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An El Salvador Fortnight

by

Glenn Cheney

© 1995 Glenn Cheney

Published by

The Shetucket Press

Hanover, Connecticut

March 12, 1994: Mexico City International Airport

As soon as I get to a foreign land I buy a pack of cigarettes and start writing letters. At the international airport in Mexico City, D.F., I had 14 hours to kill, an all-nighter in an airport that pretty much shuts down for the night. The shops and restaurants close up at around 10:00. I hurriedly searched for the brand of cigarettes called Faros, which 20 years ago I heard, repeatedly, were composed of manure more than tobacco. Apparently they've slipped from style, however. Someone told me they still exist but not in the city. It's a campesino cigarette. So I bought a pack of unfiltered Delegados - Delegates - and set myself up at a spot on the clean marble floor around the back of some elevators on a mezzanine overlooking the main lobby. Nobody there but me and a little brown maid who's clunking her bucket toward me, mopping widely as she comes. When she asks "Hay basura?" - Is there any trash? - I say no. But her standards are higher than mine. She offers to clean up my little pile of Delegado butts and gray ash. I decline. As she mops around me, I offer her a hit of wine from the little bottle I swiped from Flight 995 out of Chicago. She smiles but does not accept.

Down below, in the lobby, cops mill. I never saw so many cops. Just about all of them carry revolvers, but a couple carry carbines. I guess they're still pretty nervous about the Chiapas revolt that happened only a few months ago. I guess crime is a problem, but not in the airport, that's for sure. At 2:00 a.m. I can count 19 cops in sight at one time, and not one passenger besides myself.

To stay awake, I walk up and down the long hall that arches across the front of the airport. Dunkin Donuts, Arby's, McDonald's, a pizza joint, a souvenir shop, a liquor store and a nouveau-Mexicano food place are all closed. The airline counters are closed. When I step near the door to the street, it slides open, letting in hot humidity and the sound of traffic. I'm tempted to grab a cab but don't.

Earlier, when I tried to send a post card, I had to ask a girl with big white teeth how to operate the machine that issues stamps. It was rather complicated. Mexico is between currencies at the moment, or rather, they have two in circulation. Even though I'm used to this from Brazil, it still confuses me. The sign on the machine offers stamps in diñero viejo but dispenses stamps in the diñero nuevo. It accepts coins only of the diñero nuevo variety. The girl has to take my diñero viejo to a bank-like entity to get me some new stuff. After we extract the stamps, she explains that actually I'm wasting a certain number of centavos because the machine doesn't give stamps in the right denomination for international post cards. Then she gives me the international sign language for "Just lick the back and slap it on."

United flight 861 flight to San Salvador is a classic chicken-and-goat trip. Notably more chaotic than the Chicago-Mexico flight, which was full of Mexicans, the planeload of Salvadorans does not acknowledge the common courtesy of modern flight. Nobody's in the right seat, and a lot of people see no need to sit at all. The loudspeaker beseeches them to clear the aisles, to stow their luggage. "¡ Por favor, caballeros, toman sus assientos!" Nobody moves. A baby cries.

On the way to my seat I see two adults and a small child who look bruised. Others have gleaming silver teeth, scars, limps. The lady next to me has either a birthmark or a healing burn on the side of her face, and she's wearing a cheap wig. These are the most wounded looking people I've ever seen. And we haven't gotten to El Salvador yet. These people are arriving from Los Angeles. Most of them, of course, fled their country long ago. Now they're going home with their booty. From what I've heard, El Salvador's largest source of foreign currency is emigrants sending money home.

The loudspeakers play dental music, but this is not an dental music crowd. I suspect many of them have never seen a dentist. But they are friendly, human, warm, susceptible to all the human relationships that keep people from taking their assigned seats before all has been discussed. One of them, or maybe none or all, has left a bag in the aisle. The stewardess threatens to take the plane back to the gate and get rid of the bag if nobody claims it.

