that told me that I would see my grandmother Antonia soon, that she would be in front of the wooden doors that lead into the house proper and she would be smiling sweetly and her arms would open up as I approached her and she would say: "hola hijo!" with a big smile and I would kiss her cheek and then we would walk together into her living room and there, sitting on the dark green couches, her in her corner with her fan in her hands and me laying back on a slender old pillow on the other couch, we would talk about my trip, about the situation in El Salvador, about my cousins, about my mother, about my Uncle, about my friends and about anything else that came to us, anything would do as long as we kept talking, and as we talked, she would continue to fan herself with quick movements of her wrists and her eyes would twinkle with delight when I said something that surprised her, and her head would shake when she heard something she disapproved of, and we would talk like this until it was time for her to go upstairs and rest and then I would read for a bit and then leave, to come back later and talk some more. And that’s how it had always been, with very minor variations, and that is what my heart and my body expected as my Uncle and me walked through the black metal gates, but none of this was going to happen at all, because my grandmother was no longer there, and there would be nobody in front of the wooden doors, or, worse yet, there would be a stranger, and there would be no hug and no kiss and there would be no "hola hijo!" and no conversation and no fan that whistled back and forth in front of her old wrinkled face and there would be no laughter and no head shaking and no time to rest, she had all time to rest that she could possibly need now. There would simply be nothing at all and I took a deep breath as we walked up the stone steps, preparing myself to face the emptiness.

* * *

As a creature of flesh she was gone, and her house was quickly vanishing with her. My Uncle led me inside and I followed, greeting the new guard who didn’t know me and the old maid who recognized me immediately (and maybe by seeing me she glimpsed for a moment the past that was quickly crumbling around her) and then we started to make our way into the old maze that extended backwards through time and forward into mystery and the walls seemed smaller and dirtier than I remembered, and the air was dead and empty and my Uncle walked as if we were stepping into a funeral for that is indeed what this was, not a funeral for my grandmother but for the world that she created around herself, a world that had faded so fast that I had to squint hard just to spot the shadows. As we walked and he talked, I had to phase out my Uncle’s voice, and the repetitive meaning behind his words, always oscillating between money troubles and health troubles and the recurring combination of both, and touching on the money troubles that he associated with this house, this house which housed a maze which he couldn’t see. I concentrated on the giant corpse that was before me, and I let his voice then become another undead remain of a thousand complaints in the living room, of a thousand screams to call the guard or the maid to come and help him, of a thousand proud steps on red cement as he made his way into the house that was at least partly his, even if the papers didn’t say it. And if I could see him then as a part of the vibrant cadaver, then he was as helpful as the buzzing of the mosquitoes or the moss on the deep gray stones, or the hanging plants from the upper floors or the black mark of the wheels of my grandmother’s car on the old cement, or the cuckoo clock that had stopped working even when I was little but which always seemed to hold the promise of some day returning and announcing that a new day had begun.

* * *

The house was indeed a vast, complicated maze, a maze that extended much further than its apparent physical territory. It was full of small dark corners seething with questions and intrigue and wide open spaces that lulled me into a false sense of calm. Each chamber had multiple meanings and it was clear to me that as you moved through the doorways and passageways, you didn’t always walk out into the same room that you had just left, and echoes from one time mixed with echoes from another until I couldn’t quite tell them apart from the droning voice of my Uncle who was still explaining the new things he had done to the house, and the things he was about to do, and indeed his voice had been there all along, and it had just grown weaker and older and less full of pride but it had always been a melodic contrast to the sweet soft voice of my grandmother, who was always there to listen to him and give him advice, and all through the years that I heard them talking what he said was always the same and her advice never wavered: "Be calm. Be patient. Be in control. Things will get better." And now I would always wonder if they ever did, and if my grandmother truly believed that things would get better, and it was too late to ask her, thoroughly and finally, what things these were and how they would get better, as it was clear that the things that my Uncle could see were not better but worse and the things that he could not see were simply erased by their lack of a label and so he would just have to continue to drone and complain and maybe imagine that my grandmother was sitting with him once again and saying the same things to him that she had always said: "Be calm. Be patient. Be in control. Things will get better." And maybe he would wonder as much as I did if his mother really meant it, or if she had always meant something that he would never be able to understand or if she had simply been wrong (or even worse, lying.) And one thing that was clearly not better was that she was gone and now all that my Uncle truly had was a big empty house that was shrinking rapidly from an infinite maze to an enclosed mausoleum, populated by strangers and familiar ghosts.
As we walked into the house, the images assaulted me like a sudden wild storm of memories and implications, words upon words, faces upon faces, spaces upon spaces, and each place could hold me for days but I could only stay for minutes, so the storms became hurricanes and I had to keep moving, faster and faster, because the maze was disappearing before my eyes.

* * *

We walked up the long steep brick ramp that was the driveway, with its long stretches of slightly overgrown grass, flanked on one side by a tall dirty white wall covered in vines and purple and yellow flowers, flanked on the other side by a small stone ledge that looked over a hidden emptiness of wood and moss. At the top of the ramp I could see myself turning and walking down the trail of dusty bricks, in long lazy steps, going to La Satelite, going to see Ricardo at Fanci’s Center of Psychic Studies, going to the movies with Rodney, going to the all boy’s school Garcia Flamenco, just a block away, going, going, going, for in that year that I lived here I would always be going somewhere, and the large metal door would clang harshly each time I left and it would clang harshly again when I came, and then I would be ready to retire to my little room behind the kitchen, safe within the little cocoon of four walls and a bookshelf full of books and magazines and stacks of tapes and four posters of KISS and a little narrow bed and a black and white TV, and there I was safe from all intrusion, safe from the chaos of the outside, until it was time to go out again.
Now, looking at the ramp, I could see my cousins walking up when they decided not to roll the car up to the edge of the covered garage. I could see Roberto, my oldest cousin who was tall and strong and innocent, at least more so than the others, greeting the guard with a smile and a handshake, I could see Roxana ignoring the guard or the maid and letting them clearly know that she was above them and that they didn’t even deserve a look or a smile or any small acknowledgement unless she needed something and then they would know it, and I couldn’t see Juan Antonio, who hardly ever came in those days, for his days here with me were in a past so remote that he probably didn’t remember. I could see my Uncle’s old car, back when it was shiny and new and impressive, rolling quickly up the ramp and parking sideways on the concrete landing at the top, in a single curve of heavy metal motion. It was a movement I knew so well that I could recognize it when I was inside my room or when I was in the living room, a silvery metal slide, the metal clang of the large garage doors and the opening and closing of his car door, followed by his quick steps on shiny red bricks and the sound of his key chain jiggling as he walked. I didn’t like it when he came, not back then, and I didn’t like to have him here with me now. But the house came with him and he came with the house. He was truly a denizen of this maze, as much as I was if not more, and he was now fading away as quickly as the maze itself and maybe he would travel with it to wherever it was going. If I turned away for too long, and simply focused on one of the purple flowers or the long stone ledge, he might not be there at all when I turned back around, or he might just be a vine or a shadow or a voice in the hotel next door that complains loudly about the bad day it’s having, or wishes that things were some other way. Because things could always be some other way and my Uncle was living proof of it.

* * *

Over the stone ledge, there was darkness, a pile of rotting wood from some old construction project, some sand, some rocks, some pebbles, some dust and other remains of trash and things that had been forgotten, and all of it was covered in moss and mud and shadows. Here was the place of death, here is where my little plastic heroes came to die when their role in the story had ended, and maybe they tumbled head over feet over head, into the open dark green mouth that waited to swallow them, or maybe they slid down the slippery slope of moist black rock. This was a place to look down into and meditate on the finality of things and the coming changes that were frightening in their unpredictability, to meditate on the darkness that still lay ahead and on the green moss that grew on its sides of humid stone, which told me that even here, at the edge of reason, there was the presence of the Other. Here was the dark cavern where hopes ended and nothing ever returned. Now, I looked down into it and it seemed smaller than it had before, but it still seemed just as final and just as remote and maybe my grandmother lived somewhere down there now, along with the rotten wood and the moss covered stones, and maybe somewhere down there she waited for my ghost to arrive so she could once again say to me: "Hola hijo!" and hug me and kiss me on the cheek. This was not my own final destination, not the one I chose for myself, so, as much as I wanted to see her, if she was down there waiting, she would have to wait forever.

