A Lifetime of Sleepy Afternoons

Like most things that had ever happened, the encounter ran like clockwork, each step following another with clear and undeviating precision, like carefully etched dominoes falling in waves of inertia across a flat silver surface. First, he would call. In the midst of a sleepy afternoon, as I was laying on the light brown couch, reading a book about vagabonds and runaways, and the brave men who try to understand them.
Lorena ran towards the loud ringing sound that burst into the uneasy hot silence of my grandmother Graciela’s house. I looked straight at her as she picked up the red phone receiver, placing it against her brown cheek with the easy calm that comes from constant practice. Her wide round eyes looked straight at me with that half knowing smile that was always on her face. She nodded, in response to the trebly voice that I could barely hear coming out of the tiny speaker. She let the receiver drop slowly against her shoulder and she opened her mouth. No rush at all. Still looking at me, she said: “It’s for you…” and she pushed her lips towards me in the way that Salvadoreans do when they want to point without using their hands: lips pushed out in a simulated kiss, head pulled back in a quick sudden motion.
I stood up and walked to the phone and I immediately heard the nasal sadness of my Uncle’s voice on the other end. It sounded as if he was calling from deep in a dark forgotten well, lost and tired and hungry, his syllables echoing against the sides of the damp underground cylinder, bouncing back and forth as they crawled up to the surface, to travel up the spiral of the red cord and then all the way to the tiny speaker which was now pressed right up against my ear.
“Juan Carlos? It’s me… your Uncle…”
Earlier, my mother had called from San Francisco. She had mentioned that he would be calling me, which probably meant that she had told him that he should call me, and then she proceeded to tell me that I should see him. A sequence of artificial meetings prearranged to maintain the illusion of a happy family that never truly was, that never would be. At least not in my vicinity. Given my mother’s warning, I knew it was him, almost from the moment that the red phone rang. I maintained the sequence of the play as it was expected to proceed and I placed a touch of surprise in my voice when I answered.
“Uncle! How are you?” I could hear a slight layer of fakeness in my enthusiasm, and that made me feel embarrassed. It was too obvious, and yet I was sure that nobody would ever notice it. They were too busy faking their own enthusiasm, gliding through the predetermined scenes of their own film.
“Here, moving along, doing what we can, you know?” he said, in the only way I had ever heard him answer that question, maybe the only way he knew how. The tones of his words drooped down as the sentences progressed, as if he was sliding further down the well and the words came through weaker and weaker, and soon they would not come through at all.
“We want you to come and eat with us, we want you to come to the house,” he said in a rush, eager to complete his appointed part of the script so he could get back to the heavy silence of his bedroom.
“Yes, of course,” I said, and the impulse was to maintain the script exactly as it had been played so many times before, but I added a slight variation. I felt the resistance in my muscles as I pushed the words out, “I also want to take some pictures, I want to see the old apartment building, I want to see my grandmother’s house, maybe our old house as well…I just need to take some pictures.”
“Pictures?” he said, as if trying to locate a memory of this line in the script and coming up with nothing. Why pictures? I could sense the unspoken question in his inhale and the quick dismissal on the exhale. “Sure, that should be fine… let me see… yes, maybe on Thursday? I can pick you up on Thursday.”
“That would be perfect…can we go into the old apartment building?” I insisted. Usually I would have never asked anything of him, I would never have insisted on any request. But this was probably my one and only chance, at least for a long time, so I would have to make it count.
“Some of the apartments are rented… but the one in the back is empty, and my mom’s house… your grandmother’s house…that should be fine… your house is rented though… we can’t go in there.”
I nodded to myself. I had understood weeks before arriving here that I would not be able to achieve everything I wanted, not even a large fraction of it. There was too much to explore in this little land of smog and dirt and naked children. The more I looked upon the little country of my birth, the more it expanded to become a gigantic parallel universe that rotated slowly around the axis of my past. With every completed rotation, it became larger and larger, with a marked tendency towards the infinite. As much as I could trace, as much as I could photograph, as much I could videotape, with every placement of my attention on the details of a new chamber, of a new person, of a new corner of this vast zone of the endless labyrinth, the zone itself would become larger, El Salvador would grow right past the reach of my mind and leave me forever wanting more. So I surrendered quickly to the loss of one opportunity, having prepared for such sacrifices in advance.
“No problem. The apartment building and my grandma’s house, that would be great. Thursday is fine. I just want to take some pictures, some video…”
“Sure, sure… I’ll see you then.”
And the conversation was over before it really began. I could see Lorena’s deep black skirt and her dark brown legs moving up the stone steps that led to my Aunt’s apartment upstairs, which meant it had all taken less than a minute, maybe a little more. A car was sliding up the street outside, making the steep turn around the corner. I could hear the painful groaning of an old motor, the shaking of the doors, and all these metallic sounds were covered in a shower of bird songs and the distant sound of babies crying.

* * *

The bell rang, like a sudden buzzing explosion that echoed throughout the house and bounced from wall to wall, demanding attention. It was Thursday, around one in the afternoon. I could sense the stagnant heat of the tropical day making its way through the house, all the way up from the burning dark asphalt outside. I knew right away it was him, but I moved slowly enough to hear Ana calling me as her sandals slapped against the stone steps in quick recurrent rhythms.
“Don Juan Carlos, somebody out there is looking for you! It’s a senor.”
For Ana, men in the world were clearly and cleanly divided into two categories: “hombres”, which would wear old cheap clothes and old broken hats, and “senores” who wore expensive clothes and drove around in cars. The first kind she treated with disdain. With the second kind, she kept her disdain hidden, but it was still there, seething under the surface.
I knew already which "senor” was standing outside. I slowly got up off the little cot inside my father’s bedroom and I smiled at Ana and thanked her, letting her know that I was on my way. She nodded at me and immediately turned away. In her mind, she was already busy doing something else. I tucked my white shirt into my pants and quickly looked in the mirror to make sure my hair looked reasonably combed. I grabbed the two gifts I had for him and I walked slowly towards the front door, kissing my grandmother Graciela on the cheek on my way out. She asked me in a loud thin voice where I was going and I told her I was going out with my Uncle.
“What?” she said.
I repeated, “I’m going out with my Uncle.”
“What?” she said again.
“With my Uncle!” I said it one more time, in a voice much louder than I would have preferred to use but it was the only way that she could hear me.
She then nodded and rested her chin against her own soft neck and closed her eyes. “OK, with your Uncle. You will go to have lunch. OK. Be careful. Be very careful.” I nodded at her as well and walked up the wooden stairs.
As I stepped outside onto the terrace, I was immediately assaulted by the intense heat of the naked sunlight. There was no wind at all to compensate for the brutal rays that were pouring like invisible fire from the sky. I immediately started to sweat and I felt an intense urge to return to the cot in my father’s relatively cool bedroom. There I could lay down for the afternoon with a book and maybe sleep until the sun went down. This was just the kind of day I dreaded in El Salvador, just the kind of day that I had always tried to hide from, the kind of day that had always made me wish I could be somewhere else (and, of course, my childhood wish did come true, in ways I could never have expected.)
But even as I felt the sweat starting to slide down my forehead, I was somehow looking forward to the events of the afternoon. Not because I knew what they would be. I did know, in a vague and general way, what was going to happen, but I held onto a glimmer of hope that something, however slight, would change. I felt the taste of a game that you have played many times before, over and over, until you know each twist and turn along the way. You can see such a game coming from a distance. But maybe this time you will do something that steps outside of the pattern. Then there would be no way of knowing what would follow, no way of knowing where the game would go. That is what gave me a taste of excitement, and it was like the touch of a cool wind against the stagnant heat of endless repetition. I had no idea what this new step would be, but I felt the possibility and the possibility was enough to counteract the blazing sun against my forehead and the familiarity of the stone steps and the thin branches that extended from the tall tree in the corner all the way to a few inches from my face, and the bird songs that surrounded me and the sound of another car groaning around a steep curve further in the distance.
I slid open the heavy metal garage door with some effort, pushing with both hands as I listened to the loud piercing squeals of mechanical decay that flowed out of the rusty barrier. Then I took the final step into the vulnerable space of the outside world.
My Uncle was standing outside, leaning against his car which was diagonally parked across my grandmother’s short driveway. The first thing I noticed was that his car looked old and used. It only barely hinted at the brilliant flash of power that it once had carried. Somehow the same artifact that had once spoken of riches and class now spoke of the passing of time and the slow dispersion of all creations. Maybe time forced all masks to fall, even in the process of making new ones. I looked up at my Uncle, with his white hair and his thinning arms and his forced downward smile and it seemed that the car was his reflection, its smooth dusty surfaces held the secrets behind his tired drooping eyes.
His facial mask was deteriorating rapidly, but it still managed to cling to its place. He was wearing a white button up shirt, criss crossed with slender blue lines, and soft beige dress pants. It all seemed oddly familiar to me, as if these were the same clothes I had always seen him wear. He stepped towards me and hugged me lightly, maintaining a certain amount of distance even as he approached. I hugged him back, and very briefly I smelled his cologne which also seemed very familiar, the metallic smell carried memories of forgotten bars and meetings in noisy offices where stacks of papers waited in corners and a younger woman answered the phone with a soft voice that felt like an impersonal cold caress. He opened the passenger door of the old brown sedan and then he stepped around the front and got into the driver’s seat.
Before stepping inside myself, I waved a greeting at the guard across the street who waved back with genuine happiness, as if saying hello to an old friend, an old friend that he had only met a few hours earlier and with whom he had only spoken in short shouts from across the street. He held his black shotgun with one hand and waved with the other. I wondered if my life was as mysterious to him as the life of his employers was mysterious to me, all awash in the sound of glass shaking against blocks of ice and loud raspy laughter that smelled of alcohol and polarized Cherokees that drove up long concrete driveways into the unknown interior of opulent mansions. Maybe he saw me the same way. Maybe he wondered where I had been in the world and what I had seen in my travels, even as he smiled and waved with his thin brown arm, his teeth a thin strip of white brilliance in the midst of sweaty tanned flesh. I wished for a moment that I could simply invite him along with us, or, better yet, that I could deposit all my memories into him in one fell swoop, so that he would suddenly and irrevocably know what this strange bearded man’s life had been like, all the successes and failures, all the false starts and deceptive cadences, all the moments of clear understanding and all the deep wells of confusion, everything, all at once. Maybe then he would return the favor and I would intimately know the life of a young security guard that leaned onto the little tree across the street, smiling with sincere friendliness. Maybe it was just such a trade that held a kernel of understanding too simple to hide, too complex to speak out loud.
I turned my eyes away and I stepped into the car and looked at my Uncle with a big smile of my own. He returned the smile halfheartedly, and then he said:
“Aja, Juan Carlos… how is everything?”
It was such an open question, a question that tempted me to open it up like an old book and seek the corners that were not easily accessible, the linguistic dead ends and the trap doors that were hidden behind black walls. I looked at him before answering, at his wide wrist encased in a thick silver watch, at the thick rims of his glasses, at his permanently down turned eyes, at the thin layer of dust on the black vinyl of the car, at the security man still looking towards us and still visible to me behind my Uncle’s shoulder. I looked into my Uncle’s eyes and wondered what he would have to say if I told him how everything truly was, if I told him that I saw the sadness in him and the years of regret, that I saw the tremor of fear that hid beneath his smile. What would he say if I told him that the birds were singing strange melodies just now, a couple of meters above our heads, and that they would continue to do so long after we were gone, long after the walls of my grandmother’s house were broken down and lost to new tsunamis of life, death and uncontrollable desire. What would he say if I told him that these melodies carried as much music and intention within them as the wrinkled book on the back seat of his car, or the old tapes on his dashboard or any words that I could possibly utter, any tales that I could possibly weave. What if I told him that I felt a certain kind of sympathy for him that also had the edge of distance, that all the things I knew about him were small compared to the ones I imagined, and that they all combined to form a picture that never fully coalesced in my mind, like clouds of water and oil floating in a transparent bottle.
“Everything is good… how are you?” I said. I wondered then if he had already heard my words before I said them, heard them in his mind as the next words in the required script that we would now follow, the script that we had been following since as far as I could remember. I wondered if I would truly break away from the script or if it was too strong for me even now that I saw it, if the required sentences would be spoken and the required answers would be given and we would simply go through the motions even as the speaking mechanisms themselves slowly ground to a halt, mired in rust and biological decay. Then others would take up the job of endless repetition and the script itself would never die.
“How is your mother?” he asked as he started the car. I heard the rumble of the motor banishing the sound of the birds above me, the car shaking all around me as if it was ready to break apart into its constituent parts. I reached down to my brown backpack, simply to make sure that it was still there, on the dusty floor beneath my feet, next to a stack of old white typed papers and an empty can of Coca Cola. Then I looked out the window, at the curved slanted corner that had been the backdrop for so many of my memories, so many that were long gone, so distant and strange as to be beyond any hope of retrieval. So many that would simply keep on repeating, like the aching cries of the old car motors as they tried to make their way up the hill.
“She’s fine,” I said, knowing that he spoke with her over the phone once a week and he probably knew exactly how she was. Or at least he knew as much as he needed to know. The question was not really there to inquire for information. It was pure social gesture, a way to fill up the empty space with something other than heat and dust and slowly evaporating sweat. The car rolled back from the little driveway slowly, and then we slid down the steep incline that led to the crowded supermarket at the corner, right in front of the old presidential house.
“We’ll go to the apartments first, then to your grandmother’s…” he said and I felt that he was at a loss for words. I thought of the nature of communication, and how the linguistic contact that there could be between us was so limited, so strained, so lacking in any gracefulness or real curiosity. I sincerely felt the wish to say so much more to him but I also knew that it was not possible, it was simply beyond the scope of the options currently available. My illusory wish didn’t change the reality of these limitations anymore than it could change the corrugated texture of the tall protective walls that surrounded us. They were beyond my power. They were solid, ancient and cold. He wanted to follow the script, he had to, he had no other choice, and I needed to stay within its confines, if only to maintain the simple music of our encounter, if only to maintain the simple offer of sympathy and the repression of anger and regret. And yet our script was so restrained, so empty and flimsy, that it left us with big gaps of empty time, where only the sound of the motor or of other cars rolling by would intrude into our silence.
I looked then towards the corner supermarket with its red walls and its little crowded parking lot. A finely dressed middle aged woman with a round behind covered in expensive blue jeans was leading a couple of thin little dirty boys who were carrying her plastic shopping bags. Her movements demanded respect and held an atmosphere of arrogance around her as palpable as a dark cloud of smog. The little boys were sweating and smiling as they pulled up their arms to make sure that the white plastic bags didn’t fall. An old thin woman was sitting by a thick pillar loudly selling lottery tickets (“Loteria! Loteria! It runs tomorrow! Look at it now! Look at it!”) and a fat man with a thick black moustache was laughing at a joke a teenager had just said to him. The fat man was dressed in blue and black and held a large shotgun in his hands, and his belly was jiggling up and down under the strained buttons of his uniform. Across the street, the walls of the presidential house were as tall, old and imposing as I remembered, about three times the height of a regular house and much thicker, crowned at the top with razor sharp barbed wire and several layers of chain link fence. I could vaguely spot the light of vigilant eyes within a guard tower and the long cylinder of a sniper rifle pointing outwards from its resting place inside the darkness.
The car turned right at the corner and we moved past a Citibank and a Pizza Hut. Both buildings used to be something else but I couldn’t remember what. Now both franchises looked as if they had always been there. I could almost imagine that I was back in California, except that the sidewalks were too old and blackened and cracked like decomposing fruit, and an old fat brown woman was walking past the Pizza Hut with a wide wicker basket on her head and a little kid in her arms, her thick round belly forcing her dirty red dress up and out. There were thick and long sweat stains that ran down from her armpits to the edge of her waist. Her sandals clapped hard on the sidewalk, echoing even over the sound of all the cars and buses around us. She slipped past the uniformed men who delivered pizzas in their little black motorcycles. Their uniform was almost identical to the security guard’s, which made me realize that in San Salvador the two jobs were equivalent, requiring a similar low level of skill and a similar level of intense financial desperation. This made the security guards seem both more sympathetic and more dangerous. In El Salvador, the lines between guard and delivery man and thief were as thin as a cheap gray shirt.
“Aja Juan Carlos…” my Uncle said again, in the exact same tone that he had said it the first time, as if he had suddenly become aware that I was in the car with him. He turned slightly towards me with his downward smile full of hidden teeth, “So what have you been doing?”
“You know… the same stuff… music mostly…” I shrugged my shoulders, knowing that the fewer details I shared the better, and also knowing that there would be no further requests for details. The mention of music implied a world that my Uncle found alien and strange and beyond his comprehension, something to be left alone and looked at from afar. The only real question that could follow, in my Uncle’s world, would be “why?” But that would lead to a disturbance, which both of us knew it was better to avoid. My reasons were outside of his realm of sensibility and my own questions could only seem impertinent and rude. In any case, it was all outside the script and the script was the highest priority, overriding any glimmer of curiosity.
“Good… that’s good…” he said and nodded, letting out a breath in which I could almost taste the words “waste” and “senseless.” I could almost see them pop out from between his teeth like tiny colored bubbles floating lightly towards the windshield and breaking apart into the nothingness from which they came. Maybe it was just my imagination, just another assumption in a long chain of tiny assumptions that built a mountain of lies and illusions. But maybe it wasn’t.
We were driving past the old mansion that had been turned into a restaurant and was now an office space. Back in its days as a little vegetarian restaurant, my grandmother would bring me here so we could eat by the edge of the wide terrace and look at the cars passing by. Back then, there had been a script as well, but that script had been much broader. I could see my grandmother chewing slowly as I leaned back on a white metal chair and felt the breeze of the early afternoon on my naked arms. I could feel her smile upon me before she looked back at her plate and asked me if I wanted another drink. Now there was no restaurant, no breeze, no grandmother, no smile, no drink.
“How is your health these days?” I asked, knowing that every week when my mother talked to him, there were new complaints which were all variations of old complaints, and the only mystery to me was how he could possibly keep on piling illnesses and pains for so many years without actually dying. I thought then that my mother and him had their own script and sickness featured prominently within it. It was one thing they could discuss without fear of repercussions, a refuge from a world of contradictions and deeply held political beliefs.
“Terrible… I’m all messed up…” he said it and shook his head in a sign of self deprecating indignation. We were swinging around the great round park at the top of El Paseo, with its huge Salvadorean flag waving in the wind high up above our heads. This was the same park which had once been a great source of mystery to me, a maze of tiny corridors that promised more than they could deliver. Then it was a sanctuary when I needed solitude, when I needed a respite from the noise and curious eyes. Then a place to talk and watch and listen. Now it was only barely possible to cross the street on foot because the speeding cars never stopped flowing and they wouldn’t even think of stopping for a strange man on foot. Yet another limitation, yet another area of the maze which had been closed off.
“I thought you had started to feel better?” I asked, vaguely remembering some glimmer of good health news I had heard from my mother not too long ago, unsure of whether I was merely imagining it, or if the good news was already too old to mention, if they had already been superseded by a new batch of the bad. I could picture my mother sitting across from me at the dinner table, saying that my Uncle felt better, but this had happened so many times in almost exactly the same way, that a memory could easily be traded for a simply assumption about the future or the past. More scripts, more clockwork movement.
“When something gets better, then something gets worse… it just never stops…” he turned again towards me, nodding with his head and smiling with big round eyes that bulged like white marbles, “It’s messed up… this thing… it’s no joke…” and then he laughed with his peculiar laugh full of treble and a thick nose full of mucus.
I nodded back at him. “I bet. No joke at all…”
I looked at the pupuserias, the little dirty restaurants that lined the street around the curve that encircled the park. On the side of the road, a young woman in a deep blue skirt and striped green shirt was dumping a bucket of dirty water into the gutter. The water was splashing all over her sandaled feet, leaving little dots of moistness over her dark skin. As she tipped the wide plastic bucket, she called out to someone inside, in a very loud voice that trembled against the windows of the car and against my glasses. The woman was young and yet I had heard the same voice for decades, saying the same things, using the same melody. An older woman answered in a similar voice from behind the dark gray unpainted walls of the little building. She was giving clarifications, advice, commands. A few feet away, by a wooden post that made an attempt at holding back the large green bushes that surrounded the little establishment, a man was freely urinating. Even from the car I could see the wide arch of yellow urine as it traveled from the tip of his penis into the darkness of the tall thick bush. The man had a little leather case wrapped around his shoulder and a little white hat over his head. Maybe he was a bill collector, maybe he worked for the government. As he peed, he turned towards the young woman and leered at her, maybe he was hoping that she would turn to look at his display, but she was too busy to notice.
“We’re all in trouble, in one way or another, your cousin Roxana has some kind of problem in her jaw, your aunt has trouble with her heart and her pressure, I have my heart, my intestine, my depression… it just never stops… and it never really seems to get better…” The words flowed out of him with the easy fluency of years of rehearsal. This was almost word for word the same speech I had heard from him when he used to sit with my grandmother before lunch, laying back on the old green sofa with an unopened newspaper in his hands, the same speech he probably delivered to my mother during their weekly exchanges, maybe the same speech he told himself every night before going to sleep.
“I’m very sorry to hear that Uncle… I hope things will get better… truly better…” I said it and I knew they were just empty hopes. Something else was happening, something for which I didn’t have a word, but it was no less real for being nameless. Against that something I had no easy remedy, and even if I had had one, my Uncle would not take it from me. He would never accept any kind of advice from someone he considered an utter failure. First you make the money, then you can give the advice. Otherwise you better stay still and quiet and hope for the best. So all I could offer were words without meaning, wishes without a real intent.
“What about you? How are you doing?” he asked, once again turning towards me as we rolled down El Paseo, past the old pharmacy where I used to buy condoms by the box so we could quickly burn right through them with Dilcia, past the old Chinese restaurant where we used to sit and talk about the hidden nature of the world while chewing on large fried wontons, past the pharmacy where I used to buy comic books and little dollar novels that were not meant for little kids and that was precisely what made them so alluring.
“I’m doing good… you know, making music and things like that…” I said again, knowing that my words were as pointless as ever, that they were like seeds dropped in the ocean, floating forever outward, without ever finding a place to rest.
“Good… good… “ he nodded, once again, just as he had before, unable to find anything to add to his simple show of approval. “We’re going to go to the apartments first…”
I smiled at him with real warmth for a moment and then I acted like it was the first time he had said it. “Good! Thanks for doing this!”
“Of course man… of course…” he said and then he turned to me briefly, maybe imagining that we were old friends, imagining that we had shared a lifetime of sleepy afternoons and easy flowing camaraderie. Maybe we truly were friends, in a mysterious way that just didn’t fit my preconceived notions of friendship. Maybe there were simply different scripts for different friends and as long as you remained faithful to the particular script of your friendship, then your friend would sit next to you smiling, and the car would keep on rolling down El Paseo, forever on its way to an old abandoned house full of ghosts.