The lady next to me seems very nice. Apparently she is escorting her ancient mother, who clasps her hands to her heart every time the loudspeaker says Salvador, San or El. The lady gives me the name and location of a pension that may be cheap. She gives the approximate black market rate for dollars, though it's not much different from the bank rate - probably not worth the risk of a sidewalk transaction. This lady, it turns out, is the owner of the bag in the aisle. With great shock and loud whoop she hurries off to deal with it.

Once aloft, we pass several nice brown volcanoes. One, a double whammy, has fields planted inside its two craters. The terrain then turns to brown, an almost-no-man's-land of rugged hills sliced by arroyos. The rising sun casts nice shadows over them. Narrow dirt roads follow the ridges to small settlements. If this is where the Indians of Chiapas are rebelling, the government forces will never be able to track them all down.

For a long time I thought it was vomit on the wing of the aircraft. It had the look of dried jetsam. But I then I thought it must be the blood and guts of a bird that hit up between the wing and a lowered flap. Whatever the stuff is, it didn't blow off in a 500 mph wind.

There's something very banana-republic about the landing, too. The pilot announced that we were five miles from the capital but then flew on for a good ten minutes, then turned out to sea for a long time, then turned north, then swung way around to head back toward shore. We came in long and low, a sure sign that there isn't much around in terms of height. We pass a lot of palms and banana plants. The audience is quiet as the sound of wind bending around flaps fills the cabin. They applaud as we touch down. The engines slam into reverse thrust, but the plane doesn't slow. We kept going, going, going. A couple of feathers twitch in the guck on the wing. The brakes make a horrifying loud moan. The whole plane shudders violently before grinding to a crawl. In a few minutes the pilot comes on the loudspeaker to say that everybody would have to get off - the plane is supposed to continue to Nicaragua - so they can make repairs.

"Off" means the old fashioned way, down aluminum stairs to the hot tarmac, across the runway, up more stairs into the airport. The space around the baggage claim is way too small for the crowd. By the time I arrive, my pack has fallen into the area inside the conveyor belt. I have to step up onto the belt, lift the knapsack up over my head, step back onto the belt, then into the crowd as soon as I pass two especially short people. I think I may have hurt a person or two. Lo siento mucho, lo siento mucho.

No problem at customs. Apparently they're expecting a lot of gringos for the elections. A chubby young lady with an ID card slung around her neck asks me if I'd like to join a car pool into town. It costs only a little more than a cab. I agree to go out the front of the airport and get into a white van that will be waiting for me. But as I emerge from a short maze that was designed to keep outsiders from seeing inside, I confront a beautiful sea of brown faces on short people, everybody pressed against each other, everybody on tippy-toe, everybody's face wide open with hope. They are surprisingly silent for a crowd ten bodies deep and pressed tight together. The girls all wear oddly formal dresses, and the boys - it seems no one is far into adulthood - wear shirts with collars. Instantly I love all of them for their big brown eyes and tippy-toe shortness.

Several cab drivers accost me, but I beg off and plow forward as if I know where I'm going. Again I have to hoist my pack high over my head to get through the crowd. At one point I have to step high and wide over some small children, and I'm very thankful I don't kick any of them in the head as I step over them.

The van soon comes around. I hop in. Another American and the chubby young lady join me, and off we go. The American's name is Bob. It's his first time out of the U.S.. He's here to help with the elections and has paid several hundred dollars for the privilege. We observe intensely as we drive down the dirty, cluttered highway toward town. The driver is going to help me find a cheap hotel. Every concrete surface we pass is painted and plastered with political ads. These are my first lessons in Spanish in twenty years. The Christian Democratic party. Vote FMLN. Shafik for mayor. Vote Green. Red banners, symbols of the former guerrilla coalition, very rag-tag, flap from bridges. Red, white and blue banners, symbols of the government ARENA party, very official, well kempt and organized, hang from lampposts.

