Late update on eastern El Salvador

Amatitan journal entry

I found a place where the big goals-- food, health, sex, family-- have not been obscured by abundance and abundance of choice. Amatitan has faced war and earthquakes and whatever weather came and went, and has come to the other side of these years feeling something like the garden of Eden reborn and about to get the chance to fall again. Except that it’s less dull because it’s dry and the corn and beans don’t grow by themselves, because here, mostly, food doesn’t grow on trees, and because the people wear clothes so there is washing to take to the river, and so there is always work to do. Way out in Eastern El Salvador, in San Vicente, in the places that only have one road and two trucks, this life exists. And although enough people have family in the United States, and just about everyone has a television, and although the bus driver gets around a little bit, the sign above his bus’ front window reads, “Envy is worse than hunger.”

This is a major base for the FMLN, where the war happened in everyone’s corn field. The stories sound like the ones in war movies except they cut off abrubtly before the triumphant ending, closing special effects and red sunset. Here’s one from Alejandra:

During the war, the army captured five people, all from the same family. They were on a list of leftists that came from the capital. They always had lists. But these people hadn’t really done anything, weren’t really fighting. So all of the women of the area decided to get together and go to the army and ask that they wouldn’t send this family to the capital where they would almost surely be killed. We approached the soldiers where they were keeping the five and the five were all beaten and bloody, their hands and feet were tied, and we made our request. They told us that if we came back again, they would kill all of us. The five people disappeared, one a good friend of Chungo’s. We never saw them again.

I went to a Sunday football game with the men of Amatitan. We travelled in the bed of a big flatbed truck with metal bars to keep us in. The truck's population was approximately 25 young men, mostly players; Elisa, the ten year old neice of one of the players (it was her first away game, a big adventure for her, too); and me, strange white girl from across the sea. The men barked-- at one sort of self-aware moment, they literally just cut to the chase and actually barked rather than yelling and whistling-- at the women on the street, and at the men passing in other truck beds and were shy and curious around me. I was too close to them there in the bed of that same truck; they couldn’t yell and run. In Men of Maize, Miguel Asturias writes of the Indians, “Women far away in the firelight and close by in the shadows, men close by in the firelight and far away in the shadows.” I think I know what he meant.

The pitch was a little uneven, and had a cliff wall along one side so it was smallish, but no one minded much. The fans were drunk or deaf-mute or both and the players would play football anywhere. Amatitan won the JV game and tied the varsity. After the game, one of the footballers sat down next to me at the pupusa restaurant where we were all eating on the way home. He asked me what I thought of the place. He said that Amatitan was happy and peaceful now because the people had been through war and were ready for peace. I felt it, too. I felt it so much that I’ve contemplated moving there for a while after I finish school. Who knows. . .

However happy and peaceful the place was these days though, this young man is ready to take off for the United States to see what else there is to do besides sow corn. And Elisa, well she has a biological dad (long gone) who lives in the States and sends pictures and she wants to go, too. And Anna Ruth who fails a lot of her classes because she can’t read the exams, and who hasn’t learned to read because there aren’t many books showed enough interest in being able to read and write that I sent her a stack of used books. I sent what I could find on the street in San Salvador-- La Hojarasca, Metamorphasis, 1001 Arabian Nights and Jonathan Livingston Seagull among them. I hope they arrive.

There’s so much to say, and it’s still jumbled in my mind. There is also a river with net fishing and ancient ancient carvings in a rock shelter that apparently foreigners come to see sometimes and people camping there in FMLN hats who say in English (they are brothers and their dad was an English teach who named them American names like Jason and George) “The war is over! We’re not guerillas. FMLN is just a party!” when people look sideways at their camo pants and party hats (like FMLN party and not like in Go Dog Go when they say, "Yes, that is a great party hat!") and bed rolls. And there was a chicken that we killed and plucked and carved and ate. The woman of the house, tied its feet together with a broken cell phone charger to hang it upside down and cut it.

Sorry I'm letting the picture of Amatitan get so fuzzy and jumbled, but I am running out of time to write right this minute. I'm hurrying to wrap up and then in my next post, I'm going to throw a big monkey wrench into the cuddled picture called “they are planning to build a gold mine here.” More soon.

Where the bass is loud, the greywater above ground, and the tacuasin waits in the darkness.

Just home from El Salvador, not so much internet time there and well, here is belated news from those parts.
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Where the bass is loud, the greywater above ground, and the tacuasin waiting in the darkness.

It is 7:00 am between Agua Caliente and La Ceiba, about an hour west of San Salvador. The houses are made of brick and corrugated metal with big metal doors that deadbolt in the night and open early. The light is still grayish, but this whole mudstreet neighborhood is alive with Daddy Yankee and the latest Regueton hits. The bass is almost enough to drown out the roosters.