* * *

I was sitting in the dining room of my home in California, going over a magazine while chewing on a cheese sandwich, when my mother came in with a worried look on her face.
“Your Uncle sounds more depressed than ever. He seems so low that I am afraid for him. He doesn’t want to take his pills, he doesn’t want to exercise, he doesn’t want to do anything at all. He just wants to lie down in the darkness without moving. It is very sad. I talk to him. I try to make him see that there are still things to live for. I try to get him to do something. But nothing seems to work.”
I looked at her and I could see the evident concern in her eyes. For some unexamined reason, it was always slightly strange for me to realize the caring that truly existed between them. In most ways that I could see, they were so different from each other that I found it hard to understand that they had come from the same species, much less from the same womb.
My mother I had always known as a proud and enthusiastic woman, always ready to work on a new project, always looking for new ways to get herself into new situations, new adventures, new experiences. She was idealistic in a way that I sometimes found to be sentimental, but still I could accept it and feel the trace of sincerity in her ideals. She was stubborn but she ultimately changed through time in ways that most people would have found surprising, unexpected. If I didn’t find these changes surprising it was only because I had grown used to them. They had become like the night and the day, like the bright blue sky and the afternoon of dark clouds and cold rain drops, changes that were to be expected, changes that simply formed the background for our lives. Once my mother had rebuilt our house every few months, adding rooms, creating new windows, tearing down old walls and building new ones. When she had no more houses to rebuild, she began to rebuild her ideas, her hopes, her dreams. One way or another, the rebuilding would continue.
My Uncle, on the other hand, was not enthusiastic at all, not for ideals, not for wishes, not for anything at all. He would clearly and emphatically state that the only thing he cared about, the only thing anyone should ever care about, no matter who they were or where they came from, was money. Money, signified in him by a simple muddhra: the thumb joined with the index finger and the hand then turned around, palm upwards. Add a little shake, and there it was: the true nature of life, the only thing worth fighting for, the only treasure worth acquiring.
For as long as I had been aware of him, he had been on an endless quest for this elusive prize, and, parallel to this constant goal, he had tried, as best he could, to present himself as one who had already attained it. He bought expensive cars, expensive watches, expensive dark glasses. He carried himself with the air of success and the people around him responded to the image. His various projects were always pointing towards that single bottom line.
He lacked the sentimental ideals of my mother. Moreover, he found them distasteful and contrary to his interests (“If the leftists come to power they will raise taxes! They will take away my houses! They will take away yours! Then what will you say?”) In the leftists that my mother admired, he saw an enduring dark threat. Given the chance, they might take away his image, they might take away his own limited power, they might take away the little sliver of color that he could still recognize as his life.
He was permanently enraged because the world itself refused to open up its inner gates and offer him the single thing he craved. He had never deviated from this single obsessive endeavor. His body had simply grown older and slower, and, as time seemed to mark itself by repeated failures, his enthusiasm for even this simple ideal had waned until he didn’t himself believe it was attainable anymore.
And yet, somehow, perhaps simply by their genetic closeness, or more likely because of the years of physical closeness that had marked their early childhood, my mother and my Uncle maintained a kind of love for each other that continuously escaped my grasp. If I didn’t purposefully place my attention on it, and then allow my mind to be invaded my visions of a brother and a sister playfully wrestling in a dusty patio of San Salvador, then I couldn’t see this love at all. When it suddenly made an appearance before me, when it suddenly sprang to life all over her face, like a bright red firefly buzzing up out of her eyes, it was always a kind of electric shock to my own sense of the possible. Yes, she loved him, in spite of or maybe because of his monotonous nature.
Here she was, standing in front of me, with a look of desperation in her eyes and it was all for him, for a man I had mostly dismissed from my thoughts since I was a teenager and yet here he was, alive and all over my mother’s face. I looked closely into her pronounced wrinkles of worry and sadness. In there, in the crevices that painted her emotions on the canvas of her flesh, I saw a question. Maybe it wasn’t there at all. Maybe it was just a mirage of my own mind, trying to find a place to grip tightly with my invisible hands. But I chose to see the question in her silent movements, and I proceeded to answer it, in a calm and systematic voice.
“He must do something then,” I said, “something truly different, something startling, something that really pulls him back out of the path that he is in.”
“Like what?” she asked me with more than a hint of curiosity, her eyes wide open, her hands pressing against the side of the kitchen counter.
“I don’t know… he could find a lover… a much younger girl that would really love him and remind him of the things he has forgotten.” When I said it, I pictured the men that used to drink with my Dad, the ones who would brag about the young girls they had on the side, hidden away in some dark apartment in the suburbs, “los culitos”, “the little “asses.” I could see that this made them very happy and I was just starting to understand that there might be more to it than first had met my eyes. I pictured the old apartment number three where the mysterious man would bring his women, eager young women with skin that was brown and sweaty and hidden by dark curtains. I pictured the lusty laughter of drunk men sifting through cigarette smoke and dancing to loud disco music that made the walls shake. I pictured a young girl in a faded brown skirt looking up at my Uncle and maybe seeing in him that which I myself could not see. Just because I couldn’t see it, it surely didn’t mean that it wasn’t there. Maybe it just needed to find its way back to the surface.
“Or he could start smoking pot… that might shake aside the cobwebs in his mind and let him look upon the world again in a fresh manner.” I pictured my Uncle leaning back in the darkness of his room, sucking on a thick white joint. I could see that at first he wouldn’t like it, at first it would just be like a strange idea that had taken shape in his hands and was now slowly burning away and turning into smoke as he sucked it into his lungs. But then a certain smile would crawl across his face, and then the smile would grow bigger, and maybe he would then start to laugh in a way I had never heard, in a way that none of us had ever heard, and his chest would shake with the laughter and my Aunt would come in and ask if he was alright, for surely it couldn’t be a normal thing to laugh so much and so hard.
“Or he could start to work…maybe on some kind of artwork, something he could do with his hands…” and I pictured him then with pieces of wood of many colors, arranging them all over my grandmother’s backyard, combining them in different structures that made no sense and served no purpose, placing them against each other and then nailing them together, creating little buildings that housed nothing other than a thirst that had never been quenched. I could see him sitting on the grass staring at them, letting his eyes wander over the smooth surfaces and the sharp corners.
Even as I saw these images I knew they would never come to pass. They simply would not, could not, touch the realm of the possible with their weak fingers of gauze. My Uncle would not ever sit on the grass and smile, observing a useless structure he had carefully created. My Uncle would not hold a young brown girl in his arms and kiss her, tasting salt and tortillas on her long wet tongue. My Uncle would not sit in the shade of his elegant house and smoke on a marijuana joint, his eyes growing large and red and full of nonsensical wisdom. These things were so remote as to be almost inconceivable, and they faded into oblivion as soon as I tried to hold them in my mind.
My mother looked directly at me with an air of seriousness. I could tell that she was not angry at my pronunciations, even if she found them inherently ludicrous (as maybe they were.) She could tell that, as patently absurd as they were, there was some truth in them, like a tiny spoonful of sugar in a pot full of black coffee.
“You mean some kind of handcraft?” she said in a voice that seemed to hold some curiosity.
“Sure, something with his hands, something he can build…”
She shook her head then, and the concern reappeared after the brief interruption. “He will never do such things… even if he wanted to do them, his wife, your Aunt… your cousins… they would laugh at him if he tried to work on something, it can never happen…they just wouldn’t let him do it…”
I shrugged my shoulders, letting her know that I ultimately was not really concerned with what happened. I was only trying to offer the best advice I could give. My Uncle was a figure too distant and too fixed, more like a strange tale that we, my mother and I, ran over when we found some time to talk. Something to peruse over dinner and then dismiss. Something to forget until there was nothing else to dream about. He was not real enough for me to feel the pain that radiated from his dark and lonely room. But I had never wrestled with him, I had never seen him strong and young and proud, I had never laughed at his jokes and he had never laughed at mine.
“It would definitely be weird… very weird for him to do anything like this… but whatever he does, it has to be weird…it has to very weird and strange if it’s going to work…it has to stand markedly outside of what is expected of him… of what he expects from himself… as long as he continues to do what he has always done, the results will be the same. As long as the same things happen, the same things will happen in return. The same causes will lead to the same effects will lead to the same causes. As simple as that.”
I pictured an old wooden wheel turning over and over in the wind, slowly getting destroyed by the rain, cracking here and there, but still spinning, turning and turning until the shape had withered to a soft cracked consistency full of worms, smelling of shit, death and forgetfulness. Then it would not turn anymore. Then there would only be the wind and a decomposing shape that had once been a wooden wheel.
She laughed, shaking her head, pleased at the irreverence of my suggestions.
“A young lover… marijuana… artwork…I will tell him some day that those are your prescriptions for him!”
I laughed with her, picturing how they would laugh, how they would all say: “ah Juan Carlos… he is so crazy…”
“Yeah, tell him… at least tell him…that’s the least we can do, right?” I said it in the midst of my own laughter.
And she did tell him, about six months later. As she described it to me, they all laughed together as expected, loud exhalations going around in circles all over the old dining room table where we used to eat dark turkey and rice with cheese and green peas. They all said, one after the other:
“Ah Juan Carlos… so crazy!”
Just as we had expected, in fact, so close to our expectations that it had a touch of the eternal within it, a touch of the perpetual motion machine that produced our destiny within its secret rusty grinding wheels. After the laughter died down, the conversation changed and it was all soon forgotten. But there was something in my Uncle’s reaction that was not as expected at all. Something small and yet worth noting. Something that carried the breeze of other worlds in its flash of life.
She told me that he looked at her, without laughing or smiling, and he said:
“That’s what Juan Carlos says? Is that what he says?”
And she nodded.
“I have thought many times of doing something with my hands…” he said.
And she nodded again. But everyone was laughing, so their conversation couldn’t continue and that single moment of curiosity was carried away in the wings of derisive laughter to a place where it could no longer be reached. It was all as expected, like a little piece of clockwork theater following its programmed steps along its well used grooves, grinding its way to one final stop.
When I heard of all this, I felt a pang of sadness, a certain kind of empathy for someone I was supposed to love but I could only barely imagine. I wondered if there was some way I could truly help him. But I knew that there truly wasn’t any way to reach him. He was as distant from me as the farthest star. Nonetheless, maybe suffering from the same kind of idealistic sentimentality I had often observed in my mother, I truly wished that there was.

* * *

The car came to a stop in front of the closed sliding garage door, white and light green and heavy like the hot air that surrounded it. My Uncle pushed it open, heaving slightly with the effort. The house was like any other house in the middle class suburbs. Two floors, a little yard in front that had now been turned into an apartment, a tall white wall that covered the facade in its whiteness but didn’t manage to quite hide it all, a triangled roof that peeked over the wall in a last desperate attempt to establish its presence. The same as any other, the same as all of them.
If I had simply been driving down this little side street on my way to some other place, maybe listening to music, maybe talking to my father or a friend, maybe dreaming of possibilities that ran like spider webs over the shifting canvas of my mind, maybe trying to peer through the unbreakable barrier of otherness that was taller than any wall and much heavier than any metal gate, if I had been just passing by while dreaming of these or other things, I would probably not have given this one house more than a passing thought. Just another middle class house, in another little suburb of San Salvador. Somewhere around the corner there would be the sound of kids playing, screaming as they ran after a plastic ball or after each other, and a TV blaring with the sounds of soccer, and a ranchera celebrating ultimate sadness and desperation, and a loud dog barking away at his own existence and the sound of cars starting and turning off, and buses in the distance groaning under their human load, and nothing else. The questions would be so many that there might as well be none. The answers would be slow in coming. And so my eyes would turn away quickly, on to the next house, which would be just the same as the last.
But this particular driveway, as covered as it now was by the markings of time and the false safety of a tall wall and a metal gateway, this driveway summoned deep visions within me.
Dreams of sitting on the little wall by the front lawn, lighting firecrackers with my younger cousin, Juan Antonio, passing the wick over a candle and watching it start its frenzied run towards explosive death, and then running ourselves towards the street to throw them, gyrating head over heels into the center of the asphalt expanse, where they would swiftly transform into ripples of newspaper covered in soot, all in the midst of a loud pop and a cloud of grayish smoke.
Dreams of my older cousin lighting huge fire cracker machine guns, all wrapped in red cellophane which somehow made them more frightening, as if the redness invoked the blood of true destruction and the real death of the black machine guns which were being fired not too far away in the depths of the mountains and the “quebradas.” He would light them up with a lit cigarette in the middle of the street and then he would run towards us laughing in high nasal squeaks, and the red and black snakes exploded in terrifying sequences of burning white and rapid violet fire.
Dreams of my father coming to get me in the middle of dinner. My aunt would walk towards the door and then his voice and her voice mingled into a single message that was hidden from me by fear and false hopes, and finally the words “Juan Carlos, your father is here to get you” would break through my last flimsy sanctuary. He was mad already at the forced imposition of having to come all the way here in the middle of the Christmas celebration, all the way to the house of the family that saw him as the villain in a story they couldn’t begin to understand, coming all the way here in the middle of clouds of firecracker explosions and cars driving wildly to reach yet another place where happiness could finally be found, coming all the way here so that I could spend midnight with him and his family, for midnight was the only moment that truly mattered, and all the celebrations and all the music and all the drinking and all the laughing, it all led to that one moment, when the firecrackers would be so loud that they would make the walls shake and everybody would stand up and say “Merry Christmas!” and they would all hug each other. For a moment time appeared to stop, framed in loud explosions and tight hugs, only to begin again with a sense of confusion and uneasiness about what step to take next. How would this merriness be accomplished? Or was it already over and its death had been sealed with a hug?
Standing here brought me the taste of my own quiet tears when my father came to get me, for as much as I disliked to be in my Uncle’s house, I disliked my father’s family even more (not through any fault of their own, simply because in the great spectrum that separated the truly mine that lived within my chest and the truly Other that was hiding behind so many walls and dark nights of shining stars, my father’s family was much, much further away. That, in and of itself, made them more strange and frightening.)
Dreams of grasping at my mother’s sleeve and then meeting her look of helplessness. A deal had been made between them and I had to go, there was no other recourse, no other solution, no place to hide. So I would stand up and walk away, to light firecrackers in another driveway, to listen to different jokes, to be hugged by stranger’s arms when midnight came along.
We stepped around the half open garage door together and then he closed it behind us. He had in his hands the two pictures I had brought him as gifts, square portraits of him and my Aunt, processed to become shiny and colorful, to hint at the pure brightness in life that they had apparently lost. I was certain that they would be completely forgotten within a few hours, maybe even sooner, misplaced among all the other debris that embodied their trail of disjointed memories.
We walked up the walkway, covered in narrow red bricks with sharp edges that sank into gray concrete. Then I spotted the old bronze statue, the same one that had sat in my grandmother’s house for so many years. A nude black woman, leaning back completely exposed, unafraid to show every detail of her alluring physical presence. The bronze flesh was now wounded and marked. White lines and splotches covered the dirty bronze I had once admired, as if the transfer from one chamber to another had been too much for the naked beauty and now her body showed the wounds of the shock. I pointed her out to my Uncle, checking to make sure that it was in fact the same one and not just a copy.
“Yes, it is the same one. Your mother was going to sell her… and she would have gotten a lot of money for it… you understand me? A lot of money! But the damned artist forgot to sign it, and without his signature, the thing is worthless… and so now, here it is. The same one indeed.“
I nodded, realizing that where I saw a naked bronze beauty reclining in an eternal moment of gentle pleasure and fearless vulnerability, he saw riches and rewards, or, in this case, the lack of them.
As we stepped towards the front door of the house, I could hear the familiar slapping of sandals against the smooth white bricks that covered the lower floor.
“Aja Juan Carlos!” my Aunt said, coming to greet me with a big smile that stretched so far towards her nose that it threatened to swallow it in one sudden lethal attack of merriment. “How are you? Huh? You’re getting very fat, huh?” and then she hugged me lightly. I kissed her cheek which puffed out like a little ping pong ball covered in skin colored elastic and I said:
“Good, I’m good…”
“Good!” she said and laughed with the loud aggressive sound that I felt within me as an integral element of this house, as integral as the bricks and the walls and the long dining room table. If the house were to be abandoned some day, somebody who walked through its empty rooms would probably still hear the echo of her laughter bouncing off of the dilapidated walls. The laughter indeed echoed through the house now as I stepped inside, just as I smiled back at her, looking at the mural of family pictures behind her, and more pictures all over an upright brown piano that had gone to seed because nobody here had ever learned to play it. (Once I pressed my fingers on it, and the keys shivered under my touch, shaking left and right, and the sounds that came out where like little whimpers, not strong enough to be calls for help, not weak enough to be simply pathetic.)
My Uncle walked in ahead of me and headed straight for the little living room by the glass doors in the back that led to the backyard and the pool. I followed and immediately was overwhelmed by a strong smell of urine. My aunt was already walking back towards the kitchen where she was always hard at work, at least whenever I came here which had almost always been at lunchtime. My uncle, suddenly assaulted by the same pungent aroma that assaulted me, called out to her:
“Gladis! You didn’t clean up after the dog?”
“It’s not my dog! He pees over and over… as soon as you clean up one mess, there’s two more! You try it! You clean up after him! I give up!”
Her response came with the ameliorating tones of a joke, but also with an undercurrent of real anger. I looked over towards her by the door of the kitchen and I saw her shaking her head in disbelief, then she looked at me and shook her head some more, spreading open her mouth in the same broad smile as always.
I looked down at the shiny white floor and narrowly avoided a nearly transparent puddle of urine that was still slowly spreading over the flat surface. A few feet away was the culprit: a tiny white dog that was so old that his legs no longer worked. Every time he tried to stand up, the legs would flatten out underneath him, and he would whimper with frustration and shame.
His fur was like bubbles of cotton, only slightly marked by dirt. His eyes were dark and bulging. His nose was pink and it would flare out slightly as he whimpered. Even as I looked at him in his helpless situation, another puddle of urine was forming underneath him. The little dog looked up at me sideways in a perfect simulation of embarrassment. My Uncle switched routes and came back to where the dog was, stepping slowly and lazily around the puddles.
“Look at him… he’s fifteen years old… he’s barely alive anymore…” As he talked, he picked the dog up and held him with a tenderness that I had never seen in him, certainly not towards me, not even for his own wife or children. He held the little white dog closely in his arms and smiled at me, pressing his cheek against the dirty white cotton fur. He raised it higher and pushed it slightly towards me, as if he was showing me the most precious thing in the world that was slowly fading away in his hands. I smiled at him and at the little dog and I reached out to run my hand over its head. It whimpered back at me with big scared round eyes.
“He can’t walk anymore…”
My aunt was coming back towards us. She laughed again, and added her own commentary:
“That dog is the worst! He can’t stop peeing! He can’t walk! He’s not good for anything! But that’s the thing he loves most of in the world! Can you believe it Juan Carlos? You won’t see him hugging me! You won’t see him hugging his own sons even! But look at him with that dammed dog! Can you believe it?” And she laughed again, as loud as ever.
I nodded and kept on petting the little dog’s head. I looked up at my Uncle and his eyes were fixed on the treasure in his arms. His face was down turned with a mixture of love and sadness that sent shivers through my body, a kind of empathy that I couldn’t quite place, a raw sadness that seemed to bubble up from deep within me and spread through my chest and down my body, all the way to the tips of my fingers. As I looked at him, the sensations grew stronger and I barely resisted the urge to look away. Maybe realizing that he was showing too much of himself, he put the dog down, almost right on top of the transparent puddle that was still spreading over the white bricks. Then he turned around.
“Come and sit down for a moment. I’ll show you the pictures in a few minutes.”
I nodded and followed, still trying to not breathe too hard because the smell of urine was overwhelming. I could see that they, my Uncle and my Aunt, had already grown used to it, just like they had grown used to each other, to a life which was mostly an endless cycle of sun and shade, stress and sleep, boredom and terror, despair and fake dreams. I sat on the large comfortable brown couch that faced the large glass doors, looking at the reflection of the little pool in the back, light blue water swaying under the light of the sun. I exhaled loudly. The smell wasn’t as strong here and I felt a bit relieved.
“Aja Juan Carlos…” my Uncle said and I smiled back at him as I had done already so many times in the last hour. The house was beautiful, a construction of individual chambers full of possibilities. I couldn’t stop myself from thinking of all the things that I could do with a house like this, how I would organize it, how I would find the people that would discover within these walls a new place to work. The thought was soon dispersed by a new wave of strong urine smell coming over me from behind my back.
My Uncle raised the newspaper and looked at it while I looked once again at the little pool behind the glass doors. Tiny waves rolled across the calm surface as large green leaves danced lazily against a backdrop of gray and white. He scanned the headlines of the newspaper quickly. It was more like a reflexive movement than actual reading. I listened to the birds that scampered over the mossy back wall, calling to each other in quick songs that flashed into my mind like tiny complex spirals of invisible light. The pool was a bright blue color in the midst of the light green of the leaves and the bright yellows and oranges of the flowers. Again I thought that the house offered so many possibilities, and yet my Uncle wouldn’t even look outside, his head was turned towards the newspaper without truly reading anything inside. Maybe all he could see across the headlines was bad news and, since they were all bad news, the newspaper was only there as a daily reminder that more bad news were on the way. I turned my attention back towards him and he smiled at me, as if noticing that I was there for the first time.
“You want to read the newspaper?” he said, and I shook my head.
“No, not really…”, I placed my backpack on the floor in front of me and took out my camera. “But I do want to take some pictures…”
He nodded. By this point, he was very aware of my penchant for taking pictures of things that should have remained forgotten, things that he had walked by for years without ever giving them a second thought. And yet maybe it struck him as even stranger that my curiosity would apply even to his own house.
“Do you want to see the pictures of my mom?”
“Yes, “ I said, with eager enthusiasm as I snapped a quick picture of him looking at me, “I would like that very much.”
He set the newspaper aside and stood up, with a loud painful exhalation. I inhaled as well, but soon regretted it as I felt my lungs fill up with the stench of dog urine. I stood up and followed him to the darker living room just a few steps away. A memory of my cousin Roxana dancing to “Night Fever” with two of her friends flashed across my mind. I could see their little skinny arms gyrating in unison, red cheeked faces mouthing the words of the song. I wondered how long had it been since anyone danced on these shiny white bricks.

* * *

“I’m sure you’ll recognize this painting…”
It was one that I knew well, the same one that had hung over my grandmother’s head for decades, like a secret djinn of the past trapped in a cage of flattened oil. It dominated the main wall of her elegant living room, placed precisely over the dark green sofa where she sat down to go through her mail and talk to her many visitors. In the landscape of colors that was its surface, she was younger than I remembered her, maybe younger than I had ever known her. She was wearing a dark blue dress and a long elegant necklace that reached like a dead snake towards her chest. Her hair was pushed up into a black ball that faded into the nondescript background. She looked towards me with soft eyes that managed a perfect combination of dignified restraint and warm tenderness.
I looked at her as she stood before me, magical in her defiance of death, embraced by the static touch of eternal youth. I could feel her reaching out towards me. Maybe here was the woman that first saw me as a bubbling package of soft flesh and warm spit, crying and gurgling my way into her reality. Maybe, just as she was in the painting, with the same hands and arms that bore the mark of a paintbrush where I had once seen wrinkles, she had once cradled me in her arms and talked to me in nonsensical syllables, maybe she had opened her hidden inner sanctum to me in a mysterious way that neither of us could understand as it happened, and yet we both felt it, warm and burning, like a cord of transparent light stretched firmly between our hearts. I stared into the painting, feeling it move slightly around the corners of my eyes, feeling time dissolve just a little around the edges of its frame.
My Uncle stood aside in silence, maybe wondering what I saw in the old painting, maybe just staring at it himself. Maybe other pictures flashed through his mind, glimpses of forgotten chambers that I would never be able to explore, people and places that had vanished without leaving an oil painting behind.

* * *

I moved on to the next painting, which was of a much younger woman, red lips pursed forward in a slight nod to seduction, a dress so white and light that it faded away into the background, like the afterglow of memories that rapidly slipped away.
I imagined, only for a moment, that this woman was my grandmother as well. I imagined that this is how my grandfather had once seen her, back when he was young and strong and full of dreams. Back then, he had taken her for his own, in the only way that he knew of, the only way he had been shown, the only way that seemed to be available. Maybe this was how he had seen her as she woke up between his arms one lazy afternoon. Her lips would have been pursed just like in the painting, and they would have reached eagerly towards his thick sweaty neck. Even then, in the arms of the woman he loved, my grandfather would have been already resenting the constant heat of El Salvador, the loneliness of being away from the centers of lights and sounds and crowds and history. Even then he was already sinking into the certainty that somewhere, somehow, real things did indeed happen and he would find his way there, sooner than later. Maybe her little kiss on his sweaty dark neck could make it all vanish for a moment, and maybe for that one moment, he could look down at her and pull her into his arms. Right then he would know that this girl did indeed love him, and that this was happening right here and now, as much as it could ever happen anywhere. In that tiny bubble of perception, he would know that there was nowhere else to go, nowhere to escape to, no place to search for, no higher land to explore. But soon, little kisses and other gifts would not be enough and my grandmother would be left to find the dignity that there was in loneliness, the kind of loneliness that comes with two little crying babies and letters that jump across oceans only to say nothing. My grandfather would then have to find the pain that there was in utter defeat, in cold nights when your whole life comes crashing down around you and everything disappears into a swirling vortex of raindrops and lightning, and yet you find that you are still alive to feel it and you desperately wish that you weren’t, you desperately wish that you could yourself disappear.
But all of that would happen much later. By then her lips would not be so small and thin and seductive, and she wouldn’t be so young, and he wouldn’t allow his weak heart to fall into the hands of voracious dreams, tempered as it was by the shadow of great disappointment.
In fact, it was all only a moment of confusion and extrapolated memories from broken phrases and slight allusions. The picture was not of my grandmother at all. It was my aunt, the same one that called from the kitchen just now, the same one that held reign over this house of decaying luxury with her loud bursts of hungry laughter. Maybe her lips had kissed a sweaty neck in an afternoon that slowly descended into a night full of mosquitoes and the barking of distant dogs, but that neck that she had kissed had belonged to my uncle. And my uncle had not fallen for dreams of faraway lands and hidden centers of light and sound and history. He had remained with her, eager to fulfill whispered promises that quickly dwindled into ribbons of regret and blank sadness. Now they were alone together, slowly swimming their way into the fading future amidst clouds of dog urine and unspoken disappointment.
Two sides of the same coin. My grandfather and my Uncle. The one who left and the one who stayed. Neither had been pleased with the final result. They both made their choices and found out that both roads led to a dark room without windows, where the clock slowly ticked away the remaining rays of light.
I turned towards the stairway, trying to avoid the multiplying puddles of urine as I could still hear the little white dog whimpering close by. His little white body reminded me of the little dog of the Tarot, the one that tries to warn the Fool that he is about to jump off a cliff only to be ignored. Forever barking at the heels of impetuous youthfulness, forever unable to make his barking heard about the glowing sounds of the landscape that spread beyond the Fool’s upturned face. This dog couldn’t follow the Fool in his adventure, this dog was too old and weak and battered. The Fool would be left alone in his dangerous journey or he would simply have no journey at all, and he would have to stay and clean after a little creature who had failed in his one and only mission.