I get very excited as we pass a couple of army patrols with M-16s. Then we come to a tractor-trailer in flames, a few destroyed cars, a crumpled bicycle, a body on the pavement. I practically shove Bob away from the window so I can squeeze off several shots. I'm quite sure this guerrilla action, but when I ask the chubby young lady, she laughs at me. No, it was just an accident. There hasn't been any guerrillas activity for a couple of years. The election campaigns have been peaceful. She says she favors the ARENA party because Fredy Cristiani has done a miraculous job of reaching a peace accord and picking up the pieces. ARENA has founded a Civil Police force to replace the Treasury Police who used to terrorize the lower class to keep them working at less than slave wages. She especially likes the vice presidential candidate, who was president of the Salvadoran airline company. He's a good man, she tells us, a very good man. Something tells me she knows him. She was the only cab representative inside the airport. She could effect entrance only by special permission, I'm sure. And her English is perfect, so certainly she's been overseas. Of course she's for ARENA. Everything's fine in her life. Not that I hold that against her. She's very nice and helpful and intelligent. But the slums and shanties we pass as we enter the capital hint that El Salvador's still got problems.

After a drive around a couple of blocks, we book me into the Hotel Panamericano. As I negotiate with the kid in charge, the price of a room falls from $15 down to $7, a bit more than I'd heard from the lady on the plane, but I guess that isn't bad for a place that seems secure and relatively clean. My room is tight but has it's own bathroom. It also has a fan, a luxury I've never seen in a ratbag hotel. Of course the toilet has no seat, the shower no hot water. But there's a little pad of soap on the back of the toilet and a full roll of toilet paper. Maybe there aren't too many bugs in the place.

The fan oscillates, though not consistently. I wrap duct tape around the motor body to make it a bit quieter. After a cold shower, I dry off in the full blast of the breeze.

I don't know if this particular district has a name, but if it's Rat's Ass, it's appropriate. It's very grubby, smelling of latrine and burning garbage. Buses, old Blue Birds that may once have carried an old guy like me to elementary school, spew awesome clouds of blue-black smoke. The walls of the two-story buildings look like they've been worked over with a maul. The streets, equally chewed up, collect puddles of sewage and greenish stuff until a bus ka-thunks into them and splashes gruesome death across the sidewalk. It's one more thing to watch out for when walking.

God help me but I love it. I walk around in ever-widening circumnavigations of the Hotel Panamericano, widening my horizon, as it were. I buy some mango slices from a lady, and when she asks me if I want "italco" (or something like that), I say sí (of course) "un poquito." Italco turns out to be a mildly spicy, salty powder never meant for mango outside of a place like Rat's Ass. I buy four pieces of bread from a lady with a basket of it on the sidewalk. I eat it in a Mr. Donut just because it seems so foreign and strange, an isle of sterility. A guard with a gun holds the door for me.

I stroll through the market area, simultaneously watching my back and loving every single person I passed. They sound like children and aren't much taller than American ten-year-olds. Their personal economies are so simple: a pile of fruit on a cardboard box exchanged for cash on a FIFO basis. Just about every woman has a baby with her, sometimes at the breast, sometimes in a basket alongside the cardboard box or table. A good part of the market is a wide area under a tattered assortment of roofing material that includes everything from sheet metal to tarps to plastic sheets. Water must trickle everywhere during the six months of the rainy season.

I stop at a little hole-in-the-wall eatery where a girl was cooking some kind of corn fritters on a grill in the broad, open doorway. I can't get a close-up look because a guy lies dead to the world on a piece of cardboard just below her, his legs extending halfway across the sidewalk. I go in anyway, ask what the greasy fried things are. It turns out they are pupusas. I agree to eat two along with a bottle of water. The girl at the grill serves the dish without a fork. I wonder if it was an eat-it-with-your-hands item. I lift one and find it mushy with some kind of chicken sauce inside. I ask for a fork by pointing to a glass that holds a bunch of them. Then I eat. I watch people walking by, find it odd that some of them stop to look at the bum on the cardboard bed. I've never ever anywhere seen people stop to look at a drunk. Do they know him? Or is he their first bum? Is there something unusual about him? Then somebody asks the cook if he is muerto and the cook says, "Sí."

