Eyes Of A Girl

We were driving by the Escuela Americana (the "American School"), in the San Benito, an area next to Escalon that rivals it in huge mansions, tall walls covered in spiked wire and broken bottles and security guards with large thick black and silver shotguns. As we drove past the long street that led into the school, I could remember the many mornings when my mother’s car was about to turn left by the tall red brick wall topped with large bushes and flowers and I could feel the sliding metal gate approaching and I knew that soon I would be in a classroom again, a place I perceived (and still perceive) as a somewhat benign prison, surrounded by kids that I saw as fellow prisoners, some friendly, some not so friendly and some openly hostile. I never looked forward to that turn, to that shift that signaled the end of freedom, and I could sense some part of me, a very old and tiny part, was clearly happy that today I was not going to school, not to that school in any case, and all the little chained moments of private horror which it entailed. Today I could decide where to go and so we drove past the school and up the street which had been a mystery to me for all my childhood, as if the world turned to shadows after that turn, as if there could be nothing beyond that barrier.
Flashes of memories went through my inner mind as we passed by: the kids in the first grade moving up a dark hallway that had a solid ramp instead of a stairway, the mass of them creating loud echoes of laughter and screams in the narrow enclosed space, my fight in the middle of the first grade playground when all the kids started shouting and calling our names even from far away and the boy who was my enemy was bleeding slightly from his lip and I wasn’t sure if or how I had done that and what it could possibly mean for my future, the time that someone saw a ghost in a little alleyway behind the second grade classrooms and we all rushed to figure out what it was and there were so many kids that nobody could see anything but everybody shouted in fear and wonder as if there was something there, the first time that I looked at a girl with lust and the many complex and violent stories that I constructed around it as if through the stories I could step away from the simple crushing reality of her mouth, her cheeks and her eyes, the little gang of eighth graders that became my friends when I was in fifth grade because they shared my intense interest in geometry and the many afternoons we spent together looking at textbooks that were just beyond our intellectual grasp, the three pretty girls in sixth grade that all the boys talked about as if they were sophisticated models or starlets even though they were only little twelve year olds that were just as confused as their admirers, the wide green lawn where we played soccer during the day and where I walked around with a couple of friends after school, exchanging stories and magazines and books, reclaiming our freedom after the last bell had rung for the day. All of it rolled through me like a movie in fast forward, like a quick reckless flight through a recurrent dream that repeats in almost the same way, the same characters, the same plot, the same chambers, night after night.
We drove up to the main boulevard that signaled the western border of San Benito and we turned towards the north, back to Escalon. Just as we turned northward, I looked over to the car to our left and I saw a girl looking at me. She had dark strong eyes, thick arched eyebrows, long black hair and dark brown skin. She was probably about seventeen or eighteen and she was wearing some kind of uniform that I couldn’t fully see through the window. Another girl was next to her and she was also looking at me. It seemed to me that the second girl had said something and the first one was now looking intently at me. Her eyes had an intensity that signaled not only strength but the kind of security that comes from practice. She was accustomed to looking and she was used to people backing down from her wide open gaze. I looked directly into her eyes and she looked back at me and I kept on looking and she kept on looking and I saw that her eyes were like deep black wells of curiosity and lust that bubbled under the pliable surface of her black pupils and her dark skin, and as I looked at her, as I allowed my attention to open, I dived deep into her black depths and I saw her strength and I also saw her softness and I kept on exploring and digging deeper and she noticed that something was happening and she tried to hold the unexpected contact a moment longer, but then she had to look away. She lowered her face and she blushed, a full sincere blush that traveled all the way to her surface from the bottom of her being, and she looked down for a moment and then she looked back at me, embarrassed at the weakness she had shown me, ashamed that I had seen her innocence, her soft core that was hidden beneath layers of image and personal armor. I smiled softly at her, letting her know that I was not an enemy, that I was not trying to conquer her will or cut across the real muscle of her strength, letting her know that when I had dived inside her I had done it with tenderness and not with anger. She took in my unspoken message, carried across car windows and the no man’s land of the road around us, and she smiled softly back at me with an innocent hint of flirting and a flowering sense of discovery. Then her car turned away and drove up a side street and another car moved next to us and I couldn’t see her anymore, not even to say goodbye, and we kept on going on our way back home.
My heart was touched by her, by the momentary breakdown of her image, by the soft loving real girl that came out from under the thick armor of the sophisticated secure fake woman. I could see the place in me where I wanted her to be mine, where I would have wanted to know more about her, follow her, talk to her, kiss her, touch her. But like the tiny place in me that was still afraid to turn towards the school, this voice was already diminishing, and I could see that both were attempts to alleviate the real pain of a heart that is open, the spiraling rays of heat that have no apparent objective and which hurt in a way that has no center and appears to have no end. The beautiful dark skinned girl was gone, like all other Salvadorean girls I had ever known were gone, like all my friends from school, like almost all my friends that came later, like everyone would eventually go in their time. But the heat and the pain and the love would still be there. There was no way to avoid it. I was beginning to understand that there was no reason to try.