I’m a little groggy. I have a god child, Tonito, who is five years old. I have a god child? As Wolf put it, “Better an accidental god child than an accidental child.” Anyway, the little tyke kicks and I had his feet in my face all night. Little Katiana just turned up at the door and Enma is messing with the radio. This is why I haven’t written anything since I got to El Salvador. I’m never alone. I’m waiting for her to find the station that plays “The Summer of 69” or the one that plays covers of American songs like “Hotel California” and “Brown Eyed Girl” in Spanish. Three year old Kati kicks the dog.

Later, I want to pass by the house of Tonito’s grandmother who has a store by the main road. She is the mother of my close friend here, Alejandra, and she comes from another time. She makes cheese and has a bucket of milk that she carried down from the Ag school on her head that is on its way to cheese, and she sweeps trash into a pile behind her house and burns it, and she buys raw cacao and makes chocolate. This is how: she toasts the beans over a fire on a big bowl-shaped griddle like they use to make pupusas. Then she grinds it with a stone to separate the hull from the bean. Then, to get rid of all the bits of hull that are mixed in with the beans, she waits for the North Wind to come and she passes the beans from hand to hand while the hull blows away. Then she carries the beans to the next town, where she can pay to use the mill and returns with cocoa powder. And she adds sugar (and oil?) and sells her chocolates for 12 cents each. Any production process that requires waiting for the North Wind is alright by me.

She is also the source of the stories from the time of before. The other night, Alejandra was telling us the witchy stories that scared her when she was a child. This is the story of the Ciguanaba.

Once, this girl and this guy were in love, but her mother didn’t approve of the guy and so the two decided to run off together. They made a plan; he was supposed to come and pick her up on his horse at midnight. Turns out though, that the mother found out about the plan and locked the daughter in the house with her so she couldn’t leave. Well, the guy shows up at the appointed hour and there waiting outside the house is his girl (but it’s not really his girl, it’s the ciguanaba, watch out!) and he pulls her up behind him on the horse and off they go. And he says, why don’t you give me a kiss, and she doesn’t say anything, and he says come on, why don’t you give me a kiss, and she doesn’t say anything, and finally, he turns around and reaches around for the big embrace make out scene and !!!!!!!! She’s this terrifying thing with big scary teeth and enormous breasts. At least this is how it translates, and the guy throws himself off the horse and runs into the hills, and a the next day the horse comes back riderless, and the people go out searching for him, and they find him, and he’s been driven mad forever, and not one of the exorcisms that they try works.

Alejandra tells the story around the dinner table, and it gets the other North Americans who are down visiting telling ghost stories, and we trade ghost stories until Mary Rose who is seven is good and nervous and maybe we all are, and her brother Spencer who is nine says he is going out to the bathroom and suddenly from the window comes a shriek and from Mary Rose comes a shriek and we all gasp and Spencer got us all pretty good.

When I ask Granny Otelia Guadelupe about it, she says that of course these stories are real, but it was before her time, it was in the time of her grandparents, in the time of before. The time of the witches is past she says and I agree that there aren’t any witches left in the United States either and that they have been gone for a real long time. Maybe there is too much business these days to leave room for witches. The witches today are just the ones you see in the newspaper, arrested for selling fake remedies to foolish people.

Next door a young man cuts tall grass with a machete. He’s going to burn it to make the ground more fertile for his plot of maiz. The fresh cut grass is a relief, softens the chlorox smell from doing the dishes, and the smell of piss which I think happens because the man of the house pisses in the shower which runs into the graywater trench that flows from the house to the street where it mostly soaks in.

Kati flips water at a big wolf spider that sits on the edge of the water basin. Although Animal Planet might be playing in the doctors’ offices in the capital, these people ain’t animal lovers and nature? what’s that? Here, animals are either working for you (food) or against you. When the children play by a woodpile in the evening, one of the mothers tells them to get up, evening is coming and some little creature will come out of the woodpile at night and bite them. The last night I slept at Alejandra’s house, I slept under the open window, and as I tucked myself in, she came and asked if I was sure I wanted to leave it open. . . the cat uses it to go in and out. . . and once, I woke up and the Tacuasin was there.

Chungo (her husband) had gone to the toilet (concrete basin over big hole) when he saw the Tacuasin in the window. The Tacuasin eats chickens, so when Chungo saw it, he got up and crept up to it. . . and he GRABBED it BARE HANDED by the scruff of its neck. And it was thrashing and trying to bite him, and he shouted for me to hold the flashlight for him because he had dropped it and so I woke up to all this commotion. . . De puro mano he caught it. And then. . . at this point in the story Alejandra makes the machete to the neck motion.

Like you, at this point I still had no idea what was a Tacuasin and so I asked, and apparently it’s like an armadillo with a long skinny nose and yellow fur. What the hell I said, and I slept with the window open.