* * *

The garage was an open space covered in a white and gray roof, a short perpendicular turn from the ramp and the landing at the top. Here I could still see my grandmother’s old white car, the one car that I knew and which my mother would always know as the new car, because there was a ghost of another car that hid behind it, but this ghost I would never see and instead now I saw the ghost of the white car, for it had been gone for many years, gone when the doctors told my grandmother that she couldn’t drive anymore and gone when, after a few more years, my grandmother finally listened and obeyed and her one mode of independent movement went away one day and never came back, and from then on travel for her would mean a loud ringing and the guard running up the ramp calling for her, "nina Tonita! Nina Tonita! Ahi la buscan! Someone is looking for you!" and then my grandmother would be ready, usually ready for at least an hour before it was time, fanning herself, her face painted, her flowery dress immaculate, her gray hair covered in a thin white net, and she would stand up and make her way down the ramp while the guard helped her by holding on to her right arm, which trembled as she walked, and then she would be gone, to the church, to a board meeting, to a tea, to my Uncles’ own house for a lunch of curious silence and unanswered complaints. Once, she would go when she wanted but now she could only go when someone came looking and I knew that it made her feel trapped, helpless, weak, but there was nothing else to do and "things would get better eventually," or so she had said, but there would no return from the path she had taken.
I would sit inside the white car sometimes and turn the wheel and play with the controls, and I would imagine that I would take it out and go for a ride, and swerve on my own all over the city, without a care in the world, and pick up Rodney or Ricardo or maybe even Tania or Zonia and we would go riding to wherever we wanted, all the way to the top of the volcano, or to the beach, or to a lonely park, and what my grandmother could only now remember, the freedom of going where she wanted, when she wanted, I could myself only imagine in some distant future, a future that was so remote as to seem an illusion, and all I could do was play with the steering wheel and wonder at what they would do if I just took it and drove away, sliding down the ramp like a crazed devil on a rumbling white horse. But the truth was that I couldn’t drive then, I had never even begun to try, so I would just step back from the car, looking at the many controls with curiosity, and I would go back to my room or call Rodney or Ricardo or Malena, or read a magazine in the living room when my grandmother wasn’t there.
Now she wasn’t there at all, and she wouldn’t be coming back from a tea or a luncheon or a meeting or from church, and now I could drive but there was no white car to take and this future was as much an illusion as the one I had pictured and I could only sit and play with the wheel for the car was going nowhere.

* * *

We turned to the right, to the big, thick wooden doors which were the proper entrance to the house, as a house, where the maze robed itself in the garments of normality and reached for a moment into the shallow pool of familiarity and domestic life, but the robe was transparent and the reach was not far enough, for the doors looked too large, the doorknobs were too baroque and they were circled by even more baroque designs that amplified their nature, and the bricks that covered the floor were red and shiny and there were large deep green plants surrounding the doors, making them jump out at you in their perfect wooden geometry, outlined and contrasted by the unpredictable sensuality of the thick leaves all around them, and the right door was almost always open, and the left door was almost always closed and here she would be, when she was, dressed in a blue robe with long white stripes, with little white slippers covering her feet, and her white hair arranged in a perfect circle around her forehead, and she would stand there, right at the gateway of the brown doors, waiting for me to arrive, and her arms would open up and her lips would break into an open smile and she would say "Bienvenido, hijo…" and then she would kiss me and hug me and lead me inside, walking slowly on the shiny red bricks that I could see now, empty and a little faded, used up from so many walks.
Now, when I looked at the entrance, she was not there, and the doors were closed, both doors, closed and locked, and when my Uncle came up to them, instead of freely opening them like he once would have done, he knocked carefully and a middle aged woman answered the door, and she was a stranger and she also looked like one, she had the mannerisms of a person that lives in some other house, certainly not in this one, and she pushed her head through the open door and looked up at my Uncle, and he nodded and talked in whispers to her and then she welcomed my Uncle with a false smile and she said that there was no problem, and I wondered what problem could there be, and as she opened the door for us, I knew that this woman now roamed in the maze that had been my grandmother’s body and my grandmother would have shooed her away quickly if she had seen her running around in her hallways, she would have grabbed a newspaper and flapped it at her until she was forced to run away, and then my grandmother would have called for the guard and she would have asked him to spray some insecticide to make sure that these things don’t come into the house again. But now my grandmother couldn’t reach her and, like a mouse that has come in seeking warmth and is now in the process of starting a family, or a nest of cockroaches that have started a civilization in the depths of a hole in the wall, these people now roamed here freely, as cockroaches and mice and people like these would run around freely when a maze had been left empty and it has started to crumble, when the people had left, when my grandmother had left and she had forgotten to take her body with her, not just her body of flesh, but her body of dirty white walls and ornate brown doors and shiny red bricks and black metal gates that clanged loudly whenever somebody left or came back home. I was back home now but my home was suffering from infestations, and as my Uncle opened the door, I prepared myself for the stench of decay and negligence that would surely hit me like the aroma of a cadaver left alone too long without proper care.

* * *

The doors opened and we walked inside, our heels clicking on the shiny red bricks that I remembered, and my eyes jumped from place to place, and from time to time, and I maybe saw the old fashioned black phone on the little brown table, the same one that I pressed tightly to my ear while I talked to Malena for hours while making ephemeral invisible drawings on the shiny red surface of the floor, pushing and pulling on my legs, unable to think of what else to say, but unwilling to surrender the phone to its cradle and always eager to hear something new from her, from Malena, even though it might have been the same thing she had already said a hundred times, and maybe she had never said it, but it sounded just the same, and I liked it just as much as the first time, because it was always the first time, and the sound of her voice travelling over the heavy phone that was pressed against my sweaty ear was like the caress of a gentle feather, and just like a feather, it tickled me and made me want more as much as I wanted it to stop, and I couldn’t stop so I could only want more, and the sky would grow dark outside while I sat on the red bricks, listening and talking and listening again.
Maybe the black phone was still there and maybe it wasn’t, because the Christmas tree was definitely not there and I could definitely see it, as if it was that first morning when I had walked in and saw it for the first time, sprawling like a green apparition from a movie or a book, all over the little hallways, surrounded by thick moss and little colorful clay figures and an empty stable which was supposed to be filled in only on the holy night of Christmas eve, because that was when the baby Jesus was truly born, and before being born, the baby Jesus was wrapped up in old newspapers in the maid’s room behind the concrete washing platforms, and I could see why he would want to be there because many years later I retreated into that very same room and I covered myself up in newspapers and felt warm and safe and alone, as alone as I wanted to be, ready to be born, but only when I chose to, and in the meantime, there was never enough old newspapers to protect me from the ravages of the world outside.

* * *

We walked through the hallway and around the dividing wall to find ourselves in the living room, which was the true center of the house, under her bedroom, around the corner from the stairway, next to the dining room, straight ahead from the main doors which we had just crossed, and separated from the antechamber by a wall covered in paintings, and the garden lay beyond the criss crossing black iron bars. Here was the core, the heart of this maze that was fading, and the sofas were still covered in dark green cloth, darker and greener than I remembered, and that was because it had been changed, probably since my grandmother’s disappearance, changed to be new but not changed to be different, and the sense that this was still her living room was still here, and I could see the small corner table which was now empty but was once covered in papers, letters, notes, bills and photographs, all of it in one or two stacks that overflowed into each other and threatened to fall over in a big pile on the floor, and they were really already a big pile so nothing much would have changed except for having to pick them up and place them on the little table once again. My grandmother had sat next to it for hours on end, going through the envelopes one by one, making notes, calling on her phone when necessary, dialing one number at a time, very slowly, hampered by the dual difficulties of old age and technological phobia, yet ultimately always able to find her way around. This is where we sat so many times and discussed politics, religion, social behaviors, friends, enemies, movies, life, death, and finally her own life story which traversed through so many spaces before landing here, in the heart of this maze. She had voyaged through abject poverty in the countryside, to find humiliation at the hands of her rich relatives, to a marriage that soon was broken by distance and diverging desires, to minor success, to greater success, and then on to inconceivable success, which manifested in her role as Minister of Education during a time when women did not have government positions at all in El Salvador, and that proud successful woman, the one that had come from nothing and had managed to conquer the world, that was the woman that I could still see in the large dark painting which had sat above her head, back when her head was still there, looking at a pile of envelopes, back when the painting was there, for now I didn’t know if I just saw it there on an empty wall, or if her eyes still truly looked down upon me from the flat darkness of oil and pigment that ruled over the domain of the living room with an iron hand.
Whether the painting was there or not, the pile of papers was certainly gone, and that meant there would be no further replies, no further notes in illegible writing, no little photos among half opened bills and there would be no more discussion here, no more would my Uncle walk in, his heels clicking on the shiny red bricks, no more would he breathe out heavily as he laid on the green couch and started his daily litany of complaints and no more would my grandmother sit on her own sofa, next to her pile of papers, and listen intently to everything he had to say, even if it was the same that he had always said, with only a few names and locations changed. He could talk for a while, maybe ten minutes, maybe twenty, maybe even an hour, and then he would get up and suddenly say "I have to go" and sometimes he would look at the newspaper before he did it, and he would complain about whatever he saw, and he would say that "things are really going badly now" or "things are just getting worse" or "things are really the worst now" and my grandmother would smile at him and say "Be calm. Be patient. Be in control. Things will get better" as she sat next to the little table and beneath the large dark painting, the reflection of what she once was, in a blue long fancy dress, sitting up straight like a queen from a forgotten time, back when she was one of the actors on the newspaper, and maybe somewhere, another man back then had said "things are really going terrible now" and maybe another mother had tried to calm him.
Now I stepped into the living room to prepare my cameras on the old green sofa and a girl in yellow shorts walked by the dining room on the other end, and she had one of my grandmother’s old plastic cups in her hands and she had sandals on her feet and she talked loudly and acted as if this was her house and I again felt like an intruder was in my grandmother’s house and I hoped that my grandmother would soon appear, with that newspaper rolled up in her hand, ready to deliver punishment, or maybe just a smile and a simple warning that she didn’t need all these people in her house and that it was time for them to leave. But she was not coming at all, and I prepared my camera, took a few pictures, and then we moved on.