That certainly kills my appetite for pupusas. Suddenly the flies around me - surprisingly few - become significant in the true sense of the word - signs of something. I pay up and go outside to see for sure. I cannot see how a dead man is any different from a drunk in a stupor, except now, upon careful scrutiny, he does not look like the standard wino. He has socks on under shoes that have laces. His tortoise shell glasses lie beside his head. Maybe he has a little blue tinge to his light brown face, but it might have just been the light slicing down through the oily smoke of the stove.

The Orange Joint

The best place to eat, it turns out, is right around the corner from the hotel, right down the street. It opens early and stays open until about midnight. The walls in all four rooms are painted orange to shoulder height. Even the wall outside is orange. The ceiling is white, or once was. It's much too high to clean, so it's draped in oily ropes of cobweb. Above the orange level are murals ten feet high. One is an oriental scene of a lake at the foot of a small snow-capped volcano not much bigger than the trees behind it. A woman with a parasol strolls a boardwalk. A boat with two people in it floats in the lake. The sky is just as blue as can be. In another room, the mural features a lake at the foot of a brown mountain range. A straight line of eight white birds flies toward the mountains, each proportionately smaller than the one behind. There seems to be a small lighthouse on the shore. Either people or flying fish are swimming in the blue, blue lake. Three of them swim near a boat with a grass roof. A sun with remarkably distinct rays is either rising or setting. The sky is a lighter orange than the wall below.

Another room has a close-up of a volcano and not much else. The sky is light blue with scattered clouds partially blocked by a painted banner that says, in Spanish, "A merry Christmas and prosperous 1990 are what is desired for you by the cometeria and ice cream shop Merced." This is in March of 1994.

The rooms are populated by ratty tables that might have seen service in American kitchens in the 1950s. The prettiest waitress's name is Sonia. A brave and tiny bug lives beneath the chrome stripping around the edge of the table that best suits me. The bug dashes out, grabs an atom of nutrient and slips back under the chrome. I guess he's very safe under there, even from Sonia's occasional swipe of soapy rag.

A less lucky bug was trapped and squashed beneath the section of paper towel that lined the bottom of the plastic basket in which came two tortillas. Half the bug was in the basket, half on the towel on which I wiped sweat from my face.

I don't know what it is with the jukebox in this place, but it seems to play the same cycle of songs whenever somebody feeds it some money. I'm most grateful that they are Latino songs. I don't know if they're Salvadoran or even if El Salvador has national musicians. Just one isn't Latino. It's a sad Elton John song. Even after hearing it several thousand times, the only word I can understand is "Sacrifice," which he speaks in four long syllables.

This joint - I think of it as the Orange Restaurant - has a fine dark beer on tap for 30 cents a mug. This beer alone gives me reason to stay in El Salvador indefinitely. It's as good as the fine, dark brew of a decent microbrewery, like something from England. The advertisement for it is painted right on the orange wall, a picture of a barrel and the words "cerveza oscura en barrelita"

As if that weren't enough, each mug of beer in this country comes with a boca, a little appetizer. Until I learn to ask for one from a scribble list that Sonia carries in her apron, she brings me a tiny plastic cup of shrimp soup. Boy is it good! I squeeze lime into it. Other choices include a teaspoon of ground beef, a tiny pile of peanuts, a bit of cheese. Over the course of several sittings, I try everything but resolve to stick with the shrimp soup.

On my first day in the country I have my beard shaved off. On my spiraling tour around the hotel, I check out several barber shops until I find one where I think they won't cut my throat. Not that you can always tell these things, but on the average, I think it's better to go with your viscera rather than fate alone. Before I go in, I have my picture taken in black-and-white, five copies in a size appropriate for visas. The barber turns out to be friendly though quiet, a man in his fifties with an avuncular salt-and-pepper mustache. He has gentle hands, working off my twenty-year growth with a straight edge that rasps with each short stroke. For a good hour I lie in the chair staring at the oily, web-strewn ceiling and trying to follow the conversations of those around me. I can't. It occurs to me that I probably started growing this beard in El Salvador in 1974, the only other time I've been here. I zipped through the country in a couple of days, hitch-hiking just as fast as I could because I wanted to see stamps in my passport, evidence of my worldliness. I had neither time to shave nor hot water to shave with, so I let it grow for the next 20 years. Now, as my friendly barber tilts me up for a look in the mirror, I see it's too late to reveal my face. It's the first time I've seen it since I was 23. It's a bit flabby below the chin, and the chin itself isn't much to speak of. I return to my friendly photographer and have another picture taken. I paste one to a postcard and send it to my son, addressing to his fifth-grade room at Sayles Elementary. It will be the first time he's seen me without hair on my face.