* * *

I focused on the stairway which was covered in elegantly framed paintings. Many of them were nudes that my mother had painted many years ago. I could vaguely remember seeing her pack them up as gifts for when she came to visit.
“They like nudes… that’s all they like… they like to have nudes all over the house… so that’s what I bring them…”
I looked at the skinny woman sitting on a stool, her naked back towards me, her left arm awkwardly bent, maybe to hold her own heart in place. I looked at the bold woman in pink and green moving forward like a strong warrior with solid limbs like tree trunks and eyes of burning pride. They were like windows into worlds that the inhabitants of this house would never touch again. Maybe that’s what they saw in them, windows into distant sealed chambers where desire was still vibrant, chambers traced in careful pencil strokes and dashes of watercolor.
I looked at the steps themselves, and I could vaguely remember running up to find a place of safety in my cousin’s room, where I could dig through his pile of comic books, a treasure trove of wrinkled adventure. Unlike my own, his comics were all mixed together, cartoons with superheroes, cowboys with horror, old mangled coverless books with shiny new ones. It was clear to me that he didn’t love them in the way that I did. His heart didn’t beat with expectation as he ran his fingers over their shiny covers, trying to ingest their contents through the smooth pink tips. These were forgotten artifacts of an afternoon heavy with boredom, they had been forgotten before they were ever remembered, and now they were piled onto each other like garbage that refused to finally leave the house. I would roam through them nonetheless, eager to find that which I had never encountered, that shiny thread of promise that hid behind every new cover, behind big letters that proclaimed a new problem for Superman to solve, a new horror for The Specter to avenge, a new conundrum for Spider Man to untangle. It was precisely in the randomness of my cousin’s choices that I found hope and an alluring sense of excited wonder.
I would spend the main part of those rare afternoons here, sitting on Juan Antonio’s bed, slowly making my way through his huge pile of comics. Every once in a while, we would go out on the terrace and play with his own plastic men, or act out some story that I would invent on the spot, directing him in his movements like another plastic man made of darkened flesh and rolling eyes. But these stories were always shorter and simpler than the wars in the dark garden, as I knew that soon there would come a loud honking from the street and it would be time for me to go. As I left, I would be certain that I had been just about to discover the one comic book that I had been searching for, the one that left all the others far behind, the fragment of knowledge which could be a solid foundation for all the other fragments that I had already found. The rock upon which the temple could be built, all crowded with pink and green nude women, staring at me with eyes that dared me to uncover their mystery.

* * *

The steps looked solid and dark as always, but the taste of their promise was different now. My Uncle passed by me and indicated that I should follow. He had things to show me and he knew exactly what they were. As I walked up, I could hear my Aunt moving around in the kitchen below, shifting pots around, banging them against each other like a tiny percussion orchestra. And I could hear the little dog whimpering desperately because his little white legs would not do what they were supposed to do and he had an urgent need to pee once again.
My Uncle moved quickly up the steps and I followed right behind. He led me straight to a framed newspaper page where I could see my grandmother, much older and thinner than I remembered her, accepting a large scroll printed with golden letters. My Uncle pointed at the photograph and said:
“Look, that’s an award she received on the year before she left us…”
The man offering the award was dressed in an elegant dark blue suit and he was looking at my grandmother with an air of precious seriousness. There were other men behind her and around her, all dressed just as elegantly, all shining with the power and brilliance that comes with newly pressed clothes and bright lights. In the middle of them, my grandmother looked even smaller and weaker than she was. I could sense the great effort that had brought her out in public, even at that late stage. I could sense how much pain she had gone through to arrange her hair and her makeup just the way she liked them. I could sense how desperate she had been, as she stood on that stage, and listened to various speeches that clacked like the sound of an old typewriter, to simply be back home, back in her living room, going through new and old letters, bills, photographs, calling for Manuel (or the new security guard that might as well have been Manuel) to get her some more bread or fruit, how desperate to give her gentle advice to my Uncle who was depressed once again, how desperate to talk to her faraway daughter on her old large white phone that was longer than her own head, desperate to simply read slowly from another fundamentalist christian book, and dream with the pleasures of an eternal heaven where her faith would finally be rewarded, trying to swiftly set all her own recurrent doubts aside.
And yet she had made the effort, and they had all been pleased to see her and maybe even listen to her for a few moments (as she certainly wrote out a short speech in her nearly unreadable shaky handwriting in preparation for this event and maybe she read it out loud, in a thin loving voice that required no clarity to carry its message.) My Uncle had been pleased enough with the whole event to keep and frame the newspaper page, a reminder that so many years after she left public life, the public still remembered her fondly, or at least fondly enough to go through the process of staging a big event like this one.
My grandmother, as always, had come through for all those that needed her. And when the lights were finally turned off, and the men in elegant suits had finally turned into just another memory, one more among thousands, and the noise had finally dwindled down, and the applause had dissipated into restless silence, and when she was home and alone once again, then she would finally rest and feel pleased herself for completing one more effort among many, one more act before the curtain came crashing down.

* * *

The next picture was the centerpiece of a little altar, a compendium of photographs carefully places together upon a small table covered in a white tablecloth. Here she was more like my grandmother than I even remembered, more like the grandmother of my oldest memories, the raw image that fleshed out the word “grandmother” within me and made it come alive. In faded black and white, the color of the true past before my eyes bathed the world in rainbow colors through tears without reason, she looked to the side with a big smile that spoke of calm tenderness and a sense of overarching pride.
This was the time of being “La Madrecita”, the little mother to so many through the radiating language of radio. I could see her sitting behind a large silver microphone, telling her little stories and her little poems to thousands of kids that would idealize her as the mother that they wished they had, the Platonic ideal of a mother who was always patient, always loving, always right. Maybe nobody truly had such a mother, for it was easy to be perfect in short bursts of modulated frequency, but such a high wire act was impossible to maintain for long. Not even my mother and my uncle had such a mother, and certainly not my grandmother herself. Her own mother had spent half her life away from her and the other half in constant struggle with her, chafing at her need for decorum, laughing at her fear of failure, dismissing her learning as a transparent screen made of lies.
Maybe it was precisely this recurring absence that made my grandmother become that perfect mother of the ethers, the very same mother that once was buried under little dirt mounds, naked and pregnant and faceless, the mother that we dream of when we are afraid in the darkness, the mother that never looks away and whose smile never wavers, always in black and white, always slightly diffused in the soft light of a lost afternoon, always perfect, always ideal, always the centerpiece of a little altar, surrounded by pictures of her grandchildren and her great grandchildren, all of whom, at one point or another, saw the archetypal “madrecita” in her, the one eternal mother of all.

* * *

A picture of a couple in the middle of sexual intercourse, a slight blonde woman sat on a black haired man’s lap, her legs were thin and wide open as she pressed her crotch down upon his. Her face was twisted to the side, towards my curious gaze, and his face looked away from me, forever hiding his features from unknown spectators, forever invisible, anonymous, blank. In her eyes I could imagine pleasure, but it was a pleasure so vague that it might as well have been pain (for the two apparent opposites do meet in the twilight regions of animal lust, away from the judgment of fat American ladies with black Bibles under their arms.)
This was another nude portrait of the many that my mother had sent as gifts, an unconscious reminder of the need for creative fertility, perhaps, a silent acknowledgment of hidden origins lathered in sweat and blood and groans of desire. In this thin young woman with open legs, I could also see the eternal mother, the same ancient mother I had glimpsed in the ghostly black and white portrait that sat in the middle of a little altar. I could see that, at its most fundamental root, at a level hidden by dirt and shame and forgetfulness, to be a mother was to open up to the will of the Other, to the roughness of a man, to let his desire invade her, to let it push deep within her, so that her own desire could embrace it and transform it into a new bundle of tears and hopes. This is how Universes were made, and this is how women turned into mothers, good and bad, careful and careless, intelligent and dumb, all mothers, open and wet at a clear and distinct moment of origin when their surrender was so complete that their final and most secret defenses could not stop a foreign seed from flowering within them and becoming a new being, a new sequence of lit chambers in the endless void of the night, a vulnerable creature with only a mother to guide them, this mother, this slim little blond woman with a face twisted in what could be both pain and pleasure, requesting the intrusion of alien presence and yet somehow still trying to resist, still trying to postpone a final defeat, a final step beyond the gateway of her existence as a simple woman.
For as the slim little blond woman came to an end, a mother would come to take her place, and the mother would never see herself again in the way that she once had. There had been an interruption that could never be forgotten, a wound that could never be healed.
My Uncle would never want to stare too closely into this not so secret origin, most people wouldn’t. It struck too close to a basic contradiction that festered in the depths of their private caverns. And yet that angelic face I had just seen, glimmering in black and white, and transmitting a gentleness that could dig into the roughest heart, that angelic being who was my grandmother, she also had to surrender to the desire of a common man in order to come into full manifestation. This was the required visa to a world of sacrifice and self negation, of recurring postponements that ended in a closed door and an empty room without rewards. My own grandmother had crossed that threshold, more than once. That was true. Everything else could be a lie.

* * *

A picture of my grandmother shaking hands with Franco, the man who wrestled Spain from the hands of sentimental idealists and placed it back in the hands of obsessive compulsives who wished to change the world from above to conform to their own wishes and desires. (But don’t we all?)
She was bending forward in her dress which had been made to look like a man’s suit, except it still left her chins and her ankles vulnerable. She was covered enough to function in a masculine role but revealing enough to remind everyone present, including herself, that she was still a woman. Franco was old and bald and straight as a stone statue, dressed in full military elegance, barely reaching out with his right hand, his eyes lost somewhere else, maybe in a hill full of corpses or a city bursting with bombs and screams of pain, or maybe he was simply looking forward to a night of sleep that would allow him to forget yet another social function, and here was another diplomat, a woman no less, who wanted to shake his hand. He obliged, by barely reaching out with his right hand and looking elsewhere while my grandmother bent forward, in a clear sign of humility and respect, smiling with the honor of the occasion, pleased to shake his hand and bask in the glory that certainly surrounded such a powerful and infamous man.
Behind them both, a fat man in a black suit smiled with contentment, pleased that this exchange of pleasantries was taking place. Looking at him in the shade of the passing of decades, I believed that he had orchestrated it, I believed that this man with his round cheeks and his thin little mustache and his shiny bald head that even now reflected the light from a yellow light bulb behind my back, was the one who had brought them together, and I believed that he had done it all so that this picture could exist, as a symbol of the union between faraway countries, a kind of brief symbolic marriage between dignitaries of separate kingdoms, a picture that would show that indeed Spain cared for little people, Spain cared so much, even for tiny little countries on the other side of the ocean which it had lost to rebellions and negligence so long ago that the memory could no longer be brought up in polite company. Here was Franco, with his arm barely making an effort, and yet it was enough. The powerful man of Spain was shaking hands with the female diplomat of a banana country somewhere in South America… “Which country did you say you were from again?”
(While I waited for my grandmother and my mother to return from their trip through Europe, I could imagine that in fact El Salvador was the center of the world and that all the countries and the Universe itself gyrated around the utmost beauty and power that was El Salvador… where the best people lived, the strongest, the smartest, the richest, the most divine. I would throw a ball up in the air and know that when El Salvador did it, when the champions of El Salvador threw plastic balls up in the air for the international competitions of plastic ball throwing, it would be the best throw that there could ever be, the best throw that there ever was. Maybe Franco’s thoughts were not so different, but he never thought of El Salvador at all.)
Far in the distance, almost obscured by shadows, another tall man looked straight into the camera. He was also dressed in a black suit, but on him it looked like a true sign of elegance. His hair was dark and short and his eyes were as focused and piercing as a laser. He looked right into the lens as if he could stare through the abyss of forty years into my own lens as I leaned forward to take a picture of a picture. Maybe someday another picture would be taken of the picture I myself was taking, and this tall man in a black suit would just keep on staring into infinity, reaching deep into a place that I couldn’t myself see. His role then was to be the spirit of a final presence that all others in the room would simply do their best to ignore.

* * *

My Uncle raised a small picture in a golden frame and he pointed at it with his fat and trembling index finger.
“Here, look at this one… your mother surely remembers this one…look at us… look at how young we were!” He laughed with the simulated spitting motion of his lips that passed for laughter in him, too lazy to truly laugh, too restricted by social codes to simply remain in silence.
I looked at the picture he was holding in his hands and I saw them together, as I had never really known them. My uncle and my mother, in their twenties, full of energy and a raging hunger to explore the world that was painted across both their faces like colored lines of war.
He was thin and smiling. In his old smile I could recognize a touch of the smile that sometimes crossed his lips these days, but it was so much simpler then, so much more direct. His eyes were so much stronger, they lacked the sense of defeat that he now seemed to carry like a leather sack full of heavy stones tied around his neck. Here, in the picture, he was light and airy, covered only in a simple white shirt, his ears sticking out from under his short traditional haircut which plastered his short hair against his skull. He looked sideways towards something or someone that was outside of the frame, as if he was unable to look at the strong white light that was bursting out before him, choosing to avoid it by sensibly placing his attention elsewhere. Maybe that simple gesture contained within it the essence of all Salvadorean afternoons: a light that is too bright and eyes that turn to avoid it. The sound of birds singing and buses shaking and honking would simply complete the picture and make it come alive.
Next to him was my mother. She stared straight ahead, right into the future, right into the eyes of her son who hadn’t yet been born when she decided to look straight at him. The girl who looked at me then through the wide gap of time was younger than I was now, much younger. She was pretty and seductive in a way that was different from the girls of my own time. She had a sincere innocence that carried with it a sense of inherent dignity, much like my grandmother’s but with a touch of insolence that rested on unearned success. In her eyes glowed a barely visible glimpse of purple and red that signified a need to explore the edges (and this I recognized within me as well, except my edges were so far outside of what this young black and white girl could imagine that, from her perspective, they might as well not be edges at all.) A pretty girl with an air of sophistication, with a sense of experience that was mostly imaginary and yet carried some weight.
It was clear to me that all the boys in her school would want her, they would all dream about her during restless nights of silent desire, and they would wish that she was all theirs, in all her many facets, in all the ways that they could then visualize. (And they were constantly busy making up more.) I knew that I would have wanted the same if had met her then, if I had been there to meet her. The truth is that I had been there, but back then my name was Hugo. I was younger than I was now (maybe younger than I ever was) and I shared her world of black and white. I had just as many walls between me and Universe as I have now, but the walls themselves had a different texture. I spoke different words and I even swam in a different ocean of thoughts when all was quiet around me, but it was still me, a young boy knotted up in caves of fantasy, anxious to possess the object of his dark desire.
Somehow I had managed to take this beautiful girl away from the grasp of all the others, I had managed to hold her and dive recklessly into the mysteries of her inner landscape. I had then built a home for myself deep within the hidden valleys of her most secret thoughts. From this lost sanctuary, I had emerged once again, newly reborn, covered in blood and shit and tears, crying at the sight of a brand new world that once again attacked me from all sides, now in color, in loud sounds and bright lights that would not give me the space to rest and sleep at ease until I once again built a sanctuary for myself. Here. With her. Somewhere behind the beautiful eyes that stared at me from another world through an old gray picture.

* * *

We sat in my grandmother’s living room on a gentle afternoon of bright sun and light breeze that made the long green leaves outside scratch against the windows like little thin black creatures asking to be let in. A few mosquitoes buzzed around our ears as we talked in light sentences that slipped out of our mouths and into the air like fragile bubbles about to burst, each one cradled in tentativeness and a sense of deep underlying doubt.
I sat on the far corner of the room, closest to the heavy glass door that led to the terrace. I was leaning back on the sofa, my back bent sideways, my legs extended outwards in a living statement of easy presence, a relaxed sense of ownership that came through me without my conscious bidding. I knew I belonged here and I showed it with my body without any further need of words.
Dilcia sat closest to me. Her knees were pressed together in her short multicolored dress and her eyes darted back and forth among the various occupants of the living room. Her main job this afternoon was to be concerned about possible outcomes, without having any ability to stop them. Her small body recurrently compressed into a ball of worry, anticipating the moment when things would go badly, and she could only wonder at where the badness would come from, from where the poisonous words would emerge.
Leti, her stepmother, was sitting next to her, with her purse across her thighs which were encased in tight dark blue jeans in an effort to appear younger than she was. Her lips were permanently pressed together in a mask of suspicion. Her eyes opened wider and then wider as various sentences spilled over her brown upright ears.
Finally there was Fanci sitting at the very end of the sofa, closest to the side table. His back was straight and his legs were open and his eyes were pulled up and sideways, in a unique mixture of worry and arrogance, certainty and ignorance, confusion and light. He would sometimes lean forward and press his forearms onto his thighs, only to then return to a full upright position. His words came in bursts of practiced dialogue, jokes and anecdotes that betrayed their years of use.
All four of us were lined up in the narrow green sofa that ran along the wall, under the long narrow window against which the branches were scratching. I sat sideways looking towards my grandmother who sat on her own green sofa which formed an “L” with the one where we sat. She was made up perfectly, as she always was whenever people came to visit. Her white hair was covered in a thin net, her smile was the one I recognized from pictures of official functions. A distance showed through her features that wasn’t there when she was alone with me, an invisible barrier that came to her without any need of effort, a result of long years of practice. Fanci wore a beige shirt with short sleeves, a clear contrast with the elegance that radiated from every bit of clothing and makeup on my grandmother. I didn’t notice then but I’m sure my grandmother did and maybe she judged him for it, even if she let her judgment slide into the darkness where dreams are formed and violence is safely kept away from daylight.
They talked of the weather and of politics, the kind of political talk that only skims along the surface so as to not make any waves, just enough statements to show that a mind contained knowledge, not so much as to risk any form of rational commitment. Things were ultimately as they were and they were certainly not about to change because of some small talk in a dark living room of a middle class Salvadorean home. Leti would laugh lightly when necessary and I would follow her cue. Dilcia, the last in line, would follow me, so there was a delayed echo of laughter that would bounce in little circles around the living room, leaving a slight scent of fakeness behind as it faded away.
My grandmother was the most at ease. This was her antechamber, this is where she met with old governmental figures, old students that would come to give their respects and once again reiterate the great love and gratitude that they still held for their old teacher (some of these old students had gone on to become new powerful figures), fundamentalist christians with sweaty palms and forced smiles, writers and poets from another era when such skills were highly respected, rich women with fancy hairdos and high pitched fake laughter that slid upwards to heaven in a sign of semi conscious disdain. Every possible kind of person had sat there, on the same green sofa where the four of us now sat, and my grandmother had faced them all, without any sign of fear, nervousness or effacement, and they had all properly knelt at the altar of the living symbol that she embodied (for she was a symbol more than a woman to a vast section of the population, even if she was only my grandmother to me.)
Fanci seemed to measure his words appropriately, more so than he did in any other occasion where I had been able to observe him. Maybe later, when they were back home, he would point out the things that my grandmother had said that were tangential to the truly important issues of our time, or the things that were just plain wrong and misguided. Maybe he would point out the waste of so much wealth on this single old woman who, compared to them, lived like a queen, with enough space for two or three families and enough art to fill a couple of small museums. Maybe he would simply point out the things he had said himself, the subtle statements that solidified his status as a wise man and clarified his superiority. But all of these things would come much later. While he was sitting here, on the long green sofa, he was soft spoken and sweet and extremely respectful, and my grandmother responded to this show of respect in kind. It was a dance they both knew from memory and Leti and Dilcia and me, it was simply our place to follow their lead.
Dilcia was very nervous and continuously revealed her nervousness through tiny movements that only she herself thought were invisible or subtle. We all knew what she was feeling even if we all perceived it in slightly different ways. She was afraid of the things I might say, of the horrendous blasphemies that may come out of my loose lips in a moment of abandon. She had reason to be afraid, for I could say terrible things at the drop of a hat, just to see what the reactions would be, just to see where that thorny road would take us. But on this day I merely observed carefully and allowed them to do their dance of social diplomacy, while I interjected every once in a while with an affirmation or a very soft laugh.
At one point, my grandmother left us alone in her living room for a very short amount of time. We heard her steps walking up the stairway and a momentary silence descended upon all of us. Fanci looked around with his intense eyes that seemed to record every detail as if they were tiny video cameras embedded into the white skin of his face. After flying through the many little mementos that were scattered all around the room and the great vase in the middle of the square brown table in the center, which overflowed with color and shape and aroma in the form of fresh flowers, and after scanning the large paintings along the farthest wall, the anguished white face, the road of trees, the surrealist opening of the journey, his eyes finally came to rest on a picture in the farthest corner away from him, a black and white message that was quietly waiting in the dark.
“What is that picture of Dilcia doing over there?” he asked out loud, without turning towards us.
I was confused for a moment. I thought that maybe I had left some picture of her laying around out here, although I couldn’t think of an occasion when that could have happened.
“Over there… in the corner… it’s Dilcia…”
Dilcia giggled nervously, sensing that there was double meaning in her father’s words. Maybe his double meaning always came with a certain inflection in his voice, an inflection that had left a clear mark on the tender flesh of her unconscious. Leti pushed herself up and looked over the centerpiece vase.
“Oh yes…” she said, as she was bound to, “it’s her alright…”
I stood up from where I was and walked towards the corner, now very curious as to what they were looking at. I saw then a picture of my mother, in black and white, with long curly hair and intense black eyes. I had seen the picture many times and I had never seen any particular resemblance to the little brown girl that I felt that I loved above all others. And yet, looking at it just then, the two images blurred against each other in a haze that made me slightly dizzy. I smiled and turned to Fanci.
“Right…” I said and I walked back to the corner where I had been sitting.
“Right…” Fanci said, and he sat back on the green sofa, content with his labors.
Dilcia looked at me and blushed. I shook my head to let her know that it was fine, that everything was fine and that she had nothing to worry about. She exhaled loudly and leaned back on the tight green surface of the sofa. I could hear my grandmother’s footsteps coming back down the stairs.
Grandmother. Mother. Wife.
A photo of the past and of the future. The double image was still glowing out from the dark corner of the living room that I couldn’t see directly. A mosquito buzzed by my ear as I heard the trees rustling outside the window once again. A bus honked loudly in the distance.