* * *

We stepped into the kitchen which once had long windows along the northern wall that looked out towards the spacious green garden beyond, and now the windows were sealed shut, and a single clear wall had come to replace them, and the long narrow room, which had always been somewhat dark, was now completely dark and enclosed and it had the feel of a tomb, a tomb where cadavers could still feast on the spoils that remained from past lives. Not a place to stay for long, as the walls felt as if they would close in and seal the tomb shut forever at any time (and maybe then my grandmother would appear and say "hola hijo" and hug me, welcoming me to the darkness of her eternity), but I still had to take a look, at the fridge where I used to drink straight from the cold water bottles when my grandmother wasn’t looking, and among my many acts of rebellion this wasn’t one of them, at least not pure rebellion, as I really did like the taste of those old bottles on my mouth, the cold water then felt like no other water I had ever tasted or would ever taste, and I only had to be careful to not do it when my grandmother could see me, and the few times that she did see me, she would shake her head and she would only say: "Don’t drink from them like that! Take a cup and drink from a cup!" but the cups were plastic and they tasted of dingy factories and chemicals, where the glass bottles tasted of old parties and forgotten songs so I kept on drinking from them when my grandmother wasn’t looking.
Here, standing on the red floor of the kitchen, my grandmother and I had argued many times, about God in particular, about politics sometimes, about the church, about my future, about the nature of life and death and here, in this long room which now was dark and forgotten, she said more than once that she felt like crushing a large heavy pan on my head to get me to shut up, because I would not stop arguing or questioning her, and she could only take so much of it before she started to lift the pan, and she could never go through with it so she would laugh about it, still with the heavy pan in her hand, and I would laugh too, and she would say, when she has happy, that I would have made a good lawyer, and she would say, when she was angry, that I would have made a good torturer, and I then got the impression that both professions then were manifestations of the same impulse, to seek out the truth through harsh unscrupulous means, and to seek a truth that was already colored by preconditions and assumptions, so that its colors were already old before being born, so that any other truth that came through the pipes would be rejected off hand, if it didn’t fit the truth that was already wished for, the truth that one was being paid to uncover, and so it was with torturers, and so it was with lawyers, and so it was with me, as I asked her one more time: "But if God is good, why does he do so many evil things in the Bible?" and she would shake her head once again, and try to answer, while she squeezed the handle of the pan ever more tightly, and looked at me with wide uncomprehending eyes.

* * *

I walked then around the kitchen, past the concrete structures that were used to wash clothes (las "pilas"), and to my little room that was really the maid’s room, and I could almost see it, even though it wasn’t there anymore, because my Uncle had decided to build an apartment here, and now the walls were closed off and behind the walls there would be other strange people, people that didn’t belong here, and the maze kept on getting smaller, but, like a phantom limb that refuses to completely disappear, I could still almost see the room, the bookshelves, the old TV set, the posters, the old bed, the little open closet, the drawer where I saved all the letters I ever received, for years, only so they would all be lost when the room disappeared and maybe the words still lingered in the corners of a new strange room that rested on the decaying remains of the other one.
In this room that was no longer there but I could still feel through a blank wall I lived for a year of unhinged fantasies and crazed reality, dreaming of riding on dragons while a civil war raged just outside the metal doors, in this room is where I dreamt of working while staring at a blank wall, this is where we sat in darkness with Ricardo and stared into each other’s eyes until contact was reached and then our forms started to loosen themselves from their strict moorings, and they slid over shadows and they became shadows themselves, and they stretched out to touch the walls that were no longer solid and they threatened to escape through the open doorway, as the stars were calling from the open patio, and the little burning balls that were his eyes floated in the midst of this maelstrom and it kept on happening even after it seemed that it would have to stop and the air shook with vibrant intensity and I questioned but accepted, and I wondered but set my thoughts aside, and we just kept on looking until our will ran out and then we rested for a while. Ricardo said then that maybe I should come to his group on a Saturday afternoon and I said that maybe I would but I didn’t intend to, although sooner or later I would have to, and I didn’t know then that his group was only him sitting alone in the middle of Fanci’s books waiting for someone to arrive, and if I had arrived then there would have been two of us, and so when I finally did arrive, it was just the two of us for a couple of weeks and I knew that I should have come sooner, because there would have been more time for us to be alone, before the others came, as they always did, as they always would.
Instead, I stayed in this room, the room that was no longer there, just as I was no longer here, a ghost searching for another ghost, and maybe that is what we clearly saw that night, as Ricardo searched for me in the darkness and I searched for him, and we only found shadows and reflections of ourselves, but it was too soon to ponder that there may be nothing else, and if there was nothing else, then there could be no real concern, no real worry, and it made no difference if Ricardo sat in an empty room waiting, while I sat in my little cluttered room waiting for the waiting to be over, so that a new waiting could begin, and here, now, there was only a wall, and just as the room was now another room and it was full of strangers, so Ricardo was another Ricardo now and he was full of strangers, and as the room would never come back, maybe Ricardo wouldn’t come back either, but shadows drifted into shadows, and storms carried the weight of many clouds that were one, and the storm that took him was as good or as bad as any other storm and the shadows would always remain, just not here, for here, there was only a blank wall.

* * *

Beyond my room, I could still see the patio, where the maids would hang the clothes to dry, and the large heavy sheets would dance lightly in the wind, and the shirts and pants and underpants would flap more intensely and it all smelled of water and soap for a couple of hours, even from within my room. On the other side of the patio was the narrow little room of Alcides, my grandmother’s Godson, and his little room was really a small little storage room but he happened to live there, and it was never clear to me why or how he came to live there, but he did live there and he would come over to my room and we would watch movies together and he would tell me about the movies he had seen, the ones I couldn’t see because I was not old enough, the ones I wanted to see so badly because I couldn’t and because they would finally show me the things I yearned to see, and he brought me nudie magazines and he told me dirty jokes and maybe that was the function of all men that lived in little rooms that were not meant to be lived in, maybe they sat and waited for a young boy to arrive so that they could fill his head with lustful images and sordid tales, and as much as I would fulfill my function of being young and innocent, he would fulfill his own function of being knowledgeable and lewd and maybe then, someday I would pass it on, like a gift of hot desire that spread through outstretched fingers to the young hands that would receive it.

* * *

Past the room that was no longer there, and the open doorway to the patio, still outlined by the glimmer of the sun and the colored shades of the hanging clothes, which also were not there, there was another door, a door I once saw as closed and mysterious and then I saw as open and inviting and then again I saw as locked to the future and finally it ceased to be there altogether and it returned to its original state. It was a heavy black metal door and its austere rusty handle spoke to me of the final stages of realization, past this metal door there was another world, and I should better be sure to cross it only when it was my time to do so, and back when it was closed I never did, and then when it came to be open, I did cross it and I found my Uncle’s office on the other side, which was really a little apartment that my mom had made for my great grandmother, back before the time I could understand the implications of buildings or doors or grandmothers, and it was right here, in the little landing between the metal door of the patio and the wooden door of the apartment, that my Dad gave me Kin, the second big German Shepherd that I came to love, right after Kin the first had been buried in the empty lot next door that would one day become the Novo hotel, and I remembered my Dad holding the little German shepherd in his hands and then placing it down on the ground, and I remember me looking at it and feeling that this was not really Kin, he only had that name, and I remember thinking that I should reject it, that this was a trick, this was simply a maneuver to make me be not so sad because the first Kin was gone, but I didn’t reject it, I gave in and I embraced the little black and white puppy and I took to him as he took to me, and I loved him and feared him and respected him through the many years that he was by my side, all the way to the day when Sanson took away his pride with a single swipe of his heavy paw and I loved him even beyond that day, when he slowly declined into old age and enthropic dissipation. Like my second dog who was Kin but really wasn’t, my great grandmother’s apartment was turned into an office where my Uncle’s secretary stood guard behind her desk full of papers and pens, and her name was Flor and she loved to talk to me about women and the nature of love and the ways of men and the treachery of women, and I sat on the couch across from her many times, listening to her advice, answering her questions, making jokes as she moved her big curved body around the room, placing files here and there, typing a new deed, labeling a letter, then turning towards me and saying, as if it was just something that suddenly popped into her mind: "There’s no need to worry about any particular girl, you know. There’s plenty of them around. No need to worry about any one." And this message burrowed through me in those days because I so much looked forward to seeing Malena, and I called her every afternoon, and I went to greet her after her school day was over, and she would come out in her catholic school girl uniform and I wanted so much to kiss her and hug her and press her against me, but Flor said that there was no use in worrying so much about her, she was like Kin, like the apartment, she would turn into another and then into another, and with each one I would open my heart, and then they would end up buried in the empty lot behind the tall wall that was beyond my reach.
True to my imaginings, Malena disappeared, and the apartment soon enough returned to being an apartment, but even then it still had the certain inhuman taste of an office and here, one night, I embraced Gracia, Ricardo’s cousin, on a little broken up bed, as we both vibrated with the remains of Dilcia’s intense desire, and she smiled in way that had lust written all over it and the shadows were full of lights and I stepped away from Gracia then, because Dilcia was gone but she had not disappeared, and here in this same darkness, I called Ricardo telling him what had happened, and he approved the movement, the crossing of the doorway, which was the same doorway that I would someday cross again many years later, but by then he would not approve anymore, because the game had changed and he held a different spot on the board. But that night, Gracia was in a short dress and she laid back on the little bed and she said: "I can smell her all over you," and I nodded because I could smell her too and she leaned back, as if inviting me to touch her or kiss her and I leaned over her, my body still trembling from the lust that Dilcia had awakened, but I didn’t kiss her, and we just looked into each other’s eyes for a long time, and the air was full of crackling sparks and tiny explosions of light, and her large breasts heaved up and down and my penis was very hard, but I just kept on looking at her and she just kept on looking back until she said she had to go, and I kissed her on the cheek to say goodbye and the metal door clanged as always and the moment had passed. I had stepped to the edge and I had stepped back. Right then, I was not following Flor’s advice anymore, because I had shifted my attention over to Dilcia and I had allowed it to rest on her, like a strong magnet that could not be shaken from its resting place, and I told this to Ricardo over the phone, and he said he couldn’t expect any less, "it would have been terrible if this didn’t happen… you and her had to get together… it was really inevitable…" and I was standing precisely in the same place where Flor used to sit as I talked to him on the phone, I was breathing the same air, and Flor could not reach me through the shadows of time and I crossed the doorway, the metal door which should not be crossed until you are truly ready, and I was ready then, and the door closed behind me as I passed.
I would be ready again when a new doorway appeared, and I came to understand that they were all the same doorway, just like Kin would always be Kin, whether he was a puppy struggling in my arms, or an old skeletal German shepherd being trailed over my backyard in La Satelite like an old sack of garbage that threatened to break apart into dead tendrils of muscle and skin, or a hole in the ground beyond the tallest wall of the maze, in places that I couldn’t touch even with my mind, and as new doors opened, the old doors were forever closed, and there was no more metal door at the end of this patio for there was no patio at all and there was nowhere for a door to go.