While waiting at the barber shop I perused a newspaper and learned a new word: huele-pega. The barber told me it meant stoned, more likely on drugs than drink. Apparently the word is both an adjective and a noun for a type of person. I asked him what drugs they had here. "Todas," he said. "Marijuana, cocaina, todas." The story in the paper alleged that huele-pega was the condition of some ruffians who marred a generally peaceful political rally. These were huele-pegas of the FMLN (Frente Marti de Liberación Nacional) persuasion, or so said the paper, which, I was later told, was quite conservative. Indeed all the papers are conservative. It's obvious from the unanimity of the editorials, which condemn the violence of the left, even if only by the stoned, and use it as evidence of the evils of the communist forces that threaten to steal a few votes in the next week's elections. Political ads for the government party outnumber the FMLN coalition by, oh, I'd say at least 10 to one.

Two Peters

Two interesting characters booked into the Panamericano, both named Peter. Peter Grant is Australian, a roving free-lance photographer who's been all around and is still moving. Peter Melberg is director of Companion Communities, an organization dedicated to running and finding financing for social projects in El Salvador. Among his projects are the reforestation of the Guazapa region and the drilling of wells. That latter project progressed to the point of getting some drilling equipment donated, imported and set up, though it proved inadequate for the layer of rock found between the surface and the water table.

Peter the photographer sports black, mop-gone-wild hair, a black mustache and tiny tuft of hair below his lower lip. His eyelashes look plucked and wetted. He must drive the little girls right out of their minds. He's quick with humor, socially conscious, unafraid, casual in his collection of experiences which only a ratbagger of low standards can amass. He lives in Japan a lot of the time and in Sydney the rest. He has a Japanese girlfriend in Japan and a Chinese girlfriend in Sydney, and he doesn't want to abandon either. At the same time, he can't be tied down. He's got things to do.

Like any ratbagger, he's tight with this dough, quick to whip out his notebook to record the names of buses, highways, towns, hotels, contacts. He is not afraid to go where people warn him to avoid. He knows nowhere is ever as bad as its reputation. For this reason he has little respect for rich people who live behind high gates and padlocks and who fear that the world is out to get them. But he's careful, not stupid. He has black tape over the brand name of his Nikon cameras. He always carries two, one over each shoulder under a faux military jacket, a smart set-up since it kind of hides the cameras and makes it hard to rip them off without removing the jacket first. Peter can size up suspects. He told me the trouble always starts at the end of things: a billiards game, soccer, last call. But when he hears the noise of a crowd in the distance, he heads for the action. He did that in Cartagena to capture a protest against the government. A bomb went off near him, throwing off some kind of relatively soft shrapnel - heavier than cardboard but lighter than wood. He clicked off a couple shots and dived behind a concrete sign, then came out clicking. The crowd saw him and assumed him a police informant getting shots of perpetrators. The leader of the crowd, who was doing most of the shouting, urged people to grab him and the camera. Peter says he did pause to see how much film he'd shot - 9 frames - then decided that the only way out was to open the camera and, with actions clear to all the crowd, to remove the film and make a big show of handing it over to the apparent leader.

That always happens to the good shots, he says, that or something like that. Once a Japanese photo shop got him. He'd taken a shot of an old man in a loin cloth in India. There were huge blue storm clouds in the background as a GIANT rat skittered by and the old man reached way out with his staff, striking the rat and an odd pose. And something was hanging from his belt that looked like a huge, swollen phallus. The Japanese photo shop found it necessary to cut one negative in half to make the roll fit into the machine.