Innocence At The Fountains

I got out of the car by the twin fountains which were now dry, the Beethoven fountains that were now known by some other name, the fountains that were marginal fixtures in so many of my old memories but which featured prominently in none. I remembered walking up the fountains as a little boy escaping from school, angry, scared and sullen. I remembered being a teenager and sitting here with Rodney for a brief moment on our way to the movies, talking about girls and sex and more girls and more sex and sometimes about our friends and sometimes about the many journeys that we would someday take together. I remembered being older and sadder and walking here with Dilcia, on the rough dirt path that runs parallel to the main street, on our way to my grandmother’s apartment which was mine for a brief moment, enough of a moment to let me taste Dilcia’s flesh and enough to make her say "my love" as she pressed her chest against me.
The fountains were twins cut apart at birth by the Paseo Escalon, one of the main boulevards of the city, connecting the edges of the dirty downtown with the heights of the Escalon. When I was very young, I thought that there must be a further mystery to their existence, something that happened here when I wasn’t looking, some ritual that I had missed or some arcane significance hidden in the circular shapes and the mirror images. Some of that perception still lingered with me this afternoon, as I walked across the little round park, looking at the women and kids selling little cheap plastic Salvadorean flags so that drivers could stick them on the side of their cars and then give the appearance of being patriotic. Some cars had one of these hanging from every window and still the old women insisted that the drivers needed more.
I walked through the grass that surrounded the fountains and I took pictures of the trees, the statues, the fountains themselves, the electrical poles, the concrete stairs, the street kids resting against the main pedestals and the edges of the circles where the colors were fading under the blazing sun. Then I asked a woman, an older woman with a dirty red T-shirt, a dark blue faded skirt and a white cloth draped over her head, if I could take her picture, and she said yes and smiled and I took her picture carefully and she said thank you as her cheeks pushed up to squeeze her eyes. I walked over the main street, El Paseo, which flowed with cars like an angry river in a rain storm and I took pictures of the fountain on the other side, which was just as dry as this one, just as forgotten.
Two men, sitting inside the bed of a pickup truck as it rolled by me, whistled loudly and asked to have their picture taken and I took it quickly as they posed smiling, hugging each other and raising their hands in a sign of success. I lifted my own hand in approval and gave them a thumbs up. They laughed and nodded with excitement. Then two pretty girls in a car called to me and said: "Us! Us! You should take us!" and I took their picture and raised my thumb again and they raised theirs and said "thank you!" and drove on. It was then that I realized that in their mind they weren’t doing me a favor by allowing me to take their picture, instead I was the one that was helping them, I was the one that was giving them the gift of my attention, the gift that said that there was something in them that was worth seeing, worth keeping forever, and the thought hit me like a sudden negative image of the world that I was accustomed to, a world where the very air is flooded in paranoia and fear of hidden agendas and whispered threats.
So it was the same with the maids who were both so shy of having their picture taken and also so grateful that I had insisted. Lorena, after she finally agreed to pose for me, said "You will take us on a long journey. Who knows where we will end up? Thank you so much," and I thought that what she said was both true and also so innocent that it made my heart shiver with a kind of gentle sympathy, and it made me happy to know that there still were people that were more innocent than I could even imagine.
To take the pictures is to make the moment eternal, and maybe the Being in its deepest simplicity welcomes that opportunity to transcend the bonds of time and flash across the frozen tundra of infinity, and maybe it is only through the process of sophistication, the complex structuring of the time based adult personality, that someone might come to see the camera as a threat, the sudden observer as a predator.
I walked towards the old church by my grandmother’s house and there was a couple sitting on a bench in a tiny park across the street from it: a tough guy in a white shirt and faded blue pants and a dark thick girl in a school uniform. They didn’t want their pictures taken. They shook their heads seriously and he narrowed his eyes and she looked away. They had allowed sophistication to rob them of their trust and of their most simple wish. They were on their way to becoming like the fountains, beautiful structures built for eternity but lacking the flow of fresh water to make them complete.

One of the many palm trees that tower over the twin fountains.


The fountain designs which implied a strange significance to me.

Statue of an ancient hero now turned into forgotten stone.

A boy reads the newspaper
resting his back against the pedestal of the forgotten statue.

The older woman that was happy to have her picture taken.

The guys who demanded to have their picture taken as their pickup truck sped by.

The girls in the next car that said: "No! Us! Take us!"
An older man in the twin fountains
who was very surprised but also very eager to help
when he realized that I wanted to take a picture of him.

A driver waiting outside the mall.
When he understood that I wanted to take a picture
he immediately turned to the left to show his best side.

Lorena when she finally posed for me and then nervously thanked me.