* * *

We walked back through the dining room, past the living room once again, and then my Uncle took out his keys to unlock the heavy black metal bars that separated the lower level from the upper floor, a safety measure that was not here back in the days when I was little and which still seemed to violently cut the maze in two. Now, the bars, which had been placed there to protect my grandmother from intruders merely held her memory in place, and maybe if the bars were finally removed or if the gate were to be left unlocked, then there would be a loud swooshing sound of wind and black tears, all swirling together in an angry tornado that would push its way out to the living room and then out to the garage and from there up and out to the vast blue sky, and there it would dissipate into the grandiosity of blue and white that stretched from the volcano to the north to the mountains to the south and then it would never return and the memory would be lost and steps would no longer be heard up in the library or the bedroom and finally the house would just be a house as it was meant to be.
But then my grandmother would truly be gone, so my Uncle left the lock and the gate in their place and just now, I was standing behind him, as he struggled to find the right key, so he could undo the lock to let me in, and the metal gate opened with a loud creak and I stepped through with my cameras and I looked up and around at the long stairway that made its way up to my grandmother’s living quarters which now only held wind and black tears. I looked at the steps again, outlined by an elegant wooden banister that looked over a naked lady of bronze, that was forever resting in the center of an ocean of white pebbles, with beautiful full breasts and a great round ass, but she was also gone, and then I looked around at the paintings that remained, and I could see large thick fingers reaching towards me, and my grandmother with her fan at her side and even a picture of me with a guitar close to my face, signifying that I was made of music and guitars and that, in some way, that made me definable and understandable and the question of my real purpose could be set aside, for it was really out of reach anyway, as distant as the painting itself which my mom had made and which my grandmother had placed next to masterpieces of artists long gone, artists who had loved my grandmother enough to give her their art and had turned her maze into a gallery and my childhood into a endless free roam through a private museum, of such high subtlety and intensity as I could then only begin to understand. But most of the paintings were gone and I looked down at the white pebbles of the landing, at the platform where the naked woman of bronze once waited patiently for my eager little hands to run across her small breasts and imagine what it would be like if they weren’t so hard and what it would be like if they were soft like my own skin and pliable and then she was always there naked and ready, but now she was gone, as gone as my grandmother, and maybe she was still naked in a warehouse somewhere where nobody would ever touch her, and maybe she could even miss a little boy who couldn’t resist the urge to feel her curves of bronze, maybe she even hoped for a daring rescue, but no such rescue was forthcoming, or maybe she had no memory at all because she was just a bronze statue and, as such, she never had a soul.
Looking up at the top of the stairs I could see my grandmother standing by the final banister, holding on to the dark shiny wood, dressed in her blue and white striped robe, talking louder than usual so I could hear all the way from the cement squares on which I stood, then and now, and she was just then telling me that my Uncle had come to her and he had told her something bad about me and I was instantly mad at him, even before knowing what it was that he had said, and I had told my grandmother that I had gone to see "Conan The Barbarian" and I had not told her that I had sneaked in because only eighteen year olds were allowed to watch the carnage and I had felt happy and proud and I had come back with lines memorized and trails of dark blood etched on my mind and I would never respect Crom as I once had and I would learn that Crom and all others like him were only faint memories, locked away behind metal bars, echoes of history, lamented moments that had gone on to become dust and pebbles but some of them still held on, by people that kept them locked behind bars and would not let them go, and as I looked up at my grandmother, she looked down at me and she said that my Uncle had told her that it was a very bad movie and that it was full of sex and the fact was that there was some sex in it and even some nudity, but I had seen it because of the barbarian and not because of the naked buttocks of an evil witch shot in blue light, and sometimes I had sneaked into movies only for the sex and the breasts and the buttocks that they contained, but then I wouldn’t tell my grandmother, and if I had told her about "Conan" it was because I didn’t think of it that way, but now it was too late and my Uncle had said something that wasn’t true and my grandmother signaled with her finger from the heights of the stairway and told me to stay away from those things and she said that those movies were for old men, "old decrepit men without wives that imagine things for themselves and get sicker and sicker and eventually they can even end up masturbating!" and the way she said it, it was worse than anything I could ever imagine, it was something beyond the pale, something from the other side of the last wall, and right then I knew that my grandmother was indeed innocent and that I wasn’t, because I had started to figure out that what I had been doing for so many years was indeed a form of masturbation, and I wasn’t even an old man yet, and I would masturbate again, and most of my friends had done it as well, and they would do it again, and they were not old men either, and my Uncle probably had as well, since I had seen the porno magazines he had brought from Europe which came into my lustful hands through Flor and Alcides, and maybe my Uncle was in fact one of the old men that my grandmother feared so much, and he wanted to get me in trouble with her, and I despised him for it, and I saw him then as a kind of bug that needed to be crushed and then forgotten. I thought then of the one sex scene in the whole movie, when Conan stepped into the witch’s hut and took her, but soon he realized what she was and he violently tossed her into the raging fire in the middle of the little hut, and then she became a swift tornado of wind and black tears, that swooped through the hut and out into the sky, banished from the pure lustful eager life of a young barbarian who knew nothing of magic nor cared to have it touch him, and as it swept up into the sky, I knew that it was only when the smoke was kept within the hut, behind black bars, behind lock and key, behind walls and accusations and deviated guilt, then it could turn into an evil witch that would swallow you up and destroy you. Maybe this was indeed what was happening to my Uncle as we walked up the stairs and he continued in his droning song that spoke of double meanings, half truths and unknown desires.
Looking up at the top of the stairs, my grandmother, in her white and blue robe, was still there looking down at us, and, as I had known it then, I knew it now: she was indeed very innocent, in a way that most people could not understand. But my Uncle wasn’t innocent and neither was I.