On this trip he's been to Trinidad, Cartagena, Medellin, Guatemala and El Salvador. Today, after talks with Peter Melberg, he sets off for Santa Marta, a town recently repatriated after its inhabitants were extensively slaughtered after being chased all over El Salvador by the army and finally crawling into Honduras to spend the next seven years in a refugee camp. Today, Melberg tells us, they have a relatively progressive society with a local council that works hard to improve local life -something that has never happened before in El Salvador. Women lead the council. Some were guerrillas, and they all have a liberated attitude. They take no macho bullshit. The FMLN will probably win the election there, so Peter's off to shoot the celebration. I'll be a day behind him.

Peter Melberg, tall, handsome, clean-cut, very bright, very bushy-tailed, knows what's going on in Mexico and Central America. He's been all over the region for many years. He's got some radical ideas about economy, good ones, people-based, and he knows about all the atrocities in Guatemala and El Salvador. He knows what's going to happen in Chiapas: the government will not deliver what it has promised. It can't. The promises weren't just for rural electrification, schools, clinics and such. Presidente Salinas just gave them a certain autonomy. Can he just do that? Mexican rightists say no. It seems constitutionally questionable to me, too, but Melberg says constitutionality is not the problem, assuming the Mexican legislature approves Salinas' decision. Comandante Comacho says the promises will not be fulfilled. The problem, says Melberg, is that big land owners, who historically have maintained control of the region through private armies operating under police sanction, will block any reform. There will be violence. There are only a handful of armed fighters, and that's one sore point with the rightists. Why did Salinas give them so much after just eight days of weak resistance? One explanation is that, on the cusp of the NAFTA agreements, Salinas did not want Mexico to gain an international image as the kind of place where guerrillas should choose to live and do their thing. What's happened now is that other local governments in southern Mexico are, in Peter's lack of English word, "aglutinando-se" (essentially, attaching themselves to, in the way of the gluten that holds bread dough together), to the Chiapas communities, thereby endowing themselves with the autonomy and power that has been handed to the Chiapas Indians.

So the problem is going to expand throughout southern Mexico, from Oaxaca on down, while at the same time the resistance to the change resorts to violence. According to Peter, the situation in southern Mexico is identical to that of El Salvador ten years ago. The handful of resistors will build into a general uprising, and the Mexican government, still far from democratic, will do what is necessary to stop it. Atrocities, of course, will only worsen the problem.

Mexico borders on the police state of Guatemala, which has the worst human rights record in the hemisphere. The border between the two, I know, is mountainous jungle. It would be had to seal it. Guerrillas in both countries will find refuge on the other side. In both cases, the guerrillas are Indians with a long history of hatred for the ruling Spaniards. The FMLN experience in El Salvador will prove useful, and the results there will be encouraging in Chiapas and Guatemala.

Peter Melberg has the shits and no money. He picked up the shits on a ten-day bus trip through Chiapas and Guatemala on his way to El Salvador. He can barely eat anything and is rationing his carefully calculated funds to make sure he has enough for the airport exit fee due when he leaves on Wednesday. He could get money from his office here except it's closed because his people are up in Santa Marta. So I give him $20 in advance for a copy of a book his people have written. It's a collection of oral reports from people who lived in the Guazapa area during the war. The red hot front was around the Guazapa volcano. The leftists controlled the north slope, the army the south, with offensives coming from both sides. Neither side made much progress, and the civilians suffered the most. I want their stories very much.

I also want the story of Santa Marta very much. I don't know why it took me so long - a couple of hours - to figure out that I had to go there rather than a few other places that looked good on the map. Among the other places are Perquin, where I can find the Museo de la Revolución. Near Perquin is El Mozote, where a major massacre took place. I'd also like to go to La Palma, the highest point in the country, a place with cool, clean air. I want to get to the coffee plantation run by the former FMLN guerrillas. They're growing organic coffee, a politicamente correctissimo product and a fine subject for an article or two. After messing around with all the logistics of getting to each place, I came to my senses and remembered why I'm here. I'm here to research a novel about a boy growing up during a war.