* * *

The French explorer saw the pieces fall apart and he saw them come back together again, spreading like organic legos over a land of dirt and green and death and life, spreading like thoughts that dance in flashing spirals, spreading like melodies that never settle on a final note. He saw the great dance and he held the pieces in his hands and he yearned to find the patterns, the repeating motifs that made the whole symphony come together as a solid unified statement, the locks and binds that kept the structure in place.
He saw that A was to B as C is to D, even though A was not C and was not like C and B was not D and was not like D, and still the equation held, the relationship was true in its mysterious absence and difference. He then postulated that the letters could hold so much more than he had previously suspected, they were like giant golden bowls that could hold the sprawling midnight visions of an entire race, the slippery tentacled creatures of the oceans as seen through young curious eyes, the trail of wind and song that follows the birds in the summer, the lost fangs of creatures that left no mark and yet they were still somehow remembered.
Within the letters was the bedrock of twilight thought and of cloaked desire. In the letters themselves he would find the solace of knowledge that has no foundation, knowledge that slides around the edges of your fingers like tiny black snakes full of poison, knowledge that resists all covenants and transcends all statements, and yet knowledge nonetheless, a kind of knowledge that rests in ephemeral relations and eternal equations, a kind of knowledge that was so old as to be completely unreachable and yet so new as to become invisible to eyes that had seen everything.
The French explorer roamed this land of formless questions and brought forth hermeneutic creations that claimed no finality, so they traveled to darker depths than thoughts that yearned for an end.
As I allowed my eyes to wander over his writings, over his musings on the nature of ancient stories, I came upon an idea that struck me as strange and truthful in its strangeness. The relationship of a son to his maternal uncle is equivalent to the relation between a man and his wife, father and mother. As the connection is defined between man and wife, thus it will be between son and maternal Uncle. For the son is to the Uncle as the man is to the wife, and the Uncle is to the son as the wife is to her husband. Simple and pristine, as simple as the gentle singing of branches in the breeze or the sound of a car passing slowly down a sun baked street, as old as men and women, as new as a phone ringing and a brown hand picking it up.
My maternal uncle was the man who now guided me through his house showing me pictures of a time that most others had forgotten, a time that would soon be as lost as the ancient pyramids beneath the waves of titanic blue oceans and thick layers of rock and sand. In him, I saw my wife, the one who left, her and the other one, the one who I left behind, her and all the ones who may have left me through the corridors of time, all turning sideways, all unable to say goodbye in a way that would close the door with gentleness, all lashed in black hair and the shadows of missed opportunities, and the ones that had waited for decades, clinging to a letter or a postcard and reading through a veil of sliding tears, and the ones that had simply been forgotten, the ones that I could only touch in dreams and the ones who could never touch me. In me, he saw his husband, the one who was no good, the one who was a monster, the one who was intrinsically evil and beyond the pale, the pale which was further than any color and yet still could be described with a single word, and yet he was beyond that. I was beyond that. In me, he saw the strangeness of the Other, in him I saw the blandness of the norm.
It was no accident then that our contact would be so minimal, it was no pure trick of chance that our words would bounce off each other like billiard balls rolling over the green carpet of the Salvadorean jungle, without ever finding a wet pocket in which to rest. As my father and my mother could not live together, as they could not look into each others’ eyes to find solace or peace, as they flew away from each other like quantum particles that have been flung apart by an explosion of subatomic fury, so he was away from me, and so I would always be away from him, distant, removed, alien, Other. I embodied the creature that should have been forgotten, he embodied the worldliness that I would never want to become.
And yet these qualities did not define us. I was nothing, truly nothing, beyond qualities or any sign of distinction, as he was nothing, white and empty and shining. We could never be otherwise. In being nothing together, we were the same. But our relation to each other persisted, and so my sentences would be short and brief whenever my mouth opened around him, and his questions would be muted, and the silence would extend further and further until a time would come when there would be no words between us at all. By that time, others would have come to take our place.
A is to B as C is to D and the dance would continue forever, as pointless as it was full of meaning. Color, light, form, sound. And my Uncle looking at the floor, and me, looking away.

* * *

The next picture was the strangest picture of all, it was my grandmother as I had never seen her. Within the final enclosure of this two dimensional cage, she was thin and frail and sick, slipping quickly into invisibility like the final frames of a short and sad film. Her eyes were sunken into her face like pools of black oil, and her cheeks had vanished, dead flesh pressing against dead bone. Her wrinkled skin had drooped off the sides of her skull, leaving a mask of curious death staring expressionless into the camera. Her white hair was short and undone, it appeared disheveled, it showed none of the utmost care she would usually take to make sure that nobody saw her with even a single white strand out of place. Here she was finally past caring about such things, that meant she was simply past caring at all. Her ears stood out from the sides of her thin face and they seemed very large since everything else in her had shrunken, they were like blobs of loose skin hanging from a raw piece of meat that is quickly approaching its expiration date. She was propped up against a mountain of little pillows and she was covered in a yellow striped sheet that only reached up to her stomach, weak and yellow and thing, like her. A light yellow and white robe covered her frail body, but she still seemed to be cold and tired, ready to slide again into oblivion once the camera had done its job.
My Uncle was laying next to her, propped up on his right arm, holding her thin little weak hand in his, offering support as much as receiving it. He was smiling at the camera, and his smile betrayed a fading hope that if they only smiled together enough, for a long enough time, then she would recover from this strange state that she had fallen into and everything would eventually be fine, just as fine as she had always said that things would be. But this time she would not say it, she would not try to cheer him up or pull him out of his chronic despair. Instead, she had become the personification of this all encompassing despair and he could only weakly make an attempt to counteract this new haunting manifestation of the ancient Mother, a final fearsome statement wrapped in drying flesh and old faded clothing. It was a role he was not used to, a role he had never performed for others and so he couldn’t do it well. But he was trying, I could see it through the picture, across the gap of time and space that separated us. I could see him making an attempt as he was lying there next to her, in his white and blue striped shirt, with his large eye glasses that reflected the light of the camera flash and made it seem as if his very eyes had caught on fire, his head pressed against his folded arm, his lips pulling up towards his cheekbones, attempting to enliven a room that already seemed like a morgue.
I looked at my grandmother through the glass of the picture frame and tried to recognize the woman I had known and loved so many years ago. She was still in there somewhere, but disease and pain and decay had taken their toll, and she was ready to go away, ready to leave us, now more than ever, now even more than when she had said it too me so many years ago, back when she was still being careful about the specific arrangement of her white hair, back when she still examined her bills and letters under her royal portrait. “It’s time for me to go,” she had said. Looking at her picture I could respond, “Yes, it is grandma, yes it is.”

* * *

We stepped into what was now my Uncle’s room, the same room that used to belong to my cousin Roxana, back in the days of weekend visits and fuzzy dreams that went sliding off balconies while I was looking elsewhere. As we stepped inside, I could only faintly visualize the room as it once had been: a pink chamber of secrets that only young women could embrace, a strange place that I had only visited on a couple of occasions, and then only briefly, a place which probably still resonated within my cousin as much as my dark garden resonated within me.
But now this room had changed. Now there were photographs of my grandmother everywhere, a barrage of smiling faces of all ages, the same being scattered about many different chambers, or maybe they were many different people only tentatively connected by our mutual imagination, by our collective wish for reason and progressive change. Grandmother, mother, wife, all the same, repeated endlessly, with only a few incidental exceptions.
My Uncle pointed to a tall armoire and to the mountain of pill bottles that were scattered over the dark brown surface. I raised my camera towards it but he said:
“No, don’t take a picture of that!”
I lowered my camera and turned sideways. This was the one truth that would have to remain secret, even if it was evident in his eyes, his hands, the inner movements of his pupils.
“But look… can you understand? These are all the things I have to take every day! All of these! This is very serious. This thing… it’s no joke! No joke at all!”
I nodded, in just the same way as I had nodded when he said it in the car.
“I’m sure it’s no joke…”
He pointed to his bed which was covered in a flowery bedsheet and more pill bottles, little orange and white cylinders with tiny text messages wrapped around them, and little pieces of paper, and many loose photographs of my grandmother, all propped up against the wall with nothing but hope to hold them up. I realized that here, on his little bed, were the papers that my grandmother had always kept in the little table by her side, on the old living room where I had always talked to her. Here is where they had come to rest. They no longer meant what they had meant to her, for now they had transmuted into sacred objects, holy elements in a fragile altar that shook and shifted each time my Uncle pressed himself against the bed or sat upon it.
The many pictures, in a long line along the wall, were all leaning at an angle. All of them seemed ready to fall, they seemed as weak and inefficient as my grandmother had looked in that final picture. They seemed to hold within them all the desperation that my Uncle must have felt as the months went by and my grandmother got progressively worse, and the doctors could not come up with any good news to give him.
I pictured my Uncle sleeping in this little bed, fully clothed and laying on his side, permanently staring at all these pictures and pieces of paper, and old medicine bottles, vainly hoping that somehow this action could bring some of her back. Maybe he only hoped for one more gentle kiss or a kind phrase or a shaky hand holding his own hand, maybe even just a hint of her footsteps coming down the old stairway, maybe her perfume, maybe a distant sigh.
He clearly no longer slept with his wife, my aunt. He probably hadn’t slept with her in many years. Instead he slept with a fragile altar of old pictures and little bits of memory that my grandmother had left behind and, throughout the day and night, he constantly reached out to prevent one or another picture from falling. Instead he slept with the one woman to whom his whole life had been devoted. Instead he tried to find his way back to a place he would never find again.
He probably wept quietly in the darkness, while the little white dog whined desperately underneath the bed, trying to keep himself upright by pushing his little frail body against the side of the wall. Two creatures unable to hold themselves up any longer, two creatures rapidly sliding into oblivion, scared and unprepared.
“That is where I keep her things. I look at them and I talk to her,” he told me, pointing to the scattered pictures and pieces of paper.
“Does she answer you when you talk to her?”
“No, she never answers. But I still talk. I tell her everything. I just talk and talk.”

* * *

Another old black and white picture of my grandmother, here with short black hair and elegant earrings that slid like tear drops of shining brilliance off the slope of her soft white neck. There was a tiny cross at the end of a thin necklace. Her eyes here were deep and strong, framed by thick black eyelashes.
Here, in this one picture, I could clearly see what I had never seen before. I could see my mother in my grandmother, living like a flame within an old gas lamp, and I could see my Uncle as well, like a black anchor that holds the structure together, that keeps the metal columns in place. I could perceive them here as a single being that came from nothingness and stretched out over more than one body, here an ambitious man stumbling through life with a sack of broken hopes upon his shoulders, weighing him down so that he could barely walk anymore; here an idealistic woman hoping to alter the course of the river of the world which seemed to her to be flowing in the wrong direction, always in the wrong direction, a woman with large black open eyes adjusting her ideals slowly over the slow passing of the years, so that they became smaller and smaller as she realized the limits of her own strength; here a strong woman that managed to navigate through the treacherous corridors of the eternal palace, finding the right people to talk to, at the right moment, at the right time, finding the right papers to sign and the right people to compliment, and lifting herself up into a space of cool air and soft shadows that I came to know as her home. All three as one, and one that dispersed into three that were not the same but were not so different.
I could then ask myself how far back this being went and how far did it extend into the future. I could see that I carried it and them within me, and they carried me within themselves. This old picture made me see my Uncle as an extension of myself, and so I saw myself in him, deep within the folds of his aging eyes. Me, sad and alone, trying to maintain the last bits of memory that my mother had left behind and holding them so tightly to my chest that the force of my grip would quickly ruin them. I saw myself falling ever deeper into a kind of despair that had no passion but was instead built on complacence, on negligence, on afternoons of intense sunlight that never let up or allowed me a moment to simply breathe and rest in the shadows. Here I was, pointing out these things to myself, and here I was, myself, unable to listen.
I sensed the kind of gentle pain that I had come to recognize through years of reckless exploration. I felt that pain as I raised my eyes from the picture to see my grandmother as a man, standing before me, waiting quietly as I stared at the picture of his mother. I felt the need to say something even as I knew that there was nothing at all for me to say.
“She is beautiful here…”
“Yes, she is very beautiful there,“ he paused and stared at the old black and white picture as if he hadn’t seen it in a long time, “very beautiful.”
Maybe even back then, in those careless days of youth, which for her were not as careless as for others, maybe she had sometimes dreamed at night of becoming a sad man or a headstrong woman, or maybe she already contained both entities within her and she simply needed to live out the dreams that she could not remember upon waking up.
What kind of dream was it to become a ghost that came to survey the remains of past lifetimes? Lifetimes soaked in sweat and sunlight and mosquitoes, drifting like dead leaves upon a drying creek. What kind of dream was I, and who had first dreamt me? As much as they had fulfilled her hidden stories, I could only try to find the clues for the midnight tales that I had come to manifest. I was possibly an afterthought of a being that was currently fading in the lands that extend past the world of matter, and I was lightly running my fingers over a long stretch of dreams that were vainly held in fragile little pictures, all pressed up against an old concrete wall.

* * *

And when he was young, very young, so young that he had not yet grown bitter, the future had seemed wide open, as open as a fresh cold bottle of beer or whiskey, with all the radiant intensity that came with it, all the swirling lights of nighttime and the glowing bright colors of noon, all circling from far away and sliding deep into his mind floating in the burning melodies of the tempting alcohol, deep within him, where he would not question them at all, and he would simply shine with them, and laugh, deep hard laughs that went nowhere, the kind of laugh that was now so remote from him as to seem impossible, as distant as metal dragons flying through the skies and young pretty women looking up at him with curious eyes, tilting forward at the edge of a cauldron of lust and about to fall all the way inside.
Back then, in a noisy bar full of trumpets and guitars, all his friends would laugh as well, all of them sharing in the radiance that came from the transformed matter contained in the fire made liquid, the liquid made songs, the songs made tears, the tears made laughter, the laughter made fire. He was strong then, solid and full of momentum, and all of them were strong with him, all his many friends whose names he had now forgotten. He would drink and drink and drink and, through the constant swallowing of fire, he would allow the world to shine through him, in a furious golden spiral that went on forever, flashing through the essence of the many men and women who drank and laughed around him, and it went on and on for it was endless, as endless as a night of debauchery when all rules go out the window, and love can be encountered as easily as death, both entangling their fingers around each other without any reason for doubt or hesitation.
I could see him now, driving in an old red Volkswagen down Roosevelt avenue, laughing at every light which he didn’t need to recognize (for this was a time before rules became laws, before the laws were needed to maintain appearances, this was a time when things were simply what they were and disagreements were settled forever as easily as a meeting on a late afternoon and a few drops of blood), driving right through all intersections, knowing that this was his city and the rules didn’t apply to him, certainly not to him or to any of his kind, and certainly not at this time, when the sun had been gone for ages and the moon was beginning to recede.
Here he was, driving recklessly and laughing and signaling to the peasants who were still out even this late at night, letting them know that here he was, him whom they should recognize even if they didn’t know him, him whom they would recognize some day when the things that should happen would finally happen and then they would remember having seen him, driving recklessly like a demented demigod, on this one vibrant night. His laughter carried with it the knowledge of his high place in the world and of their own which was much lower. He was raising his left arm in salute as he held onto the wheel with his right hand, his thick strong fingers squeezing the thin circular steering wheel as he pulled it left and right, sliding all the way through the grimy downtown of San Salvador, a long tunnel of dirty awnings and tiny puddles of cold spit, a downtown which maybe wasn’t so grimy in those days, for the future dirt was just then forming all along the long tall gutters, it was just settling on the rectangular signs which said “we fix shoes” or “we do repairs”, most of them handwritten and misspelled. He would laugh again when he saw these signs for everything was very funny at this hour, and he pressed harder onto the accelerator, sinking his foot all the way to the floor and feeling the trembling heavy metal machinery under his toes. The Volkswagen would try to respond as mightily as it could, all within the limits of its own mechanical apparatus which wasn’t as perfect, precise or efficient as he imagined that it was, for his imagination truly ran deep in this one moment of glory.
He drove right through the avenue of the whores, where semi deformed brown women in ripped skirts and stained T-shirts would call out to him from within little receptacles full of smelly sheets and puddles of old sperm slowly drying on the dirty greenish floor, all of them behind old rusty metal bars and lit by dangling yellow light bulbs. They would say “Hey, where are you going sweetie? I have what you need right here! Right here I have it!” and they would reach down to point at their smelly crotch, vibrant between their thick vein covered sweaty thighs, and he would look towards them and then he would shake his head, for his intention was to keep on driving forward, ever forward, until there was nowhere else to go, and he would just hear their calls off the side of his pressing and vibrant attention which was now fixed on the flower clock up ahead.
Seeing it now for the first time, he just had to push the accelerator harder, for it looked just then like the crown at the end of a long life of fighting and he couldn’t wait to reach it after such a long struggle. The little car rumbled even more than it had been rumbling already, shaking as if in the last throes of mechanical death, as if it was about to scatter apart into all its component pieces. It slid down the last bit of asphalt, and he shouted, knowing he was finally approaching his destination (which was truly not his destination at all.) Soon he would turn, all around the little round park that held the giant clock made of flowers, but not yet, not just yet. The clock of flowers was so close and it was a sign of true pleasure for him, deep incomprehensible pleasure which was that much more enjoyable because it lacked any sense or reason, it was a beacon of joy and it was rising so tall ahead of him, like a giant volcano sputtering many colored flowers out of its deepest entrails. The car just needed to slip a little closer, just a little closer, and then he would turn.
There was a loud bang, like the firing of a gun but louder. He felt the thin steering wheel pushing hard against his ribs, like a knife without an edge trying to find a path into his inner sanctum, and then there was no clock and no flowers and there was only a dark sky full of stars. The car flew through the air, and he was flying within it, and maybe for a moment he thought that there must be some mistake, for these little cars were not meant to fly and yet here it was flying, freely and openly, while the stars were shining down upon him. Just then, he still held on to a sense of impending victory, even as a shadow of doom seemed to loom in the horizon, coming up towards him from the depths of the wide open mouth laced with flowers. The car flipped once, like an Olympic athlete in search of a gold medal, tumbling like a little red marble over the carefully arranged clock display, seeking its goal in the heart of time which was hidden at the core of the spinning arms, and then it landed right where it had wanted to go, at the center, the center of the clock where there was no time at all for there could be no movement, no future and no past.
As it landed with a loud metallic crash, he heard a dry thud, not as loud as the first one but much more painful, as his head collided against the hard roof of the tiny car. That hurt almost as much as his ribs hurt, and he tried to laugh, but his laughter tasted of blood. He called for help but his voice was drenched in the same blood, and it was all dripping down his chin and over his shirt. He tried to move but the little car was on top of him, and as little as it was, it was still too heavy for him to push away. So he leaned back and took a deep breath and realized that he might be about to die, that he might be about leave this strange world of dirty streets and fiery liquids forever, and his mother would be very sad, for she had placed on him the hope that he would replace the man that once had left her even if she didn’t know it, and his sister might even be sad as well, for once they had wrestled together and in a certain way they had cared for each other and loved each other past all the small insults and rebukes, and he would never get to do all the things he had dreamed of doing, even if his dreams were vague and tasted of harsh liquor. A tiny tear slipped from the side of his one opened eye, because he had been so happy just then, as he had slipped past lights and corners, triumphant in his reckless ride, and now it was all about to end, and it lacked any glory, any great understanding, any sense of final arrival, there was just pain and blood and a heavy sense of too many mistakes compacted together into the little soft ball that had been his short life.
People came from the gaps between buildings, running and whispering to each other, saying “el senor…. He’s inside the car…” Some of them were only half dressed for they had been sleeping when they were awakened by the loud crash. Some of them were still rubbing their eyes and trying to confirm that something indeed had happened and that they weren’t just continuing to dream. They pulled open the doors and they helped to bring him out, several men gasping with effort because the man was heavy and they were thin and brittle and half asleep. By that time he was completely unconscious and perhaps he was dreaming of wives and sons and daughters, and times when adventures such as these would not be possible, even in dreams. As sorry as he had just been for his imminent death, he would be equally sorry that such things would never happen again. And that time, that time when risk would be like a gray cloud that hangs over your head without ever delivering a storm, that time he called death. He thought that he had arrived at that doorstep just then, he thought that he was close enough to simply push through. But he was wrong. There were still many years to come. Many years to forget. Many years to remember.

* * *

He showed me a collage that his granddaughter, my niece whom I had never really met, had made for his birthday. It was a rectangular piece of dark brown cardboard, about two by three feet, covered in photos and little colorful phrases, like “happy birthday!”, “love” and “you are the best!” The photos were scattered somewhat haphazardly over the thin surface, and yet they formed a clear composition, a kind of secret message that I knew I would not have the time to decipher, for it was written in a language that wasn’t yet touched by the curse of intelligibility and logic.
My Uncle held it up with a smile, saying, “this is what she did for me…” and he made that noise with his puckered lips that in his code passed for laughter and which, to me, resembled a dry spit.
There were several photos of my grandmother, much as I remembered her from the last time I saw her, although maybe a bit thinner, maybe already taking the necessary steps that would take her all the way to the emaciated death mask I had seen earlier.
There was a picture of my Uncle and my Aunt sitting on a sofa, with my cousin Juan Antonio standing tall behind them, wearing a light green T-shirt and a white cap, fulfilling the role of hesitant guardian and overseer over these people that he had once seen as strong and wise.
There was a picture of a tiny brown girl sitting between my grandmother and my Uncle, and she was smiling intensely, staring with big brown eyes into the camera. These two people, for her, were her great grandmother, as incomprehensible and distant for her as the mountains of the Sierra Nevada were to me, and her grandfather, who might have seemed simply soft and caring and constantly eager to please, a bundle of easy love wrapped in harsh wrinkles and unsteady eyes. Seeing the three of them together, vaguely perceiving what she saw in them, made me question what I saw in them myself.
Who were these people really? Who was my Uncle? Who was my grandmother? What was their true nature in this chaotic maelstrom that we all found ourselves swimming in?
I couldn’t truly determine what they were, for as much as I was swimming in the same pool of black ink, I could not observe them from an outside vantage point that would allow me to determine their shape and nature. But I could say that they were together, and they had always been together, through years upon years of sleepy afternoons on my grandmother’s green sofa, together through so many endless tragedies and a few brief moments of comedy and bliss.
In a sudden flash, I saw that my Uncle had devoted his life to doing what his father could not do. My grandfather left my grandmother crying and alone, my Uncle took care of her until the bitter pathetic end. That is why my mother could leave her. That is why she could roam the world and be welcomed with open arms whenever she decided to step back into my grandmother’s home. But my Uncle could never leave. On his shoulders rested a weight that he could never even begin to comprehend. He would spend those long afternoons complaining, leaning back in my grandmother’s sofa, and she would listen intently, as if allowing for his short sightedness, secretly thankful for his one clear goal. My Uncle then had come to replace my grandfather, to complete the duty that he had refused.
I would never know who my grandfather had come to replace, and why he had felt it necessary to take such a long journey and never come back. Maybe such journeys were inscribed on his brown in letters so tiny that no human eye could ever read them. Maybe he was the product of one such journey and so he was biologically bound to repeat the process that created him. Unknown promises and secret curses, cosmic codes and whispers from empty mouths without teeth or lips, all swirling like colored ribbons over a land of open questions.
I looked at the little brown girl again. What curse was now pressing upon her little head full of innocence? What broken debt was she now supposed to repay?
Next to her little face was a cutout picture of the little white dog that was the dying spirit of the household. Bark, bark, bark. Danger ahead. A cliff lies just ahead of you. Jump but be careful. There are monsters waiting. Dark spells and invisible binds. The little white dog looked right into the camera with his tiny eyes of warning, eyes that would soon shut forever just like my grandmother’s already had. With his canine sense of smell could he detect the old curses, like the smell of putrid old wounds covered with infection and disease? And if he could, would he ever be successful in warning one of these many characters in time?
In time to change it. In time to let it happen. In time to watch it come, like a favorite scene in a movie we have seen so many times before and enjoy even more because we have already seen it, because we already know how it ends. In time to hope that it might be otherwise. In time to live it once again.
“You are the best!” You have done what you did because there was nothing else to do. How could you do otherwise? Did you ever truly have a choice?

* * *

The family photo contained the entire decade of the seventies within the confines of its slender golden frame. There was something about the lighting, about the clothes, the colors, the contrasts. I couldn’t fully place it and yet I could recognize it, like recognizing my friend’s voice in an old broken tape recording, even if the timbre had changed, even if the hints of innocence had left and been replaced by a false sense of absolute and final knowledge.
There was my Uncle, thin and handsome, in a white button up shirt that opened up to reveal the upper part of his chest. His hair was combed back, plastered tightly onto his head, probably held down with large quantities of Vaseline. He looked confident and secure, ready to show the world what he was capable of doing.
He was standing next to my Aunt, who looked young and proud, maybe even still in love with him. Although, if it was love, it was not so evident, it was more a substance that was made of equal parts contentment and arrogance and it slipped out of her orifices and colored the air around her past.
In front of them were their children, my cousins: Roxana front and center, directly in front of my Uncle who held onto her behind her back, then little Juan Antonio, who in this instance was the one who needed protecting (and who would grow up to stand behind his parents in much the same pose that my Uncle here took) and off to the side, cut off from the picture as if he was a simply something that didn’t need to be remembered, was my oldest cousin, Robertito (forever “little Roberto” no matter how much he grew.) Only the leftmost side of his face was visible and he stood away from the hands of either parent, already staking his claim to a kind of tentative independence, the lonely pedestal of the good older brother who can never truly do wrong, who can never quite do right.
Behind them I could see the outline of my grandmother’s house, I could even imagine that my grandmother stood behind the cameraman, smiling proudly at her fresh young family, already planning a weekend outing or a trip to the movies with the kids.
But my eyes went back to my Uncle, for here was a clear sighting of the man that once was, the man that now was lost beyond recovery. I wondered if the choices had already been set in motion even then, and the course of little steps had been so systematic that there was never a point where the path might have been changed. Or had there been a singular day, a singular moment, when two paths opened up before his clear brown eyes, and the paths didn’t fully reveal their ultimate destination and yet their aromas held little clues, clues too subtle to decipher, differences too tenuous to pin down. If there was such a single moment, I wondered what my Uncle thought then when he started walking on this broad path lined with dancing flowers, the one that led here, to this large house covered in urine, to this small bed with old pictures and papers lined up against a faded wall.
Maybe the singular moments were many, maybe they came at him, at me, at us, day after day, week after week, year after year, and yet we always managed to make the same choice. If we had always done it, then it must be right, and if we had never looked elsewhere, there must be a reason.
I looked deeply into those lost eyes of strength and then again at the fading eyes of the man that stood beside me. It was him and yet it wasn’t. He looked at me and wondered what I was looking for. I could see the question in his face, and yet he never asked me.