* * *

Looking up from the edge of the stairway, up to the library, up from the depths of the subtle shadows tinged with green and yellow that were the colors of this chamber, this stairway that once was a private museum and now was an empty mausoleum and soon would be nothing at all, looking up, I could still see her, my grandmother, above it all, leaning over the banister from the edge of her library, telling me what to do, that afternoon, that day, that week, that month, that year, that life, without clear detail but with a vague hope that I would understand and obey and a simple recognition that I wouldn’t, a simple understanding that I would continue to do things my way and that my way would lead me down bad paths where she wouldn’t be able to help me, but there was nothing she could do about it, nothing other than give me advice and hope that some of it sunk in; my grandmother with trembling hands and nodding head, my grandmother with wide open eyes and a mask of ferocity that could easily break apart into squeals of badly controlled laughter, my grandmother asking me what I had done, what new terrible thing had I been involved in, what terrible new project had I started, my grandmother telling me what I shouldn’t have done, what I should stay away from, like movies with naked witches or occult books of Dungeons and Dragons lore that scared her not because of their violence or vaguely dissimulated nudity, but because of their references to demons and devils and their detailed instructions on how to work with them and what to do with them once they arrived; like girls, specially girls that would be so bold as to come to my little room behind the kitchen, and such a girl had come once, plucked out of Ricardo’s study group, and maybe she was just an echo of the future, an echo of that other girl that I would some day pluck from the inner circle of Ricardo’s power, and her name back then was Zulma and she was my friend in a way that most girls weren’t and she was truly interested in the strange things that I liked, and I brought her to my room to show her the books I had, the music I had, the pictures I had, and my Uncle saw me bring her and he said nothing, and my Uncle saw her leave and he said nothing, and my Uncle saw me coming back from the gate after waving her goodbye, and he said nothing, but then my grandmother, still up by the banister, at the gateway of her library, she would look down at me standing on the gray cement squares at the bottom, she would look down and she would say "your Uncle told me you brought a girl into your room. That is entirely disrespectful and you can’t do that. He was very alarmed and he came to tell me right away." And it took me a moment to understand what she could be talking about, since when she said it, it brought with it an air that I couldn’t associate with Zulma at all, and it sounded like something that adults would do in the middle of the night, away from the eyes of others, and I hesitated, and my hesitation was probably perceived as guilt and then I realized what she meant and what my Uncle meant and I could only vaguely imagine what he had seen that afternoon, just as I could only barely see my grandmother now, standing up there, on top of the stairway, at the edge of her library, lips trembling, eyes wide open, hand shaking as it grabbed on to the wooden sphere that crowned the edge of the stairs, I could only imagine what my Uncle had seen, what my Uncle had thought, but most of all, I could only imagine what he had wanted and in wanting it, he would then know that it was the same everywhere and always, if he saw Zulma and wanted her then there could be only one reason why I wanted her in my room as well, and, with these vivid images flowing through his mind, he would have run alarmed to tell my grandmother that something terrible had happened, without fully disclaiming that what had happened was indeed terrible but it had only happened inside his mind, inside the strange walls of his flesh based prison, inside his private world and nowhere else, and it was only in there that Zulma had been a sign of disrespect, it was only within him that Zulma had done anything other than look at some pictures and laugh for a while, and I had never even kissed her, I had never even touched her, I had never even pictured it, but my Uncle was sure of it, and then my grandmother was sure as well, and I could only deny it a few times and then promise that it wouldn’t happen again, but what she thought had happened didn’t happen at all. Someday it would, just a few feet away, in the apartment that became and office that became an apartment, and then my Uncle would be out of sight, powerless and blind beyond repair, by then his powers would have grown weak, almost as weak as they were now, as we walked up the stairs, getting close enough to my grandmother that she was already vanishing and I could almost believe that she had never been there at all.

* * *

We reached the height of the stairway and we stepped into the heart of the library, where hundreds of books promised tales of the mysteries that were hidden by the half opened windows, the yellowish old curtains that were never quite closed, bookshelves that were an integral part of the room and reached all the way to the ceiling, all covered in big hardback books from another time, trails from a past where people signed their own books before putting them in my grandmother’s hands with care, "para la nina Tonita, mujer entre mujeres", "for Antonia, a woman among women", and large collections of first editions and illustrated manuals and thick treatises on matters long forgotten, and books full of original illustrations with colors that never quite faded with age. Later, there were shelves full of Christian books which all told the same story, someone had a bad life, this someone discovered Jesus, and now life was good, and it seemed that Christians needed to tell themselves this same story over and over for their twisted belief was so fragile, so ephemeral, so built on flimsy translucent paper, that it could break at the slightest show of force, that it simply had to be repeated, like a cold dead mantram that went nowhere and touched no one except the ones that already believed, and who wished to continue to believe to hide from the darkness that they saw all around them, maybe in some of these other books, or maybe in the gray metal of the roof of the garage which could be seen from the window of the library, out there where dead leaves mingled with pebbles and mice and rats and the dust of times long past.
Now, as we stepped into the library, I could still see all the many books but they were not there anymore and the shelves were really empty, and, in the twilight of the ghostly image of the room which still flashed in my mind like a sudden hint of lightning in the midst of a dark storm, there was a wooden rocking chair, yet another artifact from a world that had already passed us by when I was only a little boy, and nobody ever used the rocking chair, nobody ever cared to sit on it and rock themselves while reading, because my grandfather had sat there once, in one of his attempts to return to El Salvador and remain, in one of his sudden appearances when he fell from the rarefied reaches of Europe and the United States and appeared at my grandmother’s doorstep like a character from an old American movie, with a hat half over his forehead, and a long trench coat, and a thick silk scarf, and Carlos Gardel playing in the background ("…veinte anos no es nada…" "…twenty years is nothing…"), the sound of the bandoneon bouncing off the corners of the doors and the windows and little blue lights flashing all around his clear shiny face, a perfect man from a distant perfect world. This perfect man, drenched in the magic dust of the cold North, once sat on the rocking chair, while my mom was there and my grandmother was there, and maybe my Uncle was there as well, and he rocked himself on it and it rocked a bit too far back and it slid all the way back, bringing the perfect man crashing to the hard floor, and in that shocking moment, the perfect man was not so perfect, and I could see his red face, and his quick attempt to cover his embarrassment with anger, and I could hear my grandmother’s attempt to muffle her high squeaks of laughter with her hands and my mother’s red cheeks as she freely crackled with laugher, and it all dissipated into the air of the little library while my grandfather stood up and placed the rocking chair back in its place, and soon he would disappear again, and he would return to the half understood world of the North, where things were silver and gold and perfect, like he was perfect or at least he appeared to be. Up there (for the North would always be "up" and it would hint at the coldness of its cities) he had also fallen, much harder and much more violently than he had fallen that day in the library, and maybe my grandmother didn’t know quite how far he had fallen or quite how low he would drop, but it would all happen so far away that it could be set aside and forgotten ("your grandfather likes to drink… he has a problem with that…")
Here, in the library, there was only the rocking chair, left alone and unused, and when I would see it, sitting empty in the middle of the library, I could only think of him, of my grandfather, and of this chair that was here for him and which he had left in search of other chairs somewhere in the distance, and maybe, no matter what chair he would sit on, it was always bound to rock too far, and my grandfather, as perfect and as mysterious as he was, he was bound to fall, and as he fell here, he fell there, and everywhere he would go, he would keep on falling, and maybe his fall itself was the secret fuel that propelled my grandmother to rise, and the empty rocking chair in the midst of the library held the secret reason for so many dedications in so many books, for so many paintings up the stairway and in the living room, for so many people that loved my grandmother, maybe it was in his simple falling that my grandfather had offered his wife, my grandmother, his single greatest gift. With me, you are a woman. Without me, you are a star.