Besides, it takes only three or four hours to reach the most distant points in this tiny country. I could hit all my spots in a couple of days.

Three gringos work at Santa Marta, Melberg tells me. Brenda and Cristina, both Norte Americanas, and Sean, an Australian in the Jesuit Volunteer corps. I am hoping they will feed me information. I hope my Castellano Salvadorense is good enough by then to talk to people and understand what they're telling me. It's rough. if they don't talk slowly and enunciate, I don't get it. I can formulate sentences by passing them through Portuguese and converting them into Spanish, and Peter of Australia has shown me how effective and fun ignorance can be. He's been making time with Sonia, the waitress at the Orange Restaurant. When she first came over, he looked her right up and down and didn't seem to mind that she knew it. He went into a charming little clown act, never asking me how to say anything, though when I saw her giggling and getting it all wrong, I'd step in and explain a key concept. He has big plans for her, has her damned near seduced, him and his wet, plucked eyebrows, but his ideas for the two of them don't seem workable, what with her working 14 hours a day, seven days a week and having a kid (Alexander) and being due to get married in July. Still, they seem to be closing in on an agreement.

Peter's Spanish consists of sign language and English with an -O tacked on the end of essential words. He was unembarassed to introduce "breasto" to the world. This was not for Sonia's benefit. Rather, he used it in desperation at a place that specializes in chicken dishes. As he retold the story, his request for a breasto included the international sign language - pretty unmistakable stuff. So he was pretty mad that all it got him was a thigh and diarrhea. I took enough pity on his to help him buy some medicine at the pharmacy, though I'll always regret not having let him use his sign language and eye contact to get himself the right stuff.

Peter's clownish games with Sonia have come to include a running gag about cockroaches. She pointed out a couple while we were eating lunch. I told her they were Peter's, that he kept them in his pockets, his little friends. Later she turned over a slice of lime to reveal a squashed roach. "Un niño!" Peter explained. Big laughs all around. I still have figured out how Sonia knew there was a half a roach under that slice of lime. It makes one think.

Coffee

Until I got to El Salvador, I was somewhat worried about death squads, bandits in the streets, perhaps the diehard guerrilla. To read the State Dept. advisory, El Salvador is a deathtrap, a hellhole, a jungle. But it is none of those things. It is full of friendly people. Oh, I suppose one out of ten thousand might rob a person if given half a chance, and I suppose the occasional political hit happens. But it took me all of 24 hours to figure out that El Salvador is a nice place full of nice people.

But I came here with a cover story meant to hide the fact that I'd come to see the iniquity. My story, a true one as it happens, is that I'm writing articles about coffee. Through Tea & Coffee International Trade Journal I had an initial contact. I phoned him from the hotel and got the name of a key coffee person, a person, it turned out, of ministerial importance. Ruben Pineda is director of the Consejo Salvadorense de Cafe, an entity which replaced the ministry of coffee. To my immense relief, he speaks excellent English and knows absolutely everything about coffee in El Salvador. He gave me a good, long interview and turned me over to Sr. Espitia, a very nice guy who agreed to take me out to a coffee co-op the next day. Between the two of them I got enough information for two articles, and here they are:

The best thing that ever happened in El Salvador was the cataclysmic collision of the Caribbean and Cocos tectonic plates. If it hadn't been for that, El Salvador, not to mention the rest of Central America, would probably still be under water. But the subterranean pressures brought the isthmus to the surface and endowed its tiniest country with a breathtaking array of well behaved volcanoes. After a stint with indigo last century, it turned out to be a very nice place to grow coffee.

In fact, on a good part of Salvadoran land, coffee's about the only thing that will grow. The slopes of the hills and volcanoes are so steep that farming anything else is impracticable. It's coffee or subsistence crops, both of which are very labor intense. The former makes enough cash to justify the effort. The latter is worthwhile only to the burgeoning peasant population which is willing to invest a lot of labor to reap no more than personal foodstuffs.