* * *

It was a warm afternoon, as most of them were. But there was a soft wind that traveled right through the open structure of the big rancho, and it made the whiskers of straw dance on the edges of the roof, and it made my hair flicker lightly and it made the hours pass so slowly that they didn’t seem to pass at all. There were several wooden tables scattered across the red bricks of the simple establishment. The only enclosed space in the open restaurant was for the kitchen, the bar and the bathroom, and it was very small, so small that you could almost not see it at all and believe you were simply sitting in an open rancho in the middle of nowhere and not a hundred meters from one of the main roads of San Salvador. That imaginary sense of isolation was amplified by the raw empty lot which surrounded it. It had been cleared to function as a parking lot but not cleared enough to forget its origins as raw jungle. There were green bushes scattered everywhere and even a few palm trees and a little skinny young man with a machete walked slowly around the perimeter letting us know that he was on guard. The jungle in the midst of the city, and unspoken violence at the heart of the jungle.
I was seated at a table with all my Dad’s friends, and they were all very drunk after many hours of continuous drinking. They had slowly risen to the point where almost any combination of words could be hilariously funny, and all statements carried the weight of searing truth within them, they all engendered wide open eyes followed by knowing smiles. It was a space that I myself enjoyed even if I was the only one there that wasn’t drinking. By virtue of my relative clarity, and the relatively unclouded attention that it allowed me, I became the preferred audience for everyone that was there. I was the one that would listen. I was the one that would understand.
As the afternoon slowly moved towards that point when the sun is still out but the night is already whispering at the edges of the sky, I found myself sitting across from the Old Drunk Man. His name was Roberto, like my Uncle, but I simply thought of him as the Old Drunk Man. He had already drank a copious amount of beer (he counted the amount in plastic boxes of bottles and he was very proud of how many sat next to the table, high enough to reach his arm) and his eyes were bulging out and red. He was sweating in a particular way that told me he was going past a secret threshold, but I also knew that he had crossed it many times before and there was no fear in him, no surprise. He had gone from quiet and thoughtful to loud and happy in a matter of a few hours, and now he had descended into a special kind of gloom. He stared into my eyes as if trying to find answers to questions he couldn’t focus enough to pose. He leaned onto the table and signaled for me to come closer.
“Let me tell you something,” he said, and then he paused to take another sip from the cold dark brown bottle of beer, all covered in tiny transparent bubbles that slowly dripped like the ghosts of worms onto his old brown hands. “I think it’s something you should know.”
I nodded and leaned forward towards him and then I said, “Yes, please tell me. I would like to hear it.”
“Do you know about your Uncle…your Uncle Roberto… the brother of your mother…” he said it and his eyes seemed redder than ever, almost shining with drunken intensity.
I nodded once again and pressed my eyes together slightly, surprised to hear him mentioned here, in this place, in the mouth of the Old Drunk Man. My father was seated at the other end of the table and he couldn’t hear what we were saying. I wondered what had crossed the Old Man’s mind just then, what had made him want to tell me something about my Uncle. Whatever that thought had been, my role in this chamber was to listen and that is what I did.
“You know he is not an engineer, right? He’s not an engineer. Your Dad… your Dad is an engineer. Your Uncle… he’s not an engineer at all.”
I nodded and smiled slightly. Of course he was an engineer. Everyone I had ever known had referred to him as an engineer. Maybe the Old Drunk Man was simply making some kind of drunken leap into the philosophical meaning of true engineering, but I knew for certain that he was an engineer. There was no doubt about it.
“Sure he is…” I said, in a soft friendly tone, letting him know I was not offended by his statement but also letting him know that I was certain he was wrong.
“No, he is not… it was published in the paper… there was a clear announcement on the paper that said he was not an engineer at all… he never graduated…he didn’t even make it to his final year…”
I looked at him and wondered. What he said had some kind of ring of truth, the distinct shadings of it were glowing from its edges. It didn’t sound like the fantastic rumblings of a drunk man in a little rancho restaurant in the middle of San Salvador. And yet someone, somewhere, must have made a mistake. My Uncle was an engineer. I knew this. It was a fact.
I leaned in closer. “Of course he is…he has built houses… I’ve been inside of them…”
The Old Drunk Man shook his head violently and stared at me. “Listen to me. He never graduated. The announcement on the paper said that he has been passing himself off as one… just like several others…there are many like him in this city of liars…they say they are something and they act as if they are and they get paid as if they are but they are nothing… he is not what he says he is… he never was…he just learned enough to fool others…most people can’t tell the difference…most people don’t care enough to try…”
A car slipped inside the dirt parking lot, lifting a small cloud of thick dust as it moved. It slowly came to rest by the side of a small green bush. As the driver opened the door, the guard with the machete walked around it and saluted lightly, moving his thin hand against his forehead and lowering his eyes.
Something started clicking within me. I could hear the mechanical wheels sliding into place. I knew my Uncle through tiny gaps of time spent at his dinner table, surrounded by my cousins and my grandmother, or seated on his light brown sofa that forced you to lie all the way back, as if you were sinking into quick sand that smelled like leather. I knew his office and his secretary, and I had seen them talking from the doorway of my room in the days of little gray jackets and simple careless friendship. I knew his voice as he talked to my grandmother in her living room. I knew his strange laughter that simulated spitting. I knew the sound of his car as it rode up my grandmother’s driveway. I knew he was an engineer. I knew he always said so. I knew nobody had ever said otherwise.
“Listen to me… he was part of a group of young men…they all went to Mexico to study… they were all set… the world was theirs… they would study and come back professionals…they had no obstacles before them… but they never made it… they went on great drunken sprees and they messed with the young girls of the town… and they did it so much that they were kicked out and they came back here without ever having finished…they came back disgraced…”
I nodded. The illusion of fact within me started to crumble little by little, like a great cliff that slowly starts to shake under the invisible waves of an earthquake, dropping tiny pebbles and rivers of dust down its side as it prepares to split wide open. My certainty was not so solid. What did I really know? I knew his striped button up shirts. I knew his thick silver watches. I knew his loud commanding voice as he talked to his workers. I knew his tales of sorrow. What did I really know?
“The people of that Mexican town still remember the Salvadoreans that lived there… they hate all Salvadoreans… they have hated them since that time… it is true… listen to me…it is something you should know!”
As I stared into his bloodshot eyes, and his brown wrinkled skin covered in sweat, I wondered why he wanted me to know this, why it was so important to him that I should hear this. What was hiding within him? What was his own secret purpose? What did I really know about my Uncle? What did I really know about the Old Drunk Man?
“He’s not an engineer. Your father, he’s an engineer. Your Uncle isn’t anything.”
I smiled slightly and leaned back, as if trying to find the necessary empty space to find my bearings. It was not a problem for him not to graduate, at least not in my eyes. I didn’t place such a high value on formal schooling of any kind. It was simply the sense of other waves of experience going on unnoticed underneath the thin veneer of calm that I called my memories.
I looked around the table. My Dad was arguing politics with another drunken man while a red car was slowly sliding into another open parking space. He gestured with his arms and the drunken man shook his head violently. There was loud laughter coming from another table, and the sound of a loud toast from yet another, a man standing up among many, slurring his words as he raised his beer glass up in the air.
How many secrets were being revealed as I sat there? How many were still locked safely away, untouched by the seductive openness of alcohol? How many would never emerge to see the light of day? How many would remain sealed away and forbidden? How much of what I saw as solid and stable was just waiting to slide into the sea when the right earthquake would finally come to dislodge it? How much was just waiting for an afternoon of drinking and loose tongues to fully break apart?
Another time, the Old Drunk Man looked at me through bloodshot eyes and said:
“Of my childhood, I remember a long dirty mattress. It was stained with urine and it had been placed against a wall to dry, a wall next to a blue garage door,” he then stared at me to make sure that I was listening, “ A mattress stained with urine, that’s all I remember. A mattress.” And his eyes were filled with a deep sadness that reached across the gap to squeeze my heart. When the mask came tumbling down, all that was left was an old dirty mattress slowly drying in the sun.

* * *

There was a picture I immediately recognized. I had kept it among my belongings for years, I had examined it many times while browsing through my old photo albums, alone in my room or exploring them through a stranger’s eyes. But here, in my Uncle’s room, with the smell of old clothes, and old tears, and the red plastic bottles and the scraps of paper strewn on the bed, and the smell of dog urine and the sound of the little white dog whimpering in some other room not too far away, the old picture seemed to acquire a completely different nature, the context transforming its inner essence until it seemed as if I had never seen it before. It was like looking at the same picture in negative, where the parts that previously have been lit are now black and the parts that were once black are not pushed to the foreground, outlined in radiant light that makes them become new figures, new symbols, new tales.
I saw all of us, my cousins and me, surrounding my grandmother, standing in the dark early evening of a day long past, standing on the moist grass of her backyard, standing all together one last time for a flashing moment that would stay forever silent and still, living on in two dimensions and some dashes of color.
I remembered that day clearly because my grandmother had been very involved in its realization. She had made it clear to all of us that she wanted this to happen and she used all her powers to make sure that it did: “Be here on time. Dress well. Make sure to have your hair combed. This is important. Be here on time!” And I was on time. When I arrived, I saw that she had put on a shiny new dress of many colors: blue and orange and purple and red, like a complex abstract painting splashed upon her small old body, a painting recurrently repeating in mathematical perfection. And my cousins were there: Roberto in an elegant jacket, with a tie wrapped uncomfortably around his neck, Roxana in a kind of white business suit with large round dark buttons and right angled shoulders that stuck out like epaulets; and Juan Antonio, in a dark jacket and no tie, quietly confident in his own sense of youthful style.
I wore a white button up shirt, and black jeans that hung loosely around my waist. In my pocket I carried a small wrinkled notebook and a small bag of Kleenex, which made for an unseemly bulge over my heart. My beard happened to be short and trimmed at the time, and my hair was short as well. I was probably as elegant as I would ever be and my grandmother gave me a look of approval.
My Uncle and my Aunt were there as well, both dressed in the best clothes they could find, but they were not in this picture that I now looked at. My grandmother wanted only her grandchildren in this one, the kids that she loved so much, the ones that she took to the movies every weekend for years that now coalesced into a handful of memories, the ones that stayed in her room every Saturday and didn’t let her sleep through the night. She wanted one last moment when we would all be together and we gave that moment to her.
Maybe for years afterward, my grandmother looked at that picture with a mixture of happiness and nostalgia, a memory of a day when we had all pleased her, a memory only marred by the uncomfortable fact that it would never be repeated.
The only person missing that day was my mother, so it was my duty to represent both her and myself, and in my way maybe I did, cracking a left field joke every so often and then returning to the silence that they mostly expected from a strange artifact such as myself. Maybe that is what my mother had been once, in her own way. So they expected it from me and I delivered. When it was time for the picture, we were told where to stand and where to look and then there were some bright flashes. My grandmother said “Mis nietos! Mis nietos! (my grandchildren!)” a few times and then the job was done.
Looking at the picture now, it seemed to be a picture of three siblings and their grandmother and someone else standing in their midst. Who was this stranger to them? Was I then as strange and foreign to them as they seemed to me? How did they explain this picture to themselves when they saw it out of the corner of their eyes?
Maybe it was part of my own strangeness that I would ask such questions and think of such things when looking at old pictures. Maybe they would only walk by and see another old picture before going on to do the actual business of the world, the business of always moving forward and never looking back, not until it was too late. Maybe they wouldn’t even see it at all.
Before looking away myself, I looked into my grandmother’s eyes which seemed to shine with happiness through the sharp contrasted colors of the photo. Yes, she had been happy that day. For one final moment, we were all together as a family, even if we really weren’t, even if we had never been, even if we never would be.

* * *

We were inside an elegant white car, with its dark blue interior and its smell that combined the old and the new into a single chamber of shade and unsettled expectations. My grandmother was driving, as slowly and calmly as she always did. She would stop at every corner, and cars would honk loudly behind her. Upon hearing the impatient sounds coming from the other cars, she responded with irritated surprise.
“Can you believe them? Can’t they wait for a moment? Look at how people are!”
She would shake her head and let out a single burst of air through pursed lips. Then she would push her wrinkled foot slowly into the accelerator and the car would very gently move forward, all while the loud honking continued, coming at us like invisible rocks flying with the weight of real anger through the heavy hot air of the afternoon. Sometimes they would drive around the car and stare at us with distinct violent intentions in their eyes, letting us know that we had done something terrible and that we better learn to drive or bad things would happen. My grandmother would shake her head again and say:
“Bad mannered people! Hurtful! This young people today… they don’t know how to behave! It’s just terrible… the things they do!”
We would then drive a few more blocks, get to another intersection and there would be more honking and the whole process would repeat all over again. Each time my grandmother would act surprised and incredulous. Each time, I would worry for her. Each time ended with a single shake of the head and a gentle acceleration. Maybe each time the car moved, she was back in an age when cars didn’t move any faster than twenty miles per hour. Maybe she could almost see, around the edges of her eyes, the old cars coming around the corner, the people waving in genteel salute, maybe she could even see my grandfather as he was when he was young and strong, maybe she saw him walking towards her, ready to salute her with a single tip of his hat. Then there would be more honking and her dream would dissolve into the sour realization that those days were long gone and they would never come back.
From corner to corner we traveled, in a gentle movement that allowed for no rushing at all, like a feather that will fall gently from the heights of a chipilin tree but will slowly dance from side to side as it makes its way to the ground. We finally made it to the corner I knew so well, the open green lawn and the high walls of a stranger’s house, a house that to me meant we were about to turn and arrive at my cousin’s place, my Uncle’s house. My grandmother turned and pointed to the bags on the car floor in front of me.
“Don’t forget to bring those out… there’s the bread and the chicken… and that little white box has the sweet bread… you can tell them that you got it for them.”
I turned to her and shook my head. “I didn’t get it for them. You did. You know that, I know that, they know that…”
“Don’t argue with me…” she said it with a weak attempt at anger in her soft voice, “just tell them that you got it… that’s all!”
And then, as the car calmly slid up the little driveway of my Uncle’s garage, she shook her head once again.
“You argue about everything! Sometimes I just want to bang your head in!” but then she would laugh in her tiny whine that felt like invisible bubbles of pink soap sliding up towards white clouds. I laughed with her and the car came to a full stop. “We won’t be here long… I need to get back to my rest… we’ll eat and sit for a bit…and then we’ll go back…”
We had done this at least a hundred times before, maybe more. Almost every weekend, and sometimes during the week. And yet she would always explain the details, she would always tell me what she had already told me. I would always listen and nod my head.
And then she would say, like she always would, “Make sure to say thank you for everything, and don’t bring up any bad subjects, ok?”
I nodded and smiled at her, impersonating a small skinny innocent boy, and doing such a good job that I almost believed the illusion myself. She looked at me, smiling broadly, laughing at herself, and my own smile grew in response to hers, both of us enjoying this quiet preamble where there was only her and me and we could breathe in a quiet space of unspoken understanding.
“Just be a nice boy…we’ll be back home very soon…”
Then we stepped out of the car and walked up the long hallway of shiny red bricks, red like the ones in her own house, but these ones were long and narrow, and their edges were so pronounced that I could feel them through the soles of my shoes like long lines of knives that had no edge. As we walked up to the main door, it was already opening and I could see my Aunt behind the door, her mouth opening like the door itself had opened, teeth separating, big round black eyes bulging, and mirth already building to an explosive orgasm of fresh laughter.
“Aja Nina Tonita! Aja Juan Carlos!”
My grandmother immediately pointed to the bags I was holding in my hands. My Aunt reached towards her and kissed her cheek in greeting. My grandmother nodded, her wrinkled pink chin bobbing up and down in a rapid motion. She pointed once again towards the bags.
“We bring you some bread and things…Juan Carlos, put them in the kitchen!”
I nodded and moved towards my Aunt who reached towards me herself and raised her face so I could kiss her cheek. I leaned over her big smiling face, the tips of her curly black hair reaching out towards my lips, as I heard the order repeated.
“Take the bags to the kitchen,” my grandmother said and nodded to herself as she slowly made her way into the cool shade inside the house.
“Give him some time Nina Tonita! Give him some time!” my Aunt said and then she laughed in that uproarious way of hers that seemed to come straight out of the back rooms of an old brothel. “She wants everything done like now! Just take them in… put them anywhere.”
I nodded and shrugged my shoulders. Then I moved towards the dark interior of the kitchen to get rid of the plastic bags as quickly as possible so that my grandmother could feel at ease. I walked past the old brown piano that nobody played, with all the pictures crowding its narrow upper surface. There were pictures of my cousins, pictures of my Aunt and Uncle, maybe some of the very same pictures I would one day explore with so much attention and care. But I didn’t have much attention for them on this afternoon. All I wanted was for lunch to be over, so I could leave this house and return to what I saw as my real life.
I saw my mother’s paintings, all proudly hanging from the bright white walls all around me. I saw my Uncle sitting on the sofa and standing up to greet my grandmother, patting her back, kissing her cheek and then sitting back down once again, one leg crossed over the other, upper body leaning all the way back. I heard the sound of the TV blaring out an advertisement for candy, followed by one for a shopping center, and then one for a clothing store. Everything was just as it ever was, just as I had always remembered, and I couldn’t wait for it to be over.
As I walked out of the kitchen, I could hear my Aunt screaming up towards the second floor, calling for my cousins Roberto and Juan Antonio to come down.
“Juan Carlos is here! Come on down!”
I knew they had no eagerness to see me, just as I had no eagerness to be here with them. As the years had passed, the games we had once played had dwindled to nothing and no new games had come to replace them. Now there was only brief empty talk, and the sound of the TV in the background. I sat across from my Uncle on the rubbery surface of the brown sofa, and the material clung to my sweaty skin in a way I found uncomfortable. My Aunt brought me a soda in a short thick glass full of ice. Roberto, my cousin, walked by and nodded towards me, saying hello as he passed through into the garden, saying something about the dog.
It was a white dog. Another white dog. The same white dog. There were many white dogs, but it was always the same one. Always announcing impending doom, but never able to deliver his message.
Juan Antonio came and sat in the other brown sofa next to me. He was dressed in a short sleeved blue shirt and red shorts. My grandmother tried to come up with some kind of conversation but nobody had anything to say. My Aunt was cooking in the kitchen and we were all simply waiting for her to be done. My Uncle pointed out something on the paper and my grandmother made a quick comment. The sound of a loud Mexican comedy show came from the TV, filling the room with canned laughter. I leaned farther back, trying to not close my eyes, but feeling the urge to do so. Then my Aunt said that the food was ready and we all got up to eat.
“Go wash your hands!” my grandmother said, and I went immediately, glad to be away from them all even if only for a brief moment.
I would be seated at one end of the long table, covered in white and silver dishes, and tall narrow glasses full of soda. My Uncle would sit at the other end. Together we were the extreme opposites of a hidden spectrum.
My grandmother would sit to one side, mediating between these two extremes that continuously refused to even acknowledge each other, always looking elsewhere, always diving from the cliffs of the bright sunlight into the strange darkness at the bottom of our thoughts. She would laugh sporadically and even make some jokes, trying desperately to construct that invisible bridge that would connect what could never be connected. She knew the impossibility of her goal already and still she tried, with the stubborn gentleness that hid beneath her royal stature.
Roxana would sit beside my Aunt and Juan Antonio would sit next to her, both of them simply stretching the time like chewing gum, tasting the food and raising their eyebrows, ready to run when the signal was given. Roberto would sit to my left, close to my grandmother, protecting her from gross and subtle violence, the kind that leaves a mark, and also the kind that doesn’t. He would laugh in a male version of my Aunt’s laugh, which sounded even more vulgar in a thicker male voice, his nose squeezed tightly together and the eruptions sliding out of the black twin holes over his mouth like slimy snot that had grown airborne.
They would scatter references to people I didn’t know, and these names would fly all across the room like tiny black flies. I would make no attempt to swat at them because there was too many and there would always be more. They would make jokes that only they understood, jokes about places I had never been to, about food, and ocean waves, and restaurants, and long highways in the middle of a desert I would never visit.
When it seemed that too long a time had passed, my Aunt would look back at me and smile broadly, since it was the only way she knew how to smile. Then she would ask me what I was up to, what my plans were, what had I been doing since the last time she saw me. I would open my mouth and start to build sentences out of play-do, trying to create a tale that would satisfy her need while leaving enough gaps to satisfy my own need for her ignorance. It was an effort without merit and without reward. Before I could fully answer, sometimes before even a full sentence had left my mouth, someone else had already made another joke and I would never get to finish. My Aunt was already laughing at the new joke and it was clear that she was not really interested in my answer. There was no need for care or secrecy, there was nobody listening. I was playing to an empty house.
I learned to shrug it off and look back down at the food, which was always delicately made and delicious. This my Aunt could do with utmost attention, in her cooking she could finally invest her deeper vibrations and allow her powers to flower in the form of sauces and pasta and rice. This was enough, for we were only here to eat. Anything else was secondary, including my own thoughts, including the jokes, including the many strange names that still floated freely around the table, making it hard for me to see the faces of flesh, covered as they were by black references.
My Uncle would make some free floating and drastically pessimistic comments about money, and my cousins would then make jokes directed at him. My Aunt would complain and my grandmother would gently reprimand her. It was a scene they all knew well, a scene that would play in exactly the same way whether I was there to see it or not. Maybe it was still playing there when we left, repeating in a caged loop of sentences and words that would never have a meaning or a solid conclusion.
Somewhere in the midst of the pre-written sequence of jokes, commands and reprisals, I would find an empty space to drop in a statement that would seem to come out of nowhere. For a moment, everyone would turn to look at me, eyes wide open, expectant, waiting for an explanation. Then there was a complete silence. My Aunt would release another loud explosion of laughter as she said: “Ah! Juan Carlos!” and then they would all laugh and my grandmother would laugh in her restrained whiny way, and my Uncle would laugh in his way which simulated dry spitting and my cousins would laugh and I would smile and return to eating.
Eating lunch, that was why we were here. Everything else was secondary. Soon it would be time to go home. Soon this would all be a memory, a recurrent dream that sometimes fades away into oblivion but eventually comes back.
When it was time to say goodbye, there would be hugs and good wishes and then it would be just my grandmother and me again, slowly making our way back to where the air was flowing more easily, where the silence was light and sweet and cool and there were fewer bouts of incomprehensible laughter. I sometimes wondered if my grandmother was as relieved as I was.