* * *

On the corner of the library, right next to the edge where my grandmother forever stood looking down with wide open eyes, there was a shelf full of records and, close to it, against the wall with the windows that faced out into the gray metal roof, there was an old record player, as large as a small table, with a single golden speaker that rattled when the sound came out. This was back in the days when I lived behind the kitchen and the days blurred into each other like transparent clouds of gray smoke, when Rodney and me lived only to find a new record to listen to, a secret heavy metal band that nobody else would have heard of, nobody but us, so we could delve into the blasting distortion of the guitars, the machine gun intensity of the drum rolls, the squealing savagery of the high pitched screams of the singer and intricate lyrics that spoke of sex, drugs and demonic worship, the true nature of rock’n’roll, which we had come to understand and align with. In those days, Rodney would come over and sit with me in my room, and sometimes in the living room when my grandmother wasn’t there, and sometimes we would sit on the terrace and sometimes we would sit out in the garden, and my grandmother would come out with plates of food for us and she would put a big bowl of beans in the middle of the table, and Rodney would grab it and ask me how much I wanted and I would take a big spoonful and then Rodney would take the entire bowl and put it on his place mat and my grandmother would watch us from the corner of the dining room table, one foot in the kitchen and one foot outside and she would shake her head in disbelief, and then later she would tell me, "that Rodney is a glutton! I can’t believe how much he eats!" and I would just laugh and tell her not to worry, that was just the way he was, there was nothing to do, nothing to change.
Rodney one day was trying an electrical experiment in my room, and for the experiment he had taken a piece of old wire and he was trying to fix an old tape recorder which we didn’t need to fix because we had another one, but he didn’t care and I wanted to see what he could do with his electrical skills. So he took the piece of old wire and attached it to a plug and here there were two naked wires attached to a plug and then he set it into the wall just to see if it would work and then he held the two wires and smiled and then he pressed them together tightly and there was a big shower of sparks and then all the lights in the whole house went away and we were suddenly sitting across from each other in the darkness of a late afternoon. I looked at him in horror and he looked in horror at me, and I said "oh fuck!" and he said "oh shit!" and then he pulled out the wires and hid them because we could already hear Manuel, the guard, running up the steep ramp, calling "Nina Tonita! Nina Tonita! The light went out! The light went out!" and we looked at each other and I knew that if my grandmother were to find out that Rodney had done something like this then he would never be allowed in the house again, and I certainly wanted him to be back, so we just shook our head and agreed on eternal silence without ever saying a word. Manuel came running and my grandmother came out of the living room and they were calling my Uncle and an electrician and we came out together, and, in the most innocent voices we could muster, we said: "What happened? Did the lights go out?" and nobody ever found out that Rodney had done it and we forgot all about the wires and all about the old tape recorder, but I never forgot that even the best intentions can literally bring the lights down and Rodney certainly had the best intentions, if by best intentions I mean having the most fun while experimenting with the most things in the shortest amount of time, and to this day, I still consider those the best intentions a being can possibly have. Even if the lights do go down every once in a while.
Rodney sometimes stayed over and he would sleep in my bedroom, and we would sleep in the same bed, facing in opposite directions, just like Ricardo and me had done before, and it only happened a couple of times, because my grandmother was very alarmed when she realized that Rodney had stayed and she called me into the living room when it was only her and me, and she said, "It’s not good! It’s not clean! It’s bad! I don’t want it to ever happen again!" and suddenly I realized that my grandmother was maybe afraid that I was fucking Rodney or that Rodney was fucking me but she couldn’t quite say it, so knowing that, I pressed her on it and said, "What exactly do you mean? How is it dirty? What is wrong with it?" and she couldn’t say, and she just shook her head, sitting in the corner of her living room, next to her big pile of papers, under the big painting of herself, all in dark blues and browns, and I kept on asking and she kept on insisting on vague pronouncements, "It’s wrong! Don’t do it anymore!" and I had to agree to it but I would always ask her the same question, over and over, through the years, veiled in different words, touched by the different memories, cloaked in different subtle hints. And her look of horror would never change and I would always smile and tease her some more.
It was very rare for my grandmother to be gone overnight but one weekend she was gone, and maybe she went to Guatemala or to Mexico, but the house was all alone, quiet and dark and inviting. I got Rodney to come over, and, in the middle of the night, we walked up to the library, where Rodney was not allowed, but she wasn’t around so I decided that he was allowed. And we grabbed a bunch of records, both the ones that we had and the ones that were there and we sat up in the library all night, with a little lamp for a light and music for warmth and we told each other stories until we had no more stories to tell and we listened to records over and over, Judas Priest and Pink Floyd and Black Sabbath and Deep Purple and they all rang harder than ever up here in the library where we were not supposed to be, because the music itself spoke of deeds that were not supposed to happen, and the big house was quiet and empty in the middle of the night, and Manuel, the guard, would never dare to be up here because he thought that my grandmother could actually see his steps on the shiny bricks, but I didn’t think so, and a civil war was raging outside and the night was cold and dangerous and full of evil people that did nasty things to each other, out there. But here, inside my grandmother’s library, there was only Rodney and me and the music and a little lamp for light, and it was lonely in the best sense of the word and it was complete like a full flower that cannot last too long before its colors fade and its curves slide into droopy sadness, and it was quiet in the midst of loud music and it had the touch of ghost stories, with the shadows on the tall walls and the books and the darkness of the long slanted roofs, but there was no fear, because nothing could touch us, as long as the music was playing and the glass windows remained shut.

* * *

We walked past the library, which now had no books, the shelves empty and shining in their brown nakedness, and there were no records, and no Rodney, and no grandmother, really, even if I could still vaguely hear her voice, and it seemed like it was about get louder, because right then we turned right and walked straight into her bedroom, which had always been so full of her presence, so much inhabited by her, even on the rare occasions when I happened to be here and she wasn’t, her smell had been here, and her mountains of bottles of perfumes and necklaces and jewels, spread over two different tabletops, each with their own mirror, and the old TV, just to the right of the door, facing the long and wide bed, which she only used a part of, and the rest was for more books and papers and magazines and maybe for us.
Once upon a time, back before there was her and me, there was her and me and my three cousins: Roberto, Roxana and Juan Antonio. Roberto was the oldest by four years so, when we stayed with our grandmother for the weekend, he would sleep on the floor in front of the bed and he would call out jokes from the darkness beyond the edge of the bed, and I would look towards that darkness and up at the greater deeper darkness of the armoire and the gap between the top of the armoire and the roof, and that darkness was much more complete and it offered no jokes, because no older cousin was going to be old enough to sleep there, the things that slept there were much older and they were related to us only by strange equations that were much too complex to follow and so I largely stayed out of their way.
Roxana was only two years older than me, but in that time, two years was as vast a precipice as a decade or a century would be now, and so she was mysterious to me, both because of her age and because of being a girl, a cousin girl, a girl cousin, which added some kind of intricate imbalance to the equation, and she was fair skinned and her nose would wrinkle when she laughed, and her voice was very nasal and her laughter had the same scent of vulgarity that my Aunt’s laughter had, and I was never sure if I did find her attractive or not, although I did imagine her more than once running in only her panties and a long T-shirt, and maybe that was because I actually saw her or maybe that was only because I liked to imagine things, and sooner or later it became impossible to separate what was memory and was not. Sooner or later I would stop trying.
Juan Antonio was only two years younger than me, and in those days, days of long weekends with grandma and kid movies and little bags of popcorn and lots of fried chicken and bread and long Sundays in the garden, in those days, he was my true friend and companion and partner in crime, and together, we played games that were long stories that I invented and in which he was a character and so was I, and we were pirates together, and the grass of the garden became a wide and dangerous ocean, and we took captives sometimes and he became my captive more than once, and maybe then I imagined him to be a little brown girl, not unlike the little brown girls that someday I would so much desire, and he was simply another toy in a way, a toy that talked and jumped and breathed and sometimes cried when it got hurt, but a toy nonetheless and he was a sergeant in my army and a captain in my navy and a soldier in my war and an adventurer in my world and he was always happy to fulfill his duties.
Sometimes Roberto, in his own duty of being the older male cousin, would run by us and scream "Rats! You are both rats! Rats!" and then he would laugh his high whiny laugh, not so different from Roxana’s, and then we would keep on playing, and Roxana mostly stayed out of our way, and I never really knew what she was doing until a time came when she wasn’t there at all.
At night, on those weekends of cousins and grandma, we would all crowd into her bed to watch TV, and the bed was really two beds pressed together, and I would then sleep on one edge, and Juan Antonio was next to me, and Roxana next to him and finally my grandmother on her side, and Roberto, as I said, was down on the floor, and in the morning, my grandmother would complain because Roxana had been kicking around and had kicked her in the middle of the night, and she would laugh in her high squeals of pleasure, stretching her wrinkled arms to act out the madness of my kicking sleeping cousin.
Sometimes we would play the game that my grandfather had taught us, a game with cards that we could all play together, and my grandmother would try to tell us stories of my grandfather, but she didn’t know them that well, so they were all too short for me, and I would ask her for more detail but she couldn’t give me what I wanted, so I would tell her stories that I would make up, and she would listen carefully and she would try to write them down in her long cursive handwriting, and she saved those stories for years and sometimes brought them out to show people the things that I had said when I was little.

* * *

Many years later, when I came to live here, in the maid’s room behind the kitchen, in a time when there were no more cousins, as they had vanished into their own lives and had disappeared from mine, but there was Rodney and Ricardo and Malena and Liz and Tania, I would come up to this doorway, the one we were crossing right now, and I would ask for money which I usually got, and my grandmother said that she wanted to say no, and she actually tried to say no, but once my face looked a certain way, a certain sad way that touched her, then she just couldn’t refuse, and she gave me five colones or ten colones or even twenty colones, which was less than two dollars back then but it was more than enough for me to go away happy, and as I walked away down the stairway surrounded by masterful paintings, I would vaguely hear my grandmother say, "Be careful! Come back early! Don’t take any risks! It’s dangerous out there!" I did know that it was dangerous but I wanted to go anyway, and I wanted to get a taste of that danger like a hint of electric shock, without getting burned all the way, just like Rodney, with his two pieces of old wire in his hands, and my grandmother knew enough to not stop me and I loved her for it.

* * *

We walked into the bedroom and there was no grandmother there, and there was only one bed and most of the things were gone but a few were still there, and it seemed like here was the hidden heart of this labyrinth, the secret heart that stood right above the living room, allowing its moist life to drip right through the floor, the life that made the sofas green and made the painting of my grandmother glow and fed the bursts of uncontrolled laughter that every so often would shake my grandmother’s body. This chamber, this secret heart, was fading away slowly but it hadn’t faded completely, and my Uncle was still talking about the changes he had made to the place and how much it had cost, but all I wanted was a moment of quiet when I could feel the dusty touch of her voice on my skin, so she could once again tell me to be careful, so she could once again ask me to tell her a story, so she could once again buy me some popcorn, so she could once again give me a kiss and tell me to be careful, right after saying goodbye.

