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.