* * *

A picture of my Aunt as she had been once upon a time, my Aunt in a faraway land that even the ones who had passed through it had already forgotten. Here she was in black and white, with her hair arranged to resemble a furry top hap, reaching upwards to the heavens. Her eyes looked straight into the camera with a kind of smoldering sexuality that I had never perceived in her in the time that I had known her. Her smile in the picture was soft and sweet and yet distinctly seductive.
She reminded me of Malena, that girl that I loved so much for a very short time, the girl that still made an appearance in my midnight adventures every so often, if only to say a word, or wave goodbye from a passing train. Like her, she seemed simple and pretty, almost transparently shallow, but possessing of a deep well of magnetism that could not be denied.
I could place myself then in my Uncle’s shoes, in his pants and his shirts, standing before this vision and feeling entranced, wanting to possess her forever, wanting to know that she would be his and for no other, that she would forever wake up next to him, ready to kiss him and hug him and feel his form against her own, and, at night, when nobody else was looking, she would strip herself of all clothing and all shame and rub her naked sweaty body over his, and then he would push himself into her and her sweet, innocent, seductive smile would turn into an urgent frown of pleasure that would make half restrained sounds that would barely manage to restrain the furious lust which was hiding underneath.
Yes, I could see what he saw then, what he imagined then, what he urgently and secretly hoped for. Now she was no longer this girl, this girl didn’t exist anywhere at all, and she was only vaguely alluded to by this old picture. This girl had been gone for so long that what there was might as well be another creature, another alien species that had come to replace the one he loved. Now, the only desire that remained in her came out through loud raucous laughter that resonated against all the walls of a house stained with dog urine and the invisible blotches of hidden failures. Now she would wake up alone and in her own room while my Uncle stared at old pictures in the darkness of the early morning. And yet there was still an urgent smile in her, a sweaty need to live, to breathe some more while it was still possible, while air was still available.
Once, we had been seated in a dark shadowy restaurant in the middle of the afternoon. It had been her and my Uncle and my grandmother, all of us seated around the elegant table covered in a white tablecloth, looking at each other in the air conditioned twilight. She had reached over the table towards me, pushing her face up close so that I would be able to hear her words.
“Juan Carlos, you know about dreams right? You know how to understand them? You know what they mean?”
I said, “I know a little bit…”
As if the answer was already a known foundation upon which her hopes rested, she simply repeated:
“You know about dreams. You know how to interpret them…”
I nodded, knowing that she had something to say and that I wanted to hear it, I wanted her dreams to be reborn here among the cold waves of the air conditioner.
“I have a dream that comes to me over and over. I’ve had it for so long that I don’t even remember a time when I didn’t have it. I wake up in the middle of the night, and that is the only dream I can remember. And then I relive it in my mind, laying in my bed, looking up at the ceiling. This is the dream…I see myself falling into a deep black hole, a hole that goes on forever. I am always trying to reach for the edge but I can’t quite hold onto it. It slips away from my grasp no matter how hard I try to hold on. I feel myself falling and I see the light fading above me and then I wake up.”
She stared at me with big black eyes, the same eyes that stared into the camera for this black and white picture that I now held in my hand. She smiled for me in the restaurant, ready to laugh uproariously once again, ready to seek sanctuary in establishing that it had all been a joke: the dream, her worries, her life, their whole life together. And yet she held her laughter for a moment, I could sense her pulling it in like a wild mare that is ready to run wild. She looked at me and asked me.
“What could that mean, Juan Carlos? What could it mean that I fall into a hole… a hole that goes on forever…night after night?”
I looked back at her and knew that it took no special talent to know the meaning of her dream. I just needed to look at her, right then and there, in the shadows of a restaurant bathed in ice, to know everything that her dream was saying, everything that she was saying through her dream. And yet she couldn’t see it. Or she didn’t want to see it, which was ultimately the same thing.
I smiled at her and I said something, something that could be said in front of my grandmother, something that wouldn’t send my Aunt reeling out of the restaurant, and such somethings are so close to nothing that it’s hard to tell the difference. They just slide out and dissolve even as the words are still coated in saliva, they turn to vapor and escape through the windows where the hot sun can bake their thin remains.
It was enough of something that she was pleased with my answer. She nodded and smiled and then returned to talking about the weather and the current prices of milk and tortillas. But the dream was still within me, just as it surely still was within her, and I silently swooned with the hopelessness of the situation, a seemingly endless fall into a dark hole that never ends, from the light of a clear instant of awakening through the years of compromise and self betrayal, and then here we were, about to pay the bill, about to go home, about to complete yet another sleepy afternoon.

* * *

We were sitting in the secondary living room that surrounded the secondary TV which was next to the dark kitchen which was the one room that was nothing if not primary. For once, everyone was sitting in the same place at the same time, all of us staring across the white gap of wall and transparent table and shiny floor, always managing to miss each other in our quest to find where to rest our eyes.
Of course it wasn’t everyone at all, because my grandmother was gone, gone to nebulous places where she could not be easily reached through ordinary means, and my mother was elsewhere, and my two cousins, Juan Antonio and Roberto, were at their respective jobs. But at least everyone that was in the house at the moment was sitting here, crowded around a blaring TV that nobody was watching.
Every once in a while I would turn my eyes towards it and catch a long view of blue waters from a cliff and a white walled bedroom where a woman talked on the phone, maybe soon the other side of the pearl would make an appearance, and a beautiful blond girl would offer herself for the sake of vengeance, and a beautiful brunette would stay quiet for the sake of appearances, maybe Paul was watching as quietly as I was and maybe he also had nothing to say.
I was sitting by the wall closest to the kitchen and my Uncle was sitting to my left, directly facing the TV (but in his glassy eyes I could tell that the images were not making any impact at all.) Everyone else was sitting directly across from me, momentarily focused on the strange creature that had come from far away for a very short visit before their eyes slid away to more recognizable objects once again. There was my Aunt, laughing at regular intervals, her forehead and cheeks trying desperately to swallow her eyes as she let out another burst of hyena calls, shaking with her head at the endless humor of the situation, of all situations that now crowded around her like a giant metallic trash compactor slowly squeezing her out of the last remnants of life. There was my cousin Roxana whom I had once seen as pretty, even desirable, but which now seemed a bit too angular to truly be human, as if the rounded bones had been replaced by metallic plaques and straight rods of iron, and her cheeks had grown wrinkled and dry and her smile had frozen into a grimace of simulated self satisfaction, and her eyes were like little white marbles that rolled around in their sockets without ever finding a stable place to rest, and her skin seemed like armor, and her words tasted of charcoal, and her laughter was whiny and high but without the simple warmth that my grandmother’s laughter once had. Next to her was her son, Eduardo, my nephew. He was a soft little boy of about ten years, dressed in little jean shorts and a short sleeved green shirt. His skin was as smooth as I remembered Roxana’s had been, and his eyes still held a promise of sincerity, even if it was slowly clouding over with grayness, like an afternoon whose end is approaching, whose long bubbles of warmth are inexorably being covered by the thick blanket of the night.
This was only the second or third time that I saw Eduardo, but he had always seemed strangely familiar, not just because in his face I could recognize the trace of my mother’s family, but also because within his very eyes I could see something of myself.
I saw him once in my grandmother’s living room, back when she was still around and capable of smiling and talking and breathing, before she became dust and mud and memories, no longer limited to one location but free to dissolve into the world itself and observe it from all angles. On that particular voyage, I had seen deep into the heart of San Salvador and I felt that everything in it was decaying and I couldn’t place my eyes on any corner without recognizing the visage of slow death. I was feeling this deep sense of decomposing heaviness, when he inadvertently spoke to me of simple answers hidden behind soft red skin and curious eyes.
I saw him walking around my grandmother’s living room, staring at the many little trinkets that were spread all over shelves and walls. To him, they were as new and marvelous and mysterious as they had once been to me. To him, this San Salvador was the world, and the world was new and full of surprises, and the houses didn’t seem as predictable because they were all brand new and undiscovered, and the trees didn’t seem as damaged because they were all new and full of life, and the streets and the sidewalks themselves didn’t seem as broken because they were all new and ready to be traveled on, and everything that was new was just as it was supposed to be and it was all ready to be seen and experienced for the very first time.
Seeing him there, in my grandmother’s living room, I wondered if the San Salvador that I myself had seen once, the San Salvador that I once saw as new and mysterious, had been just as broken, just as ugly, just as eager to slide into urban death as this one was, but I had seen it as new and so it had been new to me for as long as I saw the newness in it.
Then I wondered further, all the while looking at Eduardo slowly examining the world of insinuations and implications that was my grandmother’s living room. If San Salvador was really truly new, as new now as it had been, as it would always be new once again, moment to moment, then I only saw it as old now because I had grown old myself, old and tired. My sight itself had grown old and tired with me, and the sidewalks and the streets and the houses and the world itself accommodated me in my descent.
For him, for Eduardo, my Uncle was not an old man in the last pathetic moments of a turbulent ride through a biological gauntlet that destroyed every last bit of hope left in him. To him, he was an old and wise grandfather, much like my own grandfather had been to me. And my grandmother must have been even older and wiser and my Aunt was a kind grandmother who laughed with him and took care of him in the midst of her constant delight. And my cousin, she was simply “mother” who was sometimes kind, sometimes strict, sometimes angry, sometimes glad.
As simple as that, they all rotated around their invisible axis and I saw them as if I had never seen them before. Once their past was removed, they were new again and fresh and ready to be examined for the first time. But the past was like a great ocean that didn’t like to be held back, so I would hear its rumblings behind the temporary dam I had built to give me a moment of discovery.
Now, sitting here with them, I could hold on to that vision, and remember that the world itself was as new and as shiny as I chose to make it. In front of me was this little white boy in shorts, rosy cheeks, wide bright eyes, open smile with a hint of mischievousness. He was the teacher who taught me this simple truth. He taught without knowing, he taught without even looking up at me or acknowledging my presence.
On the TV there were men and women kissing and my Aunt was laughing again, but my eyes were on the little boy, trying to somehow decipher how I could make contact with him, how I could pull from him the ghostly secrets that would speak to me of my own past, of my own descent into grayness and shadows.
But he was already growing older, he knew now what he liked and what he didn’t like, he knew how to get what he wanted out of people, he knew what things meant, he knew what the future held, he knew too much and it was too late to show him otherwise. So I just watched him, and I took pictures, and I asked him about the video games he played and he responded in short brief final sentences, and he made certain statements that told me he knew so much that he knew nothing at all. Maybe that was just as it should be, for it was only knowing nothing that you could ever hope to learn.
My Uncle eventually stood up and told me he would now take me home. The moment was over. Eduardo had new games to play with. My cousin had to get back to work. My Aunt had to rest. As we walked down the hallway away from the house, I could hear my Aunt’s laughter and a dog barking in the yard next door. There was dirt on the walls and I could still smell the little white dog’s urine. My Uncle moved even slower than I remembered.
But everything was the same. Aside from the shorts and the constant presence of a grandfather, there was no essential difference. I had been here before. I would be here again. It was new then. It was new now. It would be new again.

* * *

Another picture of the end, the end of all things that ever were or ever could be for my grandmother, the end of my grandmother and all things that came along with her. Meandering talks on narrow green sofas, visited by a gentle breeze, by the rustling of thin brown branches, by waves of tiny mosquitoes that buzzed right up against your ear as if they were about to invade your brain and then they vanished just as easily as they had appeared. Loud trebly laughter half repressed with trembling wrinkled hands pressed up against a shaking red face, down turned eyes that signaled an unknown shame of pleasure. Soft hugs to say hello and hard hugs to say goodbye, all in the shade of the little triangular awning and the shiny red bricks of her main hallway. Slow drives to my Uncle’s house so she could show them that I was one of them, so they could pretend that they agreed, and then just talk for a bit and eat and drive back, having done what we had to do and nothing else. Soft advice delivered in whispers, pregnant with the knowledge that it would never take root.
It was the end of all that and so much more, a vast web of tiny occurrences that I had never quite understood, flashing moments of red and brown and green that came at me with such ease, and settled within me with such laziness, that I never stopped to listen, to look, to question, to dig.
Here was a picture of it, of the end of it. In this picture she was more a corpse than a grandmother, she was as thin as the Holocaust victims were in the old pictures I had seen, the unfortunate bundles of flesh and nerves that inadvertently fell into the hands of the Nazi machine and ended up looking more like slimy skinny skeletons than men or women or people at all. She was not naked in the picture, she was not walking on a broken road of white rocks in front of an old army truck, but she was just as thin, just as pale, just as severe in her announcement of the final curtain. She stared at the camera with eyes of total incomprehension, as if she was asking:
“Why now? Why this? Why here?”
But she had no clear foundation to even complete the questions in a way that they could be understood, and so they were left hanging in her eyes like verbal tears that would never roll off her pink cheeks made of crinkly paper.
They were all around her.
My cousin Roberto, tall and strong and broad shouldered, sitting right behind her, pushing her up towards life with his own physical strength and his radiant smile (which was truly radiant even if it hid layers of anger that nobody close to him could ever begin to suspect. I could only see them because I was far away enough to notice the trails of blackened smoke that shifted around the edges of his eyes.)
My aunt was beside him, her soft white arm around his strong brown shoulders, smiling in the middle of laughing. I could hear her laughter right through the glass of the picture, making it all glimmer with a sense of urgency, of a dam about to burst (or maybe it was her laughing down below us, maybe she was just then walking from the kitchen to the living room and laughing, or walking up the stairs and laughing, or cleaning up after the little white dog, and complaining loudly, right before laughing again)

I could feel my grandmother trembling, too weak to let my Aunt know that she was laughing too loud, that her intense bursts of deflective mirth were puncturing right through her weakened defenses. She was too far gone to even make a gesture, to even raise her thin little hand in a dismissive wave. And yet she somehow knew that she would not hear that laughter for too much longer, that the days themselves were growing shorter, shorter and shorter, thinner and lighter like her own body, until there would be no days at all. And she vaguely understood that this indeed was the end of days, the one that had been predicted all along by scriptures and dirty madmen walking up and down the Plaza Libertad, and it was coming for her, this end that she now knew to be conscious and mobile, self aware beyond her own wildest imaginings and ready to devour her and dissolve her into its entrails just as she was beginning to finally understand.
Here they were all around her, and they were ready to send her off, in a voyage that she now knew she wasn’t quite prepared for, a voyage she had never packed for and now it was too late to begin, it was too late to do anything at all other than wait. Maybe she would pray, although the prayers now stuck to the roof of her mouth like old chewing gum that had lost its flavor. Stuck and dry, they didn’t come out quite right and they simply lingered around the edges of her thoughts like rustling branches. She felt a trace of emptiness that she couldn’t quite place, a narrow channel that led to nowhere and wouldn’t let you take any side roads, it wouldn’t let you get back to bed, it wouldn’t let you sit one more time on the old green sofa and rest for a moment while Manuel brought the bread or the fruit or the milk. At least soon the laughter would be over, and then maybe she would have enough silence to finally figure it all out.
My younger cousin, Juan Antonio, was sitting next to the bed, and he seemed thick and stable, like an old tree with deep full roots that reach deep into the earth and prevent it from ever moving. His face was very wide and he had a half smile on his face that didn’t seem genuine or even a good approximation. It had probably been forced onto him by someone suddenly saying “now, smile!” and this is the best he could do with such short notice. This people couldn’t, shouldn’t, really ask for more. The half smile would have to be enough. Very soon he would have to be back at work, making his way down long empty hallways, answering his cell phone with a metal mask of seriousness over his brown face, pretending to ignore the whispers that followed him, sitting at his own desk and admiring the little pictures framed in metal, the stacks of papers, the sound of typewriters on the other side of the walls. But he was here now, and he couldn’t believe how thin my grandmother looked, how sick, how destroyed…but hopefully she would get better soon, hopefully normality would return like the sun and the paper and little girl offering tortillas while banging a nickel against the garage door. And then everything would be as it should be, as it always had been.
Here were the two grandsons. Eduardo was right up front but only his eyes could be seen in the picture, staring straight into the camera with a sharp corrugated layer of shallow resentment (which I immediately recognized from another old picture I had carried around with me for years, a picture in which my eyes expressed the same boiling anger, the same indignant wish to punish those that would force me to stand here for this.) I recognized him here as a kind of recording creature, a magical entity sent to inhale the moment, an unstable shifting chamber of drastic transformation that he couldn’t quite understand as it flashed before him like a burst of colored light. But understanding was not a prerequisite. It was only necessary to look. It would soon be over and then it would be time for the next game, and then the next game after that, until a certain afternoon of smoldering darkness would awake the memory within him. Then it would all come spilling back like a waterfall full of incomprehensible colorful detail. But, by then, he would not be who he was, and all the colors would have changed their names, and all the names would have changed their letters.
On the bed was my Uncle, lying right next to my grandmother, still holding the place of my missing grandfather, even to this last moment, making sure that my grandmother was not alone, that my grandmother did not miss the man who had left her for a life of adventure, sitting next to her where her man should have been (and my grandfather couldn’t be here at all because I had seen him transform into a shower of white powder and I had seen the powder flying over the cold waters of a distant bay.) He was staring into the camera with the down turned smile that was the single trustworthy weapon in his repertoire, holding onto the little white dog who was his only guide, the same white dog that now whined and cried in the distance, surely in the midst of another stream of uncontrolled peeing, another involuntary split which would send his body crashing onto the slippery white bricks. With each fall, with each cry for help, he was taking another step closer to the end, the end of all things that ever were or ever could be, the end which would eventually come to get all of us: little white dog, Uncle, little arrogant boy, strong cousin, happy cousin, laughing Aunt, grandmother, even the creature that hid behind wide open eyes and claimed to be me. The end which, like a cloud of nothingness mired with fangs and floating jetsam, came for my grandmother shortly after this picture was taken. The picture then carried her presence as well as her absence, and it would soon carry more absences within it, as, one by one, the flattened inhabitants of its shiny paper would dive into the roaming eschaton.
There would come a time when there would be nobody left to look. Then the picture itself would come to an end.

* * *

It was late at night, or a dark evening that I used to perceive as late when I was young and so it would forever maintain its character of lateness in my memories. It was much earlier than what late was now for me, now that time passed so quickly, like a speeding modern train on its way to a distant city across open fields, a gleaming city which no train could ever reach; now that late and early met each other like a serpent biting its own tail and finding its own body too hard to swallow.
I was sitting next to my grandmother in her car and she was driving, as slowly and methodically as ever, a turn at a time, a gentle acceleration, then a stop and maybe another turn. I had asked her to drive me all the way to La Satelite, the little suburban neighborhood where I had found a street populated by loyal friends and beautiful girls and waves of invisible enemies, the place where I would rather be if I was granted any choice at all.
To me, La Satelite wasn’t that far away from my grandmother’s home, from the small area of the city that my grandmother knew closely and drove through in a sonata of precise repeatable movements. In the daylight, I could walk all the way to La Satelite in about half an hour. I could make my way through the dirt roads, strolling by the military hospital with its stylized picture of a young soldier standing straight up with legs open and back straight, holding his black rifle in front of him at an angle, a fake smile painted on his innocent young brown face. When I saw him up there, my eyes would invariably go to the gate where the real soldiers were standing. They would stare at me as I passed by. They were just as young as the one in the picture but their faces were not as friendly and their guns seemed heavier and more burdened by secret sins committed behind dark bushes and light brown mountains covered in Napalm scars. Maybe in every boy that passed by them they saw a promise of vengeance, the wrathful punishment that awaited them for their hidden crimes, the punishment that would surely come flying towards them from the depths of the midnight sun that they tried to forget, the punishment that would be carried by skinny little arms and legs in an orgy of elemental sacrifice whose underlying deep drone was pain and whose gruesome melodies were constructed out of notes of fear. So they would stare at each boy that passed them by, hoping that this was not the one that would carry out their slow death sentence, hoping that this was not the one that brought the last message that they would ever receive. I would go right past them without looking back and as I moved down the road, covered in dust and tiny dirt pebbles, I would feel their eyes on my back, as surely as I could feel my sweat and the weight of my thick wallet.
I would then walk past the dirty old houses that were the secret alcoves of the poor and the even poorer, the unknown scrawny creatures that lived not so far away from the hospital or from the small middle class houses that I was on my way to visit, and yet it was far enough away that it seemed like a whole other universe, a universe filled with little pot bellied children running around naked and screaming, and women calling for them from within dark faded rooms (the walls empty except for little cheap calendars with a picture of the Virgin Mary), and teenage girls with big round asses that barely fit into old ripped up skirts, the zipper on the back always halfway down, and they would be moving their hips back and forth as they went to run an errand, maybe hoping to meet a friend or a boyfriend on the way there, and there would be thin multicolored hammocks that were tied to dark thin posts, and light blue transistor radios blaring “rancheras” and “cumbias” and there would be gusts of high pitched laughter that would sometimes emerge unbidden from the many hidden dirty sanctuaries.
Drunken men would walk by me, hobbling back and forth as drunks do. Then they would turn around and stare. They would recognize in me an old friend that they hadn’t seen in years, and they would come towards me, large smiles on their faces which trembled under their bloodshot eyes. They would start conversations that I would soon try to finish.
“Do you remember me?”
“No”
“You don’t remember me? You know what? It’s OK… I remember you. I have the deepest appreciation for someone like you, you know. Do you know that?”
“No, I didn’t know that…”
“I do…I just want to say that to you… also, could you have a colon so I can have something to eat?”
But I had somewhere to get to, and, as much as I enjoyed the walk, in those days I enjoyed the destination even more. Once I arrived, the recognition would be mutual, the questions would need no answer, and the answers would come out in a stream of brightly colored words.
Driving was a very different experience. The dirt roads that I took when walking were not open to cars. In some places it was difficult to pass through them even on foot. Now you wouldn’t even be able to determine where it was that I walked back then, for everything had been turned to asphalt and sidewalks and dark smoke and corners that had lost their freshness and their sense of a future or a recent past. But back then, cars had to travel far to get to a place where they could turn back around. La Satelite then seemed much farther than it really was, like a lost treasure glowing in the distance, beckoning me with its hints of laughter and white breeze and cool shade on gray bricks.
Here was my fragile grandmother, with her white and gray hair covered by a thin net, with her trembling hands and lips, with her wide eyes full of worry, driving in the darkness of that early evening, in her old elegant white car, traveling through the narrow streets I knew so well but which she didn’t know at all. Where I saw familiarity and memories, she saw danger and darkness. Where I saw Rodney playing basketball in his dirty school clothes, she saw an overgrown park full of hoodlums. Where I saw the cinema where we laid back on the squeaking wooden chairs and stuffed our mouths full of popcorn, she saw a corner of vice and damnation. Where I saw hope, she saw a long slope that led to a terrible, unspeakable outcome.
As we approached our final destination, we turned at a nondescript corner overgrown with thick green bushes. It was only marked by a black sign that pointed to a local auto shot. I had never visited this particular auto shop but I had come to know it, both as a guiding landmark in our travels and as the workplace of the men that had once assaulted our vulnerable home. As we made that turn, the landscape seemed to become even more foreboding, in some way that I couldn’t quite pinpoint. My grandmother was shaking a little more than she usually did and she was holding onto the wheel with thin weak fingers, and her fingers were turning white because she was holding on so tightly. The dark blue steering wheel was her last bastion of safety. Without turning to look at me, for she would never take her eyes off the road, she asked:
“Is this the right way? Are you sure we are still going the right way? This all seems so strange and unfamiliar…”
Everything was so familiar to me that it was surprising to see that she didn’t believe me when I said, “Yes, it is. We’re on the right street. Don’t worry grandma, I’ve been here so many times… I used to live here, remember? We won’t get lost. We’re going the right way…”
And yet, when I looked through the windshield at the nighttime world outside, I could now see through the wide fearful eyes of my grandmother as she surveyed a mirage of pure fright. I could see the tall dark bushes that reached up like inverted giant squids towards the sky, their green tentacles shivering menacingly as we passed them by. I could see the crooked trees that danced with the growing wind, like strange monsters out of an old ghost tale. I could see the old dilapidated houses with their long eerie shadows and their yellowish pools of light, and the long narrow alleyways with their fateful promises of gut wrenching deadly encounters.
For a moment, I allowed myself to wonder if we really were somewhere else, if we had somehow strayed from the places that I knew and we were now hopelessly lost in the dark realms of a San Salvador I didn’t know at all, a San Salvador which was as foreign to me as a city of nightmare, a place where men were hungry predatory beasts and women were not much better. I could see that this was a dark place of danger, a place to be avoided at all costs, a place to be forgotten and relayed to the closed bins of the past. I could see it now, staring out from behind my grandmother’s eyes and letting her visions invade me like cold waves of brittle ice.
My grandmother had spent most of her life finding a way to get as much distance from all of this as possible. How could she understand that her grandson wanted this more than he wanted anything? How could she understand that, to him, the tall secure walls of Escalon, and the large color TVs, and the shiny new cars, and even all the books in the world, they all couldn’t replace this little neighborhood in the middle of nowhere, where he had found something so elusive that he hesitated to give it a name.
Seeing this street now, through her eyes, I could see that I might be as crazy as she thought I was, and that we should have been safe and warm at home, watching the latest soap opera, or listening to a good new record freshly recorded onto an old cassette tape. Instead we were here, driving through the back streets of a city already in the throes of decay. Her long thin hands were trembling like tiny thin maracas. It was too late to turn around so we continued.
We were now making our way up Constitucion Street. Here everything was so utterly known and familiar that I couldn’t see through her eyes anymore. Her vision left me as easily as it had come. The final turn was coming up and I told her so, pointing with my outstretched hand. Then I added:
“We are almost there. Don’t worry anymore. Everything will be fine.”
But I could hear her thinking and her thoughts were as plain as the white walls of the two story house in the corner:
“Why would you want to be here tonight? Why would you have me come all the way here, when there is nothing here? Nothing at all…” but she didn’t say it out loud, she just nodded and turned the wheel when I asked her to.
Soon the car was rumbling in place in front of the gray corner house which was my friend’s home, and soon I was kissing my grandmother’s cheek and she was kissing mine. She shook her head and I smiled one more time at her. Then I walked away from the car and I heard it moving slowly back to where it came from.
Days later, I was sitting on the terrace of my grandmother’s garden, leaning on the old big brown couch where I used to become a pirate, when the red bricks were an ocean, and the couch itself was a ship, and the garden was a vast mysterious world full of menace and treasure. It was the same terrace that would eventually disappear to be turned into an extra room which my grandmother would then refuse to use. My mother used it sometimes when she was visiting, a tiny ordered home within the strange labyrinth that was an outgrowth of my grandmother’s mind. The little room then became an apartment, where strange people talked in loud voices while I tried to remember a terrace that was no longer there, a terrace where I used to play with my cousin, where I used to lay back reading comic books on a sleepy afternoon.
On this particular day, the long red terrace was still there and so was the big old brown couch. I was leaning all the way back, my legs up in the air, one knee crossed so that one foot was swinging in the air while I dived out of my body into a world of high adventure and bright colors spliced into chewable bites by slender white lines, a world where death was always roaming around the sharp edges of the panels, but it never quite came for the ones that mattered, the ones that stood at the heart of the world.
I heard the sound of the car driving up the long ramp, and I immediately knew that it was my Uncle. He would slide up the ramp at a very high speed, with a loud screeching of wheels as they spinned hungrily against the faded sun baked bricks outside. I always thought that he was about to run straight into the far wall, but he always braked at just the right time and in exactly the same way, and the wheels creaked against the bricks in just the same way as he braked, and then the door opened in just the same way and then his shoes made a rhythmic patter over the same bricks as he approached, his keys jingling loudly as he entered the house.
I didn’t make a move at all, for in those days I lived there and I didn’t feel like I had to get up and greet my Uncle when he arrived. In any case, he didn’t expect it. It had become our agreed custom to stay out of each other’s way whenever possible, strangers roaming in adjacent chambers of the labyrinth, never opening a window, never opening a door, never any need to reach across the gap. Or almost never.
I returned my attention to the comic, but I kept on hearing the loud footsteps, past the point where I expected them to stop. Suddenly they were too close to ignore, they were echoing right past the sliding doors that led to the terrace, and then there he was, in a light brown pair of pants and a striped white shirt and big dark glasses which covered half his face. He was taking the last few steps towards me.
I put the comic book down and waved hello to him halfheartedly, still believing that he was on his way to the garden, maybe to check on a newly planted tree or flower, maybe just to make sure that the gardener was doing his job. But he didn’t go past me towards the open lawn or the surrounding foliage. Instead, he stood right in front of me. It was now clear that he had something to say. I looked up and dropped my legs to the floor in a vague sign of respect, a respect I didn’t truly feel, since for me he was like a forgotten painting, a painting that moves and talks but is still a painting, one that I didn’t look at very often, and, when I did, it was only to remind myself that it was indeed still there.
“Juan Carlos, I have to talk to you,” he said it in that slightly whiny nasal voice, a voice that had an element of thick weight in it, but was mostly made up of my grandmother’s voice, translated through a male adult’s vocal chords.
“What is it?” I said, wondering what he could possibly have to say to me, this forgotten painting which, in my own mind, had already said everything it could possibly have to say and was now just passing the time until it got taken away.
“You took your grandmother all the way to La Satelite the other day…”
“Yeah, she took me there… why?”
Then I looked at him more closely and noticed that there were slight differences in the painting on this particular afternoon. It was as if someone had gone over the old lines with new brushes, creating new highlights in the midst of old shades. His face was redder, his arms were more pronounced, he was even trembling slightly.
“You can’t have her take you there… ever… you understand?”
I could have said yes and forgotten all about it, but that was not in me. I simply couldn’t release such things as easily as closing a door or stepping outside. I was very curious as to what his hidden point was, or if he even had one.
“What do you mean? What’s the problem?” I asked in the most innocent voice I could muster.
“She is very old… she can’t be going all the way there!” Now his voice was rising and I was finally understanding the nature of the situation.
This man who walked past me every day, this man with whom we managed a clear understanding of mutual lack of communication, this man was now very angry. I had seen him angry many times, at the security guard, at his secretary, at bill collectors, at his sons, at his wife. I had heard his screams of anger from my room, coming from his little office on the other side of the patio. I had seen his looks of anger as he roamed around his house. I had heard him bark like a large dog when one of my cousins tried to contradict him. I had clearly experienced his anger. But on this particular day, he was angry at me. The shift was disturbing and somewhat frightening.
“I told her where I was going, she volunteered to take me. Nothing bad happened. There’s nothing to worry about…”
I said it in a calm voice that carried an edge of dismissal, hoping that he would simply walk away and it would all be forgotten. But he was still trembling and now his mouth was gaping open, unable to believe that I would dare to respond to him in any way.
“Listen to me,” he said again, and his voice was louder and heavier, like balls of iron rolling over a gray concrete floor, “you can’t ever have her take you there. Ever! That’s a dangerous place where you go… and she took you at night… don’t you ever… ever! … do that… ever!… don’t you ever do that again! You can go there if you want… that’s your own problem… but don’t ever take here there again! Do you understand me?”
I nodded but I couldn’t help allowing a slight grin to form on the side of my face.
“If I need to go, and she tells me she will take me, then I will say yes. I don’t see why I shouldn’t…” My voice now had a touch of anger as well, slimy anger that slid around my syllables like a venomous snake showing its curved fangs.
“Because I’m telling you that you shouldn’t! That’s why! She’s my mother and I don’t want anything to happen to her! I am telling you right now… don’t ever take her there again!” Now his face was very red and his mouth was very wide open, slender trails of saliva extended from one line of teeth to the other. I could imagine that his eyes were bulging out under his big thick glasses, but all I saw was two big pools of darkness in the middle of his face.
“Listen to me, Uncle…” the word ‘uncle’ came out with a strong taste of dismissal, like a bit of excess flesh removed from my lip, “you’re not my father… you don’t talk to me like that…you don’t tell me what to do and what not to do…I don’t have to take that from you… at all…do you understand me?” I said it in a cold voice that I knew would have the worst possible effect on the strangely palpitating figure before me. The snake’s fangs were now dripping venom all over the floor and my eyes were fixed at an angle, like sharply cut slits on a wall of sheer white iron. If I had seen my face in a mirror, I would have recognized it instantly. It was the face that I had once feared above all things. It was the pure image of male anger expressed in simple muscular motion and it now belonged to me.
His whole body trembled and I could almost feel him taking a step towards me, even though he never moved from his position a few feet away. I stayed where I was as well and continued to stare into the darkness of his sunglasses.
“Do not take my mother there! Never again!” he said.
I shrugged my shoulders. He turned around and walked away, mumbling under his breath. I could hear the footsteps clicking on the red bricks all the way back to the front door and then to the waiting car.
As I heard the car moving down the ramp, I felt a kind of gentle relief, almost as pleasantly cooling as the breeze that filtered through the thick green leaves of the garden outside. I would not have to go to my Uncle’s house anymore. Not for a long time. Now I had a reason to stay away and I would use it. I would raise that reason before me like a conquering flag adorned in the colors of primordial anger.
I smiled to myself and continued to read my comic book, feeling that I had been given an unexpected gift. In my mind, I was already planning to ask my grandmother for another ride. Maybe next time she wouldn’t be so afraid. Maybe then the streets would not be so dark and the shadows would not be so menacing.