* * *

From the bedroom it was a short turn to the left and we were in the darkness of the closet, which was really a small long room in itself, a depository of strange artifacts from the past, a place to walk through on the way to the bathroom, a place where I remembered turning to look at the stacks of diplomas, at the stacks of folders upon folders, of old papers, letters, notes, multiple awards, all mixed in with wigs and dresses and other things for which I didn’t have a name, all in this little long dark room which held my grandmother’s past, the past that was not up front, the past that was behind the grand painting in the living room, the past that she chose to remove from stranger’s eyes. Maybe in the darkness of this little room were the secret stories of meetings behind closed doors, in the time when she became the first female minister of El Salvador, maybe it contained the stories that quickly would flash through her eyes when we talked in the living room, her sitting under the great dark blue painting, next to her chaotic stack of mail and photos and me sitting on the other sofa, looking at her with curiosity and asking, "so what happened then? When the teachers went on strike? When they were all mad at you? What did they accuse you of?" and she shook her head and smiled briefly, letting me know that she would say nothing, that there was no way to pry into that secret realm, but there was just enough in her gesture, just enough in her eyes, that I knew that something indeed had happened. In the same way, she would not really talk of my grandfather, of his failings, of his troubles, not to me, she would not say how sad she had been even though I knew it, how sad she had been when he had left her here in El Salvador, looking for fortune in the lands of the north, and she had managed to make her own fortune here, all alone, and this maze had grown all around her, and its shining brilliance all came from her and not from him, but her sadness still lingered, right behind her smile.
Remainders of all those years, of all those stories resting upon longer stories, all of it sat somewhere in this little long room that was her closet, and back then, when I came up to shower in her bathroom, I would walk through here and wonder what was hidden under so many stacks, what was hidden behind the closed white sliding doors, what was hidden beneath the stacks that rose so high as to touch the slanted wooden ceiling, and I always thought that there would come a time when we would know, when my grandmother would leave and we would go through it all carefully, knowing that here rested the stories that her voice could not touch. I didn’t know then that her passing would be covered up by my Uncle and my Mother, that they would come and disentangle the mess my grandmother left behind, but they would do it blindly, without attention, without vision, without care, and the things that were hidden would be forever lost, and my grandmother’s stories, the ones she could never fully tell, these stories would now be like vague shapes that the dust forms in the sunlight, vague shapes that vanished when one tried to touch them. I looked now at the little room and it was empty, empty of clothes, empty of papers, empty of memories, empty of truth and it was now just a little room with a few white sliding doors and behind the doors, there was only the void, the place where my grandmother’s stories had finally gone to rest.

* * *

Stepping through the empty whiteness of the room that was her closet, I walked into the bathroom, which had been my bathroom as well, where I would shower while listening to heavy metal on a little red cassette player that I placed on the side of the sink, and I played one tape after another, just drying my hands enough to find a new one, and Judas Priest and Black Sabbath where the catalysts of a hundred adventure movies drenched in cold water, movies of tall cold mountains and creatures of red leathery skin and eyes of fire, vast deserts of madness and towering spikes full of evil monks clothed in thick hoods and the electrical vibrancy of the hidden unknown, and I saw myself as a maker of music, atop a vast construction of lights and gigantic speakers and with every power chord that I played, the whole structure would shake and the crowd would roar and when it was time for solos, they would go on forever, and every note was pristine and flawless and it splashed over my consciousness like the cold water that made me shiver, but the music itself was so hot and deep and heavy that it overwhelmed the icy cold of the water and my heart would burst with enthusiasm for a life of pure creation that I had yet to discover, and finally my grandmother would knock on the door and tell me that I had been inside too long and that I should come out. I would then step out from under the cold water, and I would get dressed quickly and hope that soon the waves of music would be covering me once again, like the vast blue sky I could see through the narrow window, music as heavy as black motors sprinkled with electrical fire, dense like dreams of black smoke, complex like the geometrical theorems of the Ancient Greeks, and all of it full of color like my dreams which were themselves fueled by this music. As I walked out, dressed and ready, my hair wet and disheveled, with sweat already starting to form on my brow, my grandmother would smile at me, never complaining because of the loud music, never mentioning it at all, and she would ask me what I would do that day, if it wasn’t a school day, and she would give me some money, and kiss me and send me on my way and I would walk down the stairs, happy and ready and full of music, eager to discover the world of people and streets and friends once again.

* * *

We emerged from the bathroom, passed back through the long white room that had been my grandmother’s closet, walked through her bedroom, which was still her bedroom as empty as it was, or as crowded with visions of what was no longer there, and we walked through the library and down the stairway and through the living room, the dining room and out onto the terrace, where we could hear the voices of the intruders, the girl with the yellow shorts and the cheap sandals talking to her father or her lover in a high whiny voice and the woman who was her mother or her mother in law, the one that had opened the front door for us, she was somewhere back in there, talking as well, and their voices had no meaning to me, their words held no content, other than the fact of their presence and that presence had an element of aggression, of danger, of infestation, and I simply tried to look away. My Uncle opened the lock of the metal gates and we walked out onto the sprawling garden that was not quite so sprawling anymore, not as it once had been, but which still contained doorways to other places, places too far away for my uncle to perceive them, old places that were still vibrant and just beyond the reach of my fingers.
I looked around, and I could still see what had been, the hair raising cliffs of danger, sharp inclines of dirty white walls and deep tunnels of black water, mountains covered in narrow paths that made their way among bushes of thorns and flowers, and many hidden levels of cold distance and lonely achievement, all the way to the tall wall that signified the end of the garden, the end of reality as it existed here. That wall was no longer there, which meant that reality was shrinking, or that the garden had flooded over into the city, and now there was no clear distinction between this reality and the rest, and where there had been paths and rocks and bushes and thorns, now there were more little apartments, and the lives of these apartment people were probably somehow touched by the thorns that once were there.

* * *

I looked down at an idol from ancient times, a small being of gray rock that once hid me in times of war, when all I needed was a plastic green helmet and a plastic gun to protect me from the showers of bullets that kept on coming in my direction, and I would sit behind this little gray idol, waiting for the attack to slow down, waiting for my turn to go on the offensive, sweating and waiting, waiting and sweating, under the little green helmet which was a permanent fixture on top of my disheveled semi blonde hair, holding onto my plastic rifle and looking through its sights, always carefully waiting for a sign. Sometimes I would spot my grandmother as she walked through the terrace or my mother sitting on the sofa, or even one of my cousins that had come to visit, on a day of war, and I had no way to warn them that we were under attack at the moment, and they shouldn’t cross the lawn unless they did it carefully, and there was no real way to explain what careful was to them, so I would have to run across the dangerous emptiness of the lawn and get them, at great risk to my own well being, but they were my cousins, so what else could I do, and maybe I would have a soda in the kitchen if I made it over there alive, and I would rest for a moment before I made my way back.
While I waited behind the gray idol, and made my plans for surreptitious movement, a greater war was brewing all around us, and it touched me in the distance, it touched all of us, and finally it broke my life in two distinct pieces, so that the war that I had hoped for, the one that would allow me to run and shoot and fight and jump, the war finally came, and I never got to shoot or jump or fight, but we did have to make a run across the greater lawn, my mother and me, to the other side, to the place where the sodas were made, to the mysterious North, where my grandfather lived, where there were freckled little gringos that ran around in shorts and hated strange kids like me, and the streets were full of lights and noise and pictures of cars. Someday I would come back and walk through this same garden with my Uncle, seeing things that were no longer there, and I would wonder how many different doorways there were in this little garden, and how many I had crossed and how many I had left unopened.

* * *

As my Uncle continued with his explanations of the many things that he had done to the house, and I half heartedly wondered why he wanted me to know these things, I took picture after picture after picture, and I looked over to the closed door to one of the new apartments, over in the corner, and in that corner I could still see the little dark hut where there had been an old hammock and the hammock had once been a pirate ship from which I commanded an entire fleet of ships and an army of ferocious killers. Together, the killers and me and sometimes my cousin Juan Antonio, we ravaged cities and we conquered lost kingdoms and we came back to rest in our hideout, which looked like a little dark hut with a hammock running across it and we sat in the hammock and made our plans, while we swinged lightly back and forth.
On the side of the hut there was a little bag and a little clay bowl and a small machete, and they were what remained of my tio Tono, who I barely remembered as a very old man, back when I was just learning to see and label what I saw, and because I was only learning, the things I saw were very faint and blurry, like early morning dreams that fade away as you wake up. By the time I met him, he probably saw things just as blurry as I did, not because he was learning but because he was forgetting, and he walked very slowly, ever so slowly, across the lawn, with his bowl of clay and his machete, and his loose old pants and his head bowed low and he sat in the hammock, the same hammock that would become our hideout but he simply sat and waited for supper or lunch or night, and he listened to the songs of the birds in the vast little garden, and he rested and sighed for hours, and maybe he saw the signs of death coming, like a vast army of dangers that loomed over the lawn, and maybe he hid in the little hut, like I hid behind the idol just in front of it, and maybe he saw what I saw, but he was tired of fighting and instead of making new plans and preparing new offensives and running like mad across the lawn, he simply waited and sighed and listened, until he had to wait no more, and then the hut was quiet and alone and there was only a little bowl of clay and a machete.
My grandmother would someday wait for the same storm that had taken her uncle. I looked at my own Uncle then, as he was still going over the details of his remodeling plans, and I wondered if he waited as well, and maybe his continuous monologue was just his way of forgetting that the waiting wasn’t over but it would soon come to a close, as all waiting eventually does.