* * *

Here was a picture of my grandfather, my grandfather as I remembered him, as I could see him now within the blank screen of my mind, walking up and down the tall hills of San Francisco, moving quickly and vigorously, with solid, strong steps, barely ever breaking a sweat or showing any sign of tiredness, pulling ahead of us as he walked and turning towards us to say:
“C’mon! Hurry up! Hurry up! We don’t have all day!”
His eyes would drill into us, showing a guttural disdain for people like us that couldn’t keep up with him, people that were weak and confused and impractical, people that didn’t know what life was truly about. I could see my grandfather sitting at a little cafeteria, leaning over the table, over the dishes of yellow rice and smoked roast beef, telling us about the wicked ways of the city, sliding around any direct and obvious references to what he saw as the hidden horror that lurked among the alleys and boulevards that he had learned to avoid. He preferred to use euphemisms or vague references to the Bible (“Sodom and Gomorrah! That’s what these two cities are! Sodom and Gomorrah! You understand me?” he would say to my mother, protecting me from lascivious perverted images that already lived within my mind, images that had flowered in my dark inner theater long before he came along to caress their edges.)
He would also tell us how much he loved to be here, in this same city of godless damnation. This never seemed to be a contradiction at all, not for him, for the city was a being in itself, a creature made of concrete and wood that had been invaded by other foreign creatures that did not belong there. He hoped that maybe, just maybe, all these invaders would soon go back to wherever they came from and the city would return to its original state, to the way it was when he first saw it. (And it was impossible for him to see that he himself had come from elsewhere, just as all the others had, and if they all were to go back, there would be no city left at all. Maybe that would be a true return to the origins, but no matter how far back you went, there would always be another question standing behind the edge, another origin behind each pristine cause.)
He would easily walk from one end of the city to the other, from the clock tower, to the Civic Center, from Powell and Market to Fisherman’s Wharf, always at the same constant speed, always retaining his straight demeanor, eyes looking vaguely downward at those around him, always impatient and eager to speak as briefly as possible so he could then move on, so he could then walk some more. That was his preferred method of movement, walking down Vanness or Grant, tipping his hat with a quick shift of the right hand wrist, in a manner that proudly spoke of elegance, and it spoke of elegance much louder than I had ever heard it spoken before, in a way that seemed unreal to a dirty boy like me who ran away from conventional manners and customs as if they were riding on a heavy black freight train rolling straight towards me, ready to crush me and tear me apart.
Here he was, in this old picture, just like I had known him, dressed in a full gray suit, a gray hat out of a movie from the ‘40s, something with Humphrey Bogart in it, something in black and white with a lot of people smoking, all covered in fuzzy bright lights. He spoke in the same way as well, so much so that if I dreamt about Humprey Bogart, I knew it was about him. He had become a kind of Humprey Bogart that had no clear direction, a man whose movie had run out many years before it was time to leave the theater, and now he was simply walking the streets of a shifting noisy city in the hope of finding a new reason to live. He spoke English in a certain cutting way that still held the world of half a century ago in every syllable, quick sentences that sounded like single words and flew like invisible knives through the cold air of the bay. He still lived in that world that had been and he carried that dead era with him, like a big white sack full of fading memories always draped across his back. Walking with him through the city was watching another city come to life in front of me, a city with fewer brilliant colors but with a sense of old fashioned honor and righteousness, at least according to his own code, a code which was unspoken but vibrant in every sentence that ever came out of his mouth.
Here he was in the picture, with his left hand fingers reaching for his chin, in the classic pose of a man who is thinking. He had always maintained an ambivalence towards learning that ultimately made him hate me more (for I had become the family’s symbolic icon for reading and learning, a pus ridden pustule where resentment could grow and assumptions could run wild.) He would proudly state, repeatedly and falsely, as I later came to find out, that he had never made it past the fourth grade, that he only knew what he needed to know and that single true stream of knowledge was always coached in the raw and final declaration of practicality.
“In life you must be practical! That is all that matters! You can’t fool around with frivolous things. You have to be practical. That has to come before anything else!”
And yet he relished the sounds of classical music. And yet he boasted of his knowledge of composers and writers to my grandmother, specially when I wasn’t around. And yet he tried to understand the Bible in a semi scholarly fashion, filling up thick notebooks with notes and references, notebooks that ended up lonely and forgotten in my garage. And yet he was proud to have been a good accountant, even if he had never received the appreciation that he deserved. And yet he was proud of all the things that he did know. A little knowledge would build you up, but too much knowledge would spoil you. I was a clear example of the latter case. He was an example of ingesting just the right amount.
In the picture, he had a broad open easy smile, the kind of smile I had rarely seen upon his old thick brown face. He was much more prone to frowning than smiling. He would leap towards fiery anger in a quick and single instant that would remain forever hard to predict (until, instead of being unpredictable it became the norm, and then there was no need to predict it at all, because by that time I knew that he would become angry at least a few times each and every time I saw him, no matter what I did or said, and so I had no need to worry, I knew exactly what was coming, I would have resigned myself to his anger before I even placed a foot inside the car, much like a traveler might have to deal with rain or snow, much like a dreamer might have to deal with nights of insomnia.)
His anger was borne of impatience and disillusionment. He had lived alone too long, caged in by the four walls of various hotel rooms and apartments, which were all the same room but with different views, and all the time knowing that he needed to be elsewhere but having nowhere else to go. And all these people that surrounded him, (including me and my mother, once we came to live in his city) we just couldn’t live up to the speed with which his brain understood itself. For his brain knew all his stories and knew all the correct questions and their corresponding answers, and knew when and how these questions could be posed and when and how these answers could be delivered. We would always ask the wrong questions at the wrong time, we would misunderstand statements, we would become distracted. Then his eyes would bulge out like heavy underwater creatures that threatened to leap out of his brown face, and his hand would drop like a heavy axe and his head would shake, making his wrinkled cheeks dance like Jell-O. Then he would become grandfather as I knew him, angry and offended, ready to run away at any moment, eager to lash out, indignant and proud.
When I would see him like this, in his full splendor as true grandfather Roberto, lost father to my mother and my Uncle, lost husband to my grandmother, elusive lost wise ghost to my cousins and me, when I saw him then, I wouldn’t exactly love him but I would certainly recognize him. As much as I recognized him now, right here in this picture, smiling. For I knew that the smile would fade away soon and then the anger would return, or maybe nothing would return at all for he was dead and gone. I had even seen him burning inside a long tunnel made of thick black metal, burning like a soft and malleable piece of meat that quickly exploded into white dust and his shape was gone before I could catch the thoughts that had burned away with him.
My grandfather lived here in my Uncle’s home though this false smiling picture, but my grandfather lived here in every corner, on every wall, on every forgotten alcove, on every silent exhalation, on every loud burst of laughter. My Uncle’s entire life had been a slow and failing attempt to make up for his many shortcomings, to make up for his ever present absence, to make up for his dreams of adventure that ended in a dark hotel room. He tried and tried to make up for what he couldn’t understand, only to find that the old habits were not so easily avoided, they clung to your skin like leeches, they were hanging from your eyes like frozen tears.

* * *

Here was a picture that had been colored to look like a painting, or maybe a painting that had been made from a picture, paying close attention to every detail. Or maybe it was just a painting without a picture, a pure imaginary transient dream flashing before my eyes, a dream of a perfect creature that never quite existed except here, on this colorful picture.
Here my cousin Roxana was young and tiny and happy and innocent and so beautiful that she radiated beauty outwards from behind the old glass frame and it spilled over into the other pictures that surrounded her (maybe that was why my grandfather was smiling in the picture to her left, maybe it was her radiance that kept my grandfather alive within his own frozen world.)
Had Roxana ever truly been this beautiful? I could never know, for when she was this young I had been young as well, even younger than her, and I didn’t have the skill to notice, I didn’t have the attention to trace the outline of her face and derive conclusions from my findings. Now that I could notice, now that I could look straight into her eyes and carefully examine the mountain ranges of her flesh and the slight shifts of color in her skin, now she was old and hard and wrinkled and made of rusty metal, and her voice had become like chalk scrubbed against a blackboard and I would soon be forced to look away if I stared into her for too long.
Here in the picture it was otherwise, here she was the light that shone above my Uncle’s heart, the living embodiment of all that he secretly considered holy. Here she was the pureness of love without boundaries, without demands or claims or rights. Here she was playful and curious. Here she was true, and her truth contained all the truth that my Uncle had been able to squeeze out of his heart to soak it into this new creature that had emerged from his very loins to give him one last glowing ray of hope before the night finally set in.
Like all of us, she was a clash of opposites, a living contradiction. Her laughter was high and whiny like my Uncle’s and my grandmother’s and it was copious and loud like my Aunt’s. Her demeanor was flighty and impetuous like my aunt’s but her thoughts were hard and heavy like my grandfather’s. To me, she had been a deep mystery that grew into a shallow question, an open case no longer worth solving. From her whiny laughter in the darkness of my grandmother’s bedroom, where she would kick back and forth in her sleep and my grandmother would wake up in the morning with bruises, to her little room flushed in pink and light shiny blue, that spoke of questions I couldn’t then formulate. From her derisive laughter aimed at my Uncle who sat at the head of the table and simply took it in, shaking his head in mock disapproval but allowing her to go on without interruption or argument, to her declarations of overarching ambitions of power in my grandmother’s living room, while my grandmother behind her shook her own head in disbelief, smiling softly at me, knowing that I would stay quiet. These formed the quadrants of my experience of her and they left much terrain that would never be discovered.
In my Uncle’s dream, which was physically manifested in the bright colors of the picture, she was life itself, hope and love and a promise of forbidden pleasures that lay beyond the horizon of the knowable. She was the golden treasure that must be raised over the army’s head when victory is approaching, the beacon of rightfulness that made everything else worthwhile. In my Uncle’s dream, life itself laughed at him continuously, life itself described all his shortcomings in between loud whiny exhalations, life itself turned her back on him for other more worthy consorts. In my Uncle’s dream, life rejected him and left him alone in a dark room, hoping for a final burst of light to save him from the endless darkness.
They said that she would be my wife someday, and maybe they were joking, and they didn’t know that their jokes were heard very carefully and elaborated with threads of precision and desire. My first dreams of married life were with her and my secret explorations of her room when there was no one else around, were for the sake of knowledge, a knowledge that was hidden by the years and the great destructions that would make it impossible to peer through the thick clouds.
They said that she was like my mother, and I would say she was nothing like her, but what they said was true in a way I couldn’t yet understand. She was to my Uncle what my mother had been to my grandfather, and where my grandfather had abandoned his life in search of a new one, my Uncle had sacrificed his own for the sake of the little burst of gold that once cried hopelessly in his arms. For my grandmother, for my aunt, for my cousin.
Crone, witch and virgin. It was all the same.
My mother hated my grandfather for escaping, my cousin hated my Uncle for his total and absolute surrender. Looking at her in her original splendor, in the brilliant colors of a manifested dream, I could believe in true escape, in the possibility of a final redemption. In her fixed eyes, that stared straight at me through the glass, I could sense centuries of fateful hopes and dismal failures, I could sense a circular path that always came to the same place where the nothing turned into something and a story could then begin all over again. No matter what path you chose along the complex labyrinth of a lifetime, you would always come back here, to a sleepy afternoon soaked in sweat and dust and fading memories. Here was what would be rejected and what could be would be forever yearned for, desired in unspoken words that were as light as feathers, as transparent as tears, as distant as stars. From the picture, my cousin looked at me, shining with hope, unaware that all her hope had vanished long ago, and it was now only a mirage, a memory of things that had never truly happened.

* * *

One after another, the old scenes came to fruition, like single slices of film being slowly processed through the living camera hidden behind my eyes. I could only slowly slide into a sense that I had been through each and every single one of these scenes ten times, twenty times, a hundred times, a thousand times, and I couldn’t bring myself to say how many times it truly had been because it couldn’t have been that many and yet I saw them like endless reflections stretching forever into the past and into the future.
Here were the white clouds moving slowly past the brown and green shadow of the volcano. Here were the loud horns of the buses, screeching as the big black wheels pressed onwards up El Paseo, a teenager hanging from the side, calling for more passengers by screaming the closest destination (“Salvador del Mundo! Besa! Besa! Besa! Salvador del Mundo! Besa!”) and letting the ones inside know where they were. Here was my Dad, again deciding once and for all that people were idiots and then going on to outline their true problem as he saw it, and here I was trying to make fine points with him, points of logic and empathy that would slide down the drain of his perception like dead leaves down an old gutter and I could only watch them floating away, already decomposing beyond recognition, already lost beyond repair. Here was my grandmother Graciela making her way up the wooden stairs, a maid at her side holding her up, reaching up with her trembling skinny hand to pass it by my cheek, offering her own cheek so I could kiss it and then feel with my lips the soft wrinkled remains of what was once her youthful face. Here were the birds, singing continuously outside the windows, flashing from tree to tree in joyful bursts of melody, repeated calls for the lost past “Dichoso fui! Dichoso! Dichoso fui!” (“I was so happy once! I was so, so happy once!”) and for the mysterious present that was still hiding behind the shining cloak of moistened green leaves. Here were the maids stepping out of little black metal side doors, their sandals clapping loudly on the sloping sidewalks as they made their way once more down to the supermarket, their legs brown and thick and tainted with dark blue veins, their skirts light blue and dark blue and all made out of cheap fabric. Here were the guards, talking and joking as the days passed by without notice, moving quickly only when a shiny dark brown Cherokee approached and that meant it was time to open the gates and salute, sometimes with a smile, sometimes with a single direct frown that signified respect. Here was the station wagon with a loud bullhorn affixed to its top, letting the whole world know that it carried fresh fish and shrimp (“Camaron fresco! Boca colorada! Camaron de rio!”) all in a deep sexy voice that couldn’t possibly be the same one I had heard when I was a little boy and yet it was indeed the same, just as deep, just as sexual, just as eminently seductive, and it would stay the same as long as I returned to this place (and when I couldn’t return any longer, the place itself would simply keep on rotating.) Here was the young girl banging with a nickel on the side of the metal gate below and ringing the bell which she could barely reach while she called out forcefully: “Tortillas! Tortillas!” Here was my Uncle, parked sideways on my grandmother Graciela’s little driveway, standing by the door and forcing a downward smile as I stepped out of the garage door, reaching out to me with his thick white hand covered in little white hairs and saying “Aja Juan Carlos!” Here was the big military academy with its towers full of machine guns and its brilliant eyes that shone out from the layers of shadow within. Here was the loud sound of little vans passing by, drenched in “rancheras” and “cumbias” while people struggled to keep their eyes open inside, pressed against each other by others just like them, all sharing the same sweaty anxiety, the same clinging fear. Here were the men with hairy arms and chests, all dressed in short sleeved shirts, all wearing gold medallions around their thick brown necks, all perpetually balancing between a place of anger and a place of laughter, always ready to show the silver that crowned the yellow teeth in their mouth. Here was my Dad once again, in loose gray shorts, leaning against the brown sofa, arms widely outstretched, pressing his back against the seat and looking at me with curiosity, then leaning his head back and looking up at the roof while exhaling loudly, his nose elastically flaring up. Here was a small clear glass, covered in a white weaved little jacket that my grandmother had made, in her bouts of quick intense creativity. Here was the sound of my grandmother calling for the maids to come quickly, and then her loud exhalations of complaint when they never managed to come quickly enough. Here was the loud sound of honking as we drove into downtown San Salvador, and the thick clouds of smoke slowly deepening their darkness as the sound increased and more and more people reached for the window, offering their items for sale in loud whiny voices that demanded your attention. And here I was, leaning against the seat of my Uncle’s car, watching it all, going for a quick lunch at his house, returning a few hours later, ready to read another book, ready to slide into the arms of another sleepy afternoon which was ready to embrace me back with the abandon of a happy drunken woman, with the warmth of a new mother, with the unrelenting oppressiveness of endless enthropic death.
I was watching the film but I was part of it as well. I had my part in the script and I followed it to the letter. It had been written long before I decided to watch it. I had no business trying to change it. I could only delve deeper into its mysterious corners, into its most hidden parts. If my Uncle wanted to talk, then I would let him. I might ask questions, I might take pictures, I might even try to step out of line. But regardless of my actions, the film would go on. The heavy presence of the transparent afternoon would not let it do otherwise.

* * *

She must have been beautiful, as beautiful as the young girl I saw selling chewing gum on the street the first day I arrived. Like her, she must have been very thin and her flesh must have been soft and brown and unmarked, and her eyes must have been wide open and appealingly innocent, full of a devious curiosity that sparked fresh reflective curiosity in the watcher as well. Her hands must have felt like feathers, purposeful feathers that gathered around his most secret places and made him realize that life was still there, for it was surely holding him now, and it was making him relish what truth there was in this moment, with this beautiful girl that just stared into his eyes and barely smiled in the cool darkness of his apartment. Maybe now she was completely naked and her soft young body was shining in the darkness and her eyes were shining as well, and her hands were even softer, specially now, compared to his own rough hands that now made their own voyages over the landscape of her flesh. When she started moaning with unabashed pleasure, it was almost too much, for it was akin to a miracle, a tree caught on fire in the middle of the desert, a booming voice from the sky, a young girl that moans in uncontrollable pleasure when he touches her. Right then and there nothing else mattered, nothing else could matter, and the sky outside faded into nothingness and the air inside was as dark as clouds packed with rain, and his own eyes began to radiate some of that same curiosity he saw in hers and he vibrated so much that his skin tingled and her own skin tingled pressed up against him, and their sweat formed rivers that fused into a single current and then divided up again as they made their way through the ridges of their anatomical geography, and he grunted like an animal and she grunted as well and that sent him over the edge just as she started to grind even harder. Then they were kissing and her lips felt like pure love sliding over harsh ocean rocks and it tasted of a sweetness that had nothing to do with candy, and it smelled of fresh discoveries, and it felt like life in a form he had nearly forgotten.