* * *

I took one more look at the garden, at the square of lawn in the middle of trees and bushes and flowers, and I remembered one night, in one of those rare occasions when my grandfather was visiting and in the even rarer occasion when he had decided that we would freely talk. (This was so rare that I believed that it was the only time that it truly happened.) That night, the two of us, perfect grandfather shining with the light of foreign lands and curious grandson, we walked around in circles in the middle of the lawn, in wide circles that touched the edges of the bushes and the flowers and the idol and the bricks, and he pointed to the stars and told me about light and how fast it traveled, and he explained that a light year was a measure of distance and not of time, and he told me that it would take four years for the light from the nearest star to reach us, and when I heard him say this, I thought that it took as long for light to reach us from the nearest star as it took for my grandfather to come back to our little corner of El Salvador from the far away emptiness where he resided, and that meant that my grandfather was light from a distant star, light that had left my grandmother’s home a long time ago, light that came back every so often, with stories and gifts and tales of hardship and a pocket full of secrets that were never to be told, and, if my grandfather was the light that traveled through the vast emptiness, that made my grandmother the earth, patient, calm, robust and full of riches, waiting endlessly for its partner to return, to touch her with warmth once again, if only for a brief moment, before it had to leave again, as it surely did have to leave. This was clearly understood. If not by them, by me.
That night, my grandfather talked of light and energy and heat, and I listened and asked questions when I couldn’t understand something and then I listened some more, and later my grandfather told my grandmother that I was a very good listener and that I was very intelligent (this was long before he came to know me as a rebel, as a stubborn creature which would not allow him to rule our world, but that was so far in the future that none of us could even begin to dream about it) and my grandmother was very proud of what my grandfather had said about me, and she repeated that quote many times to me and to others, long after my grandfather had left again, back to the cold strange lands of the north, where he had somehow found a home, and then my grandmother would wait once again, for the light which had left, the light that was bound to come back, beaten and bruised and tired, from the depths of a darkness beyond the walls of the known.

* * *

As we walked back into the house, into the dark dining room which was now contaminated beyond repair by the presence of the intruders, I allowed myself to step sideways into the silence, into one of the many hidden chambers in the fading maze where my Uncle could not reach, and I vibrated out of the range of his voice and, then, finding myself quiet and alone, I went back to a night of clarity, a night when I closed my eyes and I traveled in the middle of darkness as a weightless wrath, and I found myself in a green room, a room with translucent walls and silvery columns, where the light itself was green and it didn’t seem to come from anywhere in particular, and I knew this room well, as it was part of the maze, a part that I didn’t visit with my mind, so my mind couldn’t know it, and yet it was familiar, so familiar as to offer the comfort of home. In this room was my mother and maybe other people I had never met, and I realized that it was from this room that my grandmother had flown away, in a bridge of light that cut across the sky like a brilliant rainbow of the night, and I knew then where some of her was, the part that remained, the part that refused to leave, and was still caught by secret desires and broken promises. With this knowledge, I rose above the slanted green ceiling of this strange hidden room, and I traveled through the greater labyrinth that was the city, which held infinite labyrinths within itself and was infinite as well, an infinite that contained other infinites and was itself contained, and I saw the trails of the lights of late night workers, explorers of midnight that still held onto their passion after dark, and I saw the long streets as hallways and I saw the forests as peaceful and friendly, as infested as they were by thieves and gangs and other desperate men, and I trailed over the roofs of metal and brick and tin, and I arrived at a vast cemetery, an old place that was darker than the night and as ancient as the gods that came here before the white men, and I descended into this place without fear and I found there the light that was my grandmother, the light that would not leave and I urged her to fly on. I told her that, as my grandfather had flown before, it was now her time to be released, to fly out into the vastness beyond our known mazes and find the truth that had always escaped her grasp. As I reached her with my unspoken words, I saw her rise in the middle of the darkness, and she was not in her white and blue gown anymore, and she was not in her wrinkled old body anymore, and she had no face and no smile and no eyes, but it was her and I recognized her beyond questions, and she recognized me and her liftoff lit up the cemetery like the sun coming out at night, but only a single moment, and in that moment I saw the graves and the sadness and the forgetfulness and the memories that had sunk beneath layers of mud and stone and pavement, beyond the reach of men or gods. Then she rose even higher and the endless cemetery was dark once again and I returned to where I came from and I realized that none of it had ever happened but I could still remember it and so it had the taste of truth. As I returned then, I returned now, and my Uncle was mentioning a few other repairs he had made to the dining room and I smiled at him and told him I would only take a few more pictures and then we would be done. He nodded and kept on talking.

* * *

Today, my grandmother’s house was empty. I could feel her in every corner, like a shadow on a window, or a voice behind a door, or a squeal of laughter behind a wall, but just as she was about to touch my shoulder, just as she was about to say "hola hijo" one more time and hug me and kiss my cheek, my Uncle would talk about remodeling, about repairs, about renting, about the economics of a country that was poor to begin with and seemed to be always getting poorer, and then, we would be back in a room or a kitchen or a garden, and the house remained empty and the spirit which was my grandmother was truly gone, after so many years of giving life to this strange little maze, a strange maze in which I lived many lifetimes and which now was invaded and destroyed. The little maze was back to being a house and the house had the air of death and absence and it waited in silence for its final decay, a decay which my Uncle carried within him, and which was already evident all around us, no matter how many repairs he had made or how much money he could spend. I hoped only that maybe, just maybe, another spirit would come and breath here, and with its unknowingly divine breath, bring it back to life.
But it took patience to create a maze like this, a kind of patience that was now growing more uncommon, patience to create something that most would not notice, not my Uncle who had sat in the living room complaining for half his adult life, not the people who came to pray and complained about the saints until my grandmother had to remove them, not the elegant ladies who looked down at the world from the heights of their two story houses, not the intruders who now spread their stranger dust over the kitchen and the living room, not anyone at all.
We walked out of the fading maze and left it behind us. My Uncle carried its death within his body, I carried a bit of its life within my camera and the light that was my grandmother carried its spirit within its body of dreams. The black metal gate clanged and shook, sending echoes up the red brick ramp, as I closed it one last time, and then we walked away.

The red brick ramp
and the black metal gate
that was the gateway

To the maze that was

My grandmother’s hideout,

The final chamber of her thoughts

The secret prison of her unrealized dreams.The entrance to the inner maze
that was the house
that was an extension of my grandmother
and now fades and dissolves
like her bones and her flesh and her hair.

One door open,
one door closed,
shiny red bricks
and cool shade inside.
Just as it ever was.

The corner where my grandmother ruled her world

Through half open letter, bills and photographs,

And now sits empty and forgotten,

For my grandmother has gone on

to rule other lands.

My mother, my grandmother and my uncle
Floating in the empty void
Like fragile leaves that crackle and dry
As time passes them by.

The top of the stairs
where my grandmother would stand
and issue her rulings
on distant things
that were not as they seemed.

My three cousins and me,
Juan Antonio, Roxana, me and Roberto.
Juan Antonio is trying to imitate Roberto
but he is not quick enough.

Roxana is better at it,

and Roberto is excellent at being himself.
I am testing the waters as a cowboy
and finding the life of the range pleasant
on this particular summer day.

Four empty chairs
that silently wait
for the four cousins to return,
without knowing
that when the time of cousins was over
it would never come back.
The bathroom where I drenched myself

In icy cold water

And dense heavy metal,

Screaming into the mountain ridges

That formed on the underside of my eyelids,

Dreaming that some day

I would stretch out my hand

And they would be within my reach.

The window of my grandmother’s bedroom

From which she used to survey

Our adventures in the world of the garden.

Many times I looked up in the heat of battle,

And saw her silhouette,

Next to the half open curtains.

A smiling goddess surveying her creation

And finding it pleasing.

Back when I was a soldier

And fought in many fearsome wars

Where death was all around me

And pain was a daily sight,

Too close to be ignored

Too distant to be frightful.

The gray idol that had mastered

the art of waiting

And in its silent patience,

protected me from an enemy army.

My grandmother standing in the midst

Of the garden as it once was,

And if you squeeze your eyes together

You may still see me in the corner behind her,

Protecting her from the ferocious warfare

That rages all around her

While she stands vulnerable and weak

Amidst the deadly violence.

The old rocking chair

Where my grandfather lost his balance

And his facade of perfect poise.

My grandfather Roberto,

As polished and perfect

As the light of stars that took years to arrive.
My grandfather Roberto

who finally imploded inwards

Too heavy to continue

Too ossified to change

Too proud to ask for help.

The dark abyss that ran along the eastern edge
Of the world that was my grandmother’s garden,
Where danger lurked beneath dark moist leaves.
Here I learned that this very danger
Held a whispered promise of the unspeakable.

One of the many doorways
that opened around every corner
of my grandmother's private maze.

Many times I travelled down that road

and found myself

in strange faraway places.
Maybe in one of those many voyages,

I simply never came back.

My Grandmother Antonia
As she was the last time I saw her.
She would always remember saying to me:
"First I will die,
then your mom will die,
and then you will die…"
in the darkness of a movie theater,
And I responded with an argument:
"No grandma…
we don’t really know who will die when,
and besides, you’re very young…
look how smooth your face is…"
And I ran my hand over her face

to show her it was true.
Many years later,
when her face was much less smooth,
she looked at me and said:
"I will live one more year, and then I will go.
I have done enough…"
And I smiled and understood that now it was time for her departure
And I respected her wish
And offered no argument.