“The problem with the gangs, las “maras”, is as terrible as ever, they are even more violent than they ever were before. They say that if someone wants to be a leader in one of these ‘maras’, they have to kill at least eleven people. Imagine that! Eleven people, just as a basic requirement…”
We were making our way back from my Uncle’s home and we were just then driving past the old “deportivo”, the sports club where we used to go all together when I was a little boy, where I would play with Juan Antonio on wooden horses that never left their metal stable and just danced back and forth, locked forever into a frozen pattern made of color and echoing laughter. We would sometimes swim on the big pool as well, but we would mostly stay by the see saw and the horses, and there we would invent our own games and follow our own rules while the older kids soaked their half naked bodies.
I looked out the open window of my Uncle’s car and I saw them. A long line of tough looking skinny boys on their knees, their hands on the back of their heads, all of them facing the wall of the old sports club.
“Look, there it is… just what I’m talking about… that’s what you should take a picture of!” my Uncle said and he pointed with a thick finger that was both an expression of anger and fascination.
I looked towards them. Two of the policemen that were holding them in place immediately turned towards me. They seemed nervous and ready to find an excuse to be angry and violent. They cradled their heavy black shotguns like a mother carrying a newborn baby and they looked at me with the ferocity of the same mother, if she were to believe that her baby was in danger. While some of the policemen searched and interrogated the long line of boys in dirty shirts and loose blue jeans, the two who were serving as guards stared at me, daring me to do something that would unleash their wrath. I reached for my camera but the car moved and then we were gone.
“So what happened with your therapist? I heard there was some story that went with that?” I asked, knowing the story pretty well but wanting to hear it fresh from my Uncle’s lips.
“It’s terrible… it’s these gangs… they’re like animals… you saw them there… it’s good that the police are cracking down on them… somebody has to…”
“Tell me the story… I would really like to hear it…” I said it just as the car turned up the street that led back to Escalon, to the cluster of streets that I had once seen as a sanctuary but I had never understood from what .
“Well, there’s not much to tell…”
“I’m sure there is…”

And once having experienced love and life and truth in this way, he came back for more. He had to. Again and again, for what else could there be. There was only her, a young girl in a short skirt and shiny earrings dancing from her ears, shining with the sun, white high heels that wrapped around her tiny brown feet, and a laughter that tinkled against the walls like little pebbles made of glass. There was the feel of her thighs against his hand when they sat together in the movie theater, and there was the first sensation of freedom when the door closed in his apartment and they were all alone once more, and he knew that now he was free to take any liberty that he could imagine, and he took liberties then with her that he had never taken with anyone before. There was the sound of the cell phone when she called, and the sound of her voice when she said “hello” over a crackling tenuous connection. When the soft timbre of her syllables slid into him, the streets didn’t look so dead, and people were not as hostile as they had been not too long ago, and the sky itself was wider and clearer, and he could look up without fearing the repercussions of a mysterious God that didn’t love him, for he clearly did, otherwise he wouldn’t have sent him this gift, this incomparable offering that made him smile in a way he hadn’t smiled since the days of being innocent and foolish. Maybe he was indeed foolish again, but he didn’t care, he didn’t care at all. He would take her to the most expensive restaurants, and he would buy her whatever she wanted, and he would lavish her with jewelry and he would take her where she needed to go, without even asking why she needed to go anywhere.

“He was depressed himself I guess… it’s funny that these people want to help you get better but they’re not that well themselves!”
I nodded, prompting him to continue. Two young boys were running in circles around each other across the street, releasing loud continuous beads of laughter as they pointed at each other and at the cars.
“So he found himself a young girl…a teenager… and he fell head over heels over her… he was like a different man… he missed appointments and he wasn’t even sorry… but he seemed happier just then, he seemed full of life…he was definitely different…”
“And then what happened?”
“Well… one day….”

She called and asked him to come and meet her. Maybe he felt a slight chill that ran up his back like a tiny black spider made of cold tin. She seemed too eager, too desperate. The tone of her voice was not the same he remembered, it was not the soft calming melody that he had come to recognize. But he wanted so much to be inside her again, that he couldn’t resist the urge to tell himself that she was only eager to see him, only desperate to be his once again. So he agreed to go where she specified.
It was an apartment that he had never been to before. She said that she would be waiting there for him, and she even dropped hints about what she would to him once he arrived. When he knocked at the door of this strange place, she was indeed there, as beautiful as ever when he ran his hungry eyes over her slender figure. He kissed her lustfully and she kissed him back, but there was a touch of hesitation in her movements. They sat on the leather sofa to be alone together in the cold rumbling quiet made by the walls and the air conditioning. There was a sense of danger that was sliding around over his body, creeping up from his stomach to his chest and then traveling all the way down his arms. But he wanted to ignore it, he didn’t want to lose even one second of lustful celebration with the creature that offered itself to him in the cool shade of this strange new place.
Maybe once or twice he suggested that they go to his own apartment but she said that she wanted to stay there, so his shoulders dropped in resignation, unwilling to start an argument and risk her love in even the slightest way. Maybe once or twice he looked out the window which overlooked some office buildings and he saw the tall white walls covered in old black smudges. Maybe he felt then that this day wasn’t a good day for this and he told himself that he would just leave and see her another day, and then everything would return to normal and there would be no chills or spiders or dirty walls with black smudges. But then he would turn away from the window and see her, so beautiful still, so perfect, in her short blue skirt that was riding up her thighs as she leaned on the sofa. Then he just shrugged and figured he could stay just a little longer, just a few more minutes and then he would go. That was when the front doorknob turned and several thin young boys came in.
His blood turned to ice and the tiny black spider multiplied into hundreds of them that were now riding all over his body, dancing like mad puppets over the sweaty expanse of his hairy flesh. The boys knew her but he didn’t know them. Still he tried to tell himself that everything was fine and that there was no problem. But it was clear that there was and it was too late to change it, the scene was already frozen and echoing into eternity.

“She invited him to come and see him somewhere else… it was an apartment that her boyfriend owned…he had never been there before…”
“Her boyfriend?”
“Her real boyfriend. A gang leader. So the boyfriend showed up with a bunch of his friends…all gangsters, “mareros”…and he was there with the girl…and he had no way out…they had set him up. “

They drank for a while, all sitting around the old coffee table. He looked into their eyes and joked with them, and they joked back. Every once in a while, he would look at the door or the window and then he would smile at them and laugh again. Since they were all getting drunk together, it was easy to believe that they were all friends, quick friends made over alcohol on a sleepy afternoon of sweat and heavy gray smoke. It was easy to believe that everything would be fine soon and he would be back in his house, all by himself, breathing softly and laughing all alone at the crazy thoughts that had gone through his head earlier that day.
Maybe then he could even start to rethink the idea of this girl, of being around her, of being inside her, of following her around as if she was a magical guiding star quietly floating over a huge barren desert. He was old enough to be her father, her grandfather even, he should not be doing this, he would think, it was completely out of line. Maybe once he was home, all alone in his bedroom, watching TV, maybe then he would go over the details and maybe he would call her and break it off, and then she would cry for him but he would tell her to be strong and to understand, and he would feel very sad himself but he would try not to let it show. Then his life would go on just like it always had, and he would forget all about young beautiful girls who moaned like wild beasts in the twilight of the late afternoons and he would forget the sweetness of her voice on the cell phone and he would forget a moment when the doorknob turned and strange young boys appeared and disrupted his world of pure love and desire. He would forget all that, but not just yet.
Right then he was still sitting on a long leather sofa, and they were all drinking together and having a good time together so there was nothing to be afraid of, and he would just keep on repeating that to himself and it would have to be true, or become true by pure force of his quiet dreaming.
They kept on laughing loudly, their eyes squeezed together tightly and little drops of sweat rolled down their brown foreheads like tiny raindrops dropping from their hair. They had tattoos all over their arms and their chests and even their faces, making them seem inhuman to him in a way he couldn’t understand, like creatures from a nightmare he had already forgotten by the time he woke up. They laughed at every joke that came out of his mouth like it was the best joke they had ever heard, and he laughed at their jokes as well, and the laughter just kept on getting more intense, and his girl was laughing too, his girl sitting on the sofa with her short blue skirt and her soft brown arms spread outwards in both directions, so inviting, so completely untouchable.
The boys were all red and sweaty, and the sky outside was getting darker. One of them, the one who first came in and the one who first talked to him, put his arm around him and cradled him like an old lost brother, rolling him around as they sang about kings without thrones or queens or anyone left to understand them. He felt at home with them, and he thought that maybe they truly respected him and loved him because he was with the girl, who was like a part of them, so maybe now he was a part of them too. The laughter and drinking continued for what seemed like hours to him and he was almost ready to forget his fears and simply drift in the turbulent river of consciousness that the alcohol had formed in his mind. Then suddenly one of the jokes seemed directed at him and they laughed harder than ever, and the laughter itself seemed deeper and filled with dark insects dancing in heavy mud. He dismissed it and told himself that maybe he had misunderstood. But then there was another joke and this one was clearer, much clearer, too clear, and then one of them took out a gun.

“What did they do to him?” I asked my Uncle as I stared out the window at a short line of three secretaries in tight red dresses walking back to their job after a quick lunch at the local McDonald's.
“They did horrible things… horrible… they were not just happy to kill him… they did some disgusting things to him first, they raped him, and they humiliated him in other horrible ways… and she was there all along, watching them do it!”
“So she had known all along what was going to happen?”
“I don’t know… maybe they had planned to use him that way… maybe they were just angry… who knows with these people? They’re animals! They need to be dealt with like animals! Beasts!”
“But… did he try to run?”
“Yes, he tried to run… but there was nowhere to run to and they caught him and did more things to him until they finally killed him. It was in all the newspapers.”

As he looked up at the strange apartment, the last thing he saw were her eyes, the same eyes in which he had found innocence and love and a renewed faith in life. There she was, looking down at him, and she didn’t try to help him, she didn’t try to stop them, she didn’t even try to console him. Her eyes were cold and just stared at him with raw nothingness behind them. And what he had thought was innocence, was really nothing. And what he thought was truth, was really nothing. And what he thought was love, was really nothing. Nothing all along. And then he heard a loud sound, and it turned out that everything else, his life, the apartment, the street, the sky, his memories, the world itself, it was all nothing. I had been nothing all along. Nothing at all. And it was all contained in the cold eyes of a young girl that had the job of showing him what there was behind the veil of the fundamental illusion.

I remembered my recommendations then. They were not for this man and yet he had followed one of them, carefully and methodically, as if it had been intended for him. It didn’t help him. It didn’t deliver him from a slow painful slide into endless repetition. Or maybe it did. Hearing his story made me feel that there might be no exit at all, or at least not an easy one, not one laid with flowers, air conditioning and soft beds.
If you ran away from your fate, there would be a thousand platoons of hungry demons waiting to rip you open, ready to follow you to the ends of the earth to bring you back to your rightful place in the infinite movie that had never begun and could never end. As much as you may run, for as long as you may manage to avoid them, sooner or later, they were certain to trap you and bring you back weeping to your minimalist kingdom of sighs.
If you stayed where you were, you would simply shrink down into oblivion and fade away like old bits of dust flying in yellow sunlight.
No twilight hallway. No red doors. No empty street in the late afternoon that welcomes you with its silence as the loud sounds of the movie are still ringing in your ears. No way out. Not now. Not ever.

* * *

Is it possible that all these huge mansions in Escalon, high in the upper reaches of the micro universe of San Salvador, far beyond the reach of the little brown people who live their lives half in the mud and half in private puddles of tears, far beyond the little tin houses and the loud radios and the skinny boys covered in tattoos, is it possible that all of them hide in their entrails the unerasable mark of a heavy slow decay, of the black smoke of the buses which slowly eats away at everything, of the sweat that never dries and slowly makes its way under the skin leaving tracks like bloodless wounds, of the urine smell of the little dogs and the big dogs and the old men and the old women and the people who just don’t care anymore and they leave behind them a rotting trail of flesh and discarded matter which continues to dig into the surface of the world long after the carriers have vanished, people who can only look forward to one more day and maybe one more day after that, for all that was life has happened and all that they wanted was broken into little jagged pieces and dispersed through the many little holes of the city, never to be found again.
Could it be that all these mansions were created in a golden moment of happiness, a burst of intense hope and creativity that glistened on blue paper etched with patterns and structures and then rose up from the mud and the dirt and the sand, all gray and heavy and sharp, smelling of cement and sweat and covered in cool water, surrounded by gray light, green mountains and red bricks and men in ragged dark pants covered in paint and no shirt on, structures rising up from nothing to something, embodying within them a dream of eternity to be protected and hidden within white walls, deep in dark chambers where blood would be invoked and the future would come streaming out like bubbles of compost, and it would splatter all over the walls, and, as much as they would try to clean them, some of life would leave a mark that would remain.
Could all these mansions then be the physical manifestation of intangible promises, promises that were never understood and never fully envisioned, and yet they lived behind closed eyes, in the shade of these very houses that were built up around them in order to hide them, walls and roofs and pillars and stairs and rooms and gardens, all there to maintain dreams caked with sperm, spat out with fear and sealed in concrete oblivion, all for a promise that was shining bright within dark caves of forgotten thoughts, fixed ideals that were never clearly expressed or explored, and so they all fell, all the great orgy of them, dreams and visions and thoughts and hopes and fears and desires, they all fell together, gurgling down the esophagus of time, into a slow heat death, baked by the unrelenting sunlight of El Salvador, and now they have become massive mausoleums which smell like raw sewage and urine and old dry vomit, and they are enlivened now only by fake twisted newscasts and endless soccer championships and rusted guns hanging from stained walls and guayaberas stained by years of old sweat and bored fat sweaty maids that whisper while they eat, stuffing their mouths with tortillas and beans as they try and fail to hide themselves from the stench, and big open cuts in the walls which open wider each day, spilling out pestilence and pus, and men that lie down alone in the hope that the TV will help them to forget one more time, and they can’t even remember what it was that they hoped for one day but they can't truly erase it, and so it lingers like the smell of rotting food and the harsh words spoken in a moment of reckless abandon.
Could it be then that the great walls of the mansions of Escalon are not there only to stop the poor little hungry thieves from breaking in (with their thin hopes of finding a brand new TV or a radio or maybe a bundle of dollars inside a drawer)? Maybe the walls are also there to prevent the sick old rich decaying creatures that still faintly breathe inside from crawling out of their smelly holes and infecting the vigorous life that still remains around them. Maybe the walls are there to let them die slowly while a young woman on the TV screen says: “Try it out!” and an old man whistles outside while he chops down the tall green bushes that are growing past the edges of the walls.

* * *

My mother came up to me as I was sitting on the dining room, roaming absentmindedly over a magazine as I drank some milk. She sat down next to me and looked straight at me. I put the magazine down and looked back at her.
“You won’t believe what happened… it’s so sad…”
I turned completely towards her and forced the scattered bits of my attention that were still clinging to the glossy pictures on the magazine to focus on her.
“What happened?”
“It’s your Uncle… I can’t believe it… he has such bad luck… it’s so sad…”
I nodded and leaned forward.
“Tell me what happened…”
“He went to sleep upstairs and he left the door open, you know, the glass door that faces the garden and the pool… he left it open…that’s really all he did…but now he feels so bad, so guilty.”
“What happened? Tell me…”
“When he woke up in the morning, he couldn’t find the dog, you know, the little dog he loves so much.”
“Yeah, I know… I saw him…”
“He ran all around the house, calling for him, he even went and woke up your Aunt so that she could help him. You know how your Aunt is… but maybe she saw the desperation in his eyes, maybe she was just worried herself…they both ran all over the house looking for the dog, calling him over and over…”
“And then?”
“Finally he saw him… it was your Uncle that saw him… he walked outside…maybe sensing that he had left the door open… maybe he had sensed it all along. And then he saw the little dog at the bottom of the pool…”
“Oh no…”I said and as my mother spoke I could see my Uncle with the little dog between his arms, caressing his head, pressing his own cheek against the cotton of his furry body.
“They fished him out and your Uncle had him in his arms… your Aunt says that he just grabbed him and pressed him against his chest and he wouldn’t let go of it… he just sat in the living room, with the tiny thing in his arms…crying and crying and crying…and in the midst of it all, blaming himself for leaving the door open…your Aunt tried to console him…but she says he wouldn’t talk, he wouldn’t talk at all, he just held onto the little dog and cried and cried…”
“The dog was very sick… he was probably going to die soon…he couldn’t hold himself up…”
“I know…that’s probably why it couldn’t swim out of the pool…before he probably just swam around in it… no problem… maybe this time he dropped in… thinking he would come out just like he usually would…but it didn’t work… if he had only died naturally…but now your Uncle feels so guilty… so guilty…”
“He couldn’t know… it was an easy mistake…”
“Finally your cousins came and took the body of the dog away… but since then, your Uncle has been in his room, all alone in the darkness… your Aunt says he won’t eat anything at all and he won’t come out… he’s not even reading….”
“Maybe you can talk to him…maybe you can get him to come out…”
“I’ve been trying… but it’s not working… what can you say? What can I say?” and she was looking at me then as if I would have some kind of answer. But I was only asking the same question, and it was ringing loudly in my head like a loud brass bell: What can you say when hope itself has died? When it has sank slowly to the bottom of a pool and it is now just a little bundle of wet fur and weak soft tissue? What do you say then? What can you do for the man who has lost everything?

* * *

It was sunny as always, and my grandmother was tired from so much talking. It was time for my Uncle to disappear down the red brick ramp and go back to his dark room and his swirls of dreams and memories that had no real shape and their shapelessness made them that much more terrifying. It was time for me to lie all the way back on the green living room sofa, maybe reading a book I had brought from my father’s house, maybe reading an old comic book I had left here years ago, maybe the same one I used to read on the brown sofa in the old terrace, on afternoons when I didn’t feel like walking over to La Satelite or going to the movies. But it was time for something else.
Even as the footsteps of my grandmother slowly making her way up the curved steep stairway were still ringing through the house, banging against white walls, ricocheting from mysterious abstract paintings and large pleading hands, bouncing on the naked woman of bronze who was still leaning undisturbed on her perch in the middle of the ocean of white pebbles, travelling right over the vast desert of shiny red bricks where I once sat down to talk on the phone for hours, even as they were still traveling and bouncing and slamming into each other, my Uncle stood up and gestured for me to follow him.
“Come with me Juan Carlos, I have something to show you…”
I stood up as well and I placed my book carefully on the edge of the sofa. We walked out to the edge of the red brick ramp. I stood facing away from the house and the sun was hitting me directly on the face. There were birds dancing over the slim black roof that hung over the black metal gateway, there was the sound of buses in the distance honking and screeching as they made a turn. I squinted to protect my eyes from the sun. My Uncle then turned towards me and smiled. I smiled back at him, very curious as to what he was going to show me. He then proceeded to slowly unbutton his shirt.
“Look, Juan Carlos, look…”
He opened it up with both hands and pushed out his chest so I could look at it more clearly. I first saw the thin white hairs that covered his flesh and then his thick fingers which surrounded the circle of hairs, pulling tightly on the sides of the shirt to make sure that I could see what was in the center. He smiled at me and nodded his head, and his smile was downward as always but held a kind of pride as well as a heavy sadness… maybe all emotions at once were contained in that smile and negated by his bulging eyes that held no emotion at all. I looked deep into the center of the fleshy gap that his fingers were creating and I saw the long scar that stretched from the center of his chest all the way to the edge of his shoulder.
“Look at it, Juan Carlos, look at it…”
It was like a zipper of raw red flesh interlaced with a thin black cord, like a strange animal that had come to live on my Uncle’s chest and was now busy integrating into its surroundings, becoming one with the upright monkey that carried it.
“This is what they did… they opened me up… just like that… look!”
I looked again and now I couldn’t help but picture a cut so deep across my chest, and I could then almost feel a long sharp knife cutting straight across my flesh and revealing my heart, holding the edges of my flesh open with thick fingers covered in black hair, and my heart in the center, pumping in a slow steady rhythm. So vulnerable, so easily brought to an anticlimactic end. So easy to hurt, so hard to heal, so impossible to recover.
“They cut me apart and they put something in me… this is what they did… see? Look at it, look at it, Juan Carlos…”
And I looked again, and then I looked into his eyes and they were very wide open and filled with a kind of subdued excitement.
“It’s tough, isn’t it? Look… that’s what they did to me…”
Then he closed his shirt because I was looking up at his eyes and not at his chest. He shook his head.
“I’m going home. Is your Dad coming to get you?”
I nodded.
“Good, then I’ll see you another day.”
I saw him walking down the long ramp of faded red bricks, framed by the tall wall covered in flowers and long bright green branches, surrounded by tall unruly grass, all of it delineated by the black metal gate that separated us from the street. As I stared at his back, slowly receding as he slowly walked away, I could still see the long red scar in my mind’s eye. I wondered then what they had truly done to him. I wondered who they were. And I wondered what they had taken out of him and why they never put it back.
Without it, all these days would become like each other, and the end would just be another short nap after lunch, another sleepless night of formless dreams, another descent into a realm without limits or stable categories. And even that final moment of silence would soon be cut short. The sun would soon be once again blaring down upon us and it would then be time to begin the story again, it would be time to follow the script that we never had a hand in writing. The same story as always, the same characters, the same rooms, the same streets, the same empty lots, the same dirt paths, the same crushing deceptions, the same open eyes, all cradled between invisible arms, all dancing in swirls of dust, all in the midst of a slow decay that had no ending, all forever alive, deep in the rotating heart of another sleepy afternoon.

Little white dog
Calling out its empty warning
Forever trying to stop
What will forever happen
no matter how much it barks
no matter how much it jumps
no matter how it whimpers.

How many times I saw her
a solemn memory of power,
of days of glory
and days of brilliance,
a distant shadow looming
over the gentle woman
the one I did know
the one that herself
has now become
a slowly fading thought.

My elegant grandfather
here smiling with a touch
of venerable compassion.
For my mother and me,
for most people that knew him,
he was like a figure out of a movie,
out of a tango or an old tale,
something to be seen from afar,
and admired for its faultless perfection.
No man could ever live up
to his well honed image,
certainly not him,
not when you came close enough
to see the cracks in the ancient armor
to see the snow on the TV screen.

The beauty bows to the beast
and the beast accepts her respect,
with a gentle resignation,
a kind of arrogant acceptance,
reinforcing ancient connections,
that lie buried,
lost and forgotten,
deep under mud and sand.

They are to her
what others were to me,
and what she sees
is not what I see,
and what I see,
she would find incomprehensible.
Somewhere in between,
a voice demands the truth,
if only to find a solid footing,
but there is only silence
and silence has no surface
and silence has no end.

The sound of tinkling glass,
and forks crashing against knives,
and jokes and tales and commands,
and questions without answers,
and laughter without force.

My uncle and my mother
With my grandmother between them,
A bridge of warm embraces
And unspoken demands,
desire borne of days
far beyond our reach,
A bridge to quiet tears,
Cradled in wandering men
lost in far and foreign lands.

A silent living room
Full of wraiths and double images,
Of traces of jokes told
A thousand times,
Of stories that would
Never be heard,
Of tales that would
Never be told
Of questions that would
never be answered.

Indeed she was beautiful,
desirable and unreachable,
and it was his place to catch her
and it was her place to be caught.
Once in his power,
a descent would surely follow,
for dreams die quickly,
when they are finally held
tightly in your grasp.

A kiss of sensual beauty
that lived beneath the stairway,
that beckoned without shyness,
that surrendered without fear.
But her creator forgot to name her
and so she drowns now
in a lake of quiet forgetfulness.
For without a name
she couldn't be allowed to exist.

She dreams of the black void
and she can only laugh
to keep from crying
to keep from looking
to keep from falling
to keep herself from knowing
what the void itself
has already whispered
in her ear.

She was once a vision,
a jewel in a king's crown,
a banner of truth and glory
hidden behind silky veils.
But who remembers such things
when even the photos that remain
seem to never have been real,
when even her eyes are fading
into the color of dying grass.

A quiet fire of real innocence
slowly smolders to rusty iron,
shades of lost days
when I was the one reaching out
through those very same eyes,
days when I didn't know
that things grew old,
broke down
and came to an end
all while I wasn't looking.

She has changed
into something harsh and cold
from what was once
something unreachable.
Now she dreams of power
while she leans on a couch
laughing at the world
that never fully welcomed her
into its deadly embrace
of metal and concrete.

News, news and more news,
And it’s all bad and worse
And terrible and bad again,
All to let me know
All to assure me
That it isn’t just me
That I am not alone
In my furious and reckless race
Towards the final caress of oblivion.

My grandmother Antonia
As I knew her and as I didn’t
Infused with warmth
And bathed in innocence
In a kind of purposeful blindness
To the wide underground currents
That ran deep and strong
just a few inches beneath her feet.

And the little white dog
would forever keep on barking
and some ears would turn and wonder,
and some eyes might even look ahead,
but in the end they all would jump
and the abyss would swallow them
and scratch their faces raw
with vicious pointed fangs,
and as they slipped under the weight
of years of passive negligence,
the dog would bark more weakly,
finally learning that hope
could truly live only in the past.