And that's the crux of El Salvador's recent problems. One of the world's most profitable legal cash crops, a high-tech product that demands intelligence and investment, has given a narrow upper class a rather nice standard of living. Meanwhile, most of the population of five million in a country the size of Massachusetts has traditionally received little of the coffee cash and ever-decreasing portions of the arable land. The voluminous peasantry, half of whom lived in rural areas, had little to eat but plenty of caffeine to keep them up nights thinking. What they finally thought of was as inevitable and cataclysmic as the collision of tectonic plates.

They had a civil war. The class-against-class upheaval lasted twelve years, killing 80,000 people, uprooting hundreds of thousands of others and sending over a million into exile. Death squads suppressed any attempts to strengthen the social conditions of peasants. Guerrillas sabotaged any attempts to strengthen the economic position of the country. El Salvador was a ever-deepening pit of despair.

Most of the coffee producing regions were well protected by the military and generally unaffected by the war. Government policy and world economics, however, attacked where the guerrillas did not. From the early 1950 to 1986, the Salvadoran government, which had a mandated monopoly on all coffee exports, collected a tax of 30 percent of the FOB value of all exported coffee. Then, in the midst of war and a faltering economy, it slapped on an additional 15 percent. That left little initiative for production. The government also enforced an artificially low currency exchange rate that effectively reduced the value of exported coffee by about half. And on top of that, the government export agency had no interest in marketing fine and gourmet coffees, of which El Salvador had a few, at least until 1979.

As if that weren't enough to finish country off, the global coffee industry went into its current price crisis, and the guerrillas hacked away at the economic infrastructure, blowing up bridges, burning trucks, robbing banks, cutting power and phone lines, doing whatever they could to make it hard for anyone to make a living.

By 1988/89, coffee production collapsed to a trickling 1.51 million bags. Hardest hit were the small farmers who represented 82 percent of production. They saw a US$650 million drop in their combined income from exports, enough to inspire many of them to let their hillside plots go to weed.

The decline spelled sure disaster for a country that had seemingly already suffered sufficient onslaughts, from volcanoes and earthquakes to communists and coups. El Salvador needs coffee. Switching to anything else is virtually impossible. While a Brazil or Kenya could replace its coffee trees with soy or corn, El Salvador can't do much else with its mountainous terrain. In the absence of a good crop during the torrential months between May and November, the country's invaluable volcanic soil would soon wash into the sea. The country that once produced more coffee per hectare than any other would soon become a desert of arroyos and bare-backed ridges.

Furthermore, Salvadoran coffee grows under shade trees which are pruned to provide maximum shade during the dry season and allow more light through during the rainy season. The pruned branches provide the country with 60 percent of its firewood, a primary source of cooking fuel even in the capital, San Salvador. If it weren't for those prunings, the country would soon be stripped of its natural trees.

Coffee is also vital to El Salvador because it comprises a higher proportion of employment, GNP, land use and export revenues than coffee does in any other country. Over the years, coffee has represented about half of the total value of exports. Coffee contributes 6.3 percent of the GNP, compared to just 1.5 percent in Colombia. Eight percent of the national land, 12 percent of arable land, is dedicated to that single cash crop.

Clearly El Salvador didn't have much time left when, in 1989, Alfredo Cristiani - "Fredy" to his friends - was elected president. No one's calling him a savior, but he moved quickly to give coffee producers the freedom to go about their business without government interference. The export tax was eliminated. The exchange rate was floated. The government got out of the export business and created the Consejo Salvadoreño del Cafe ,The Salvadoran Coffee Council, which serves the purpose not of controlling but rather of assisting the production and export of coffee.

And finally, in 1992, to the relief of rich and poor alike, the guerrillas and the government negotiated an end to the war.

Thanks to the reformed government policies and confidence in the peace process, in 1992-93 El Salvador produced its biggest crop in ten years. It looks like 1993-4 will be a bit lower, due to its normal up-down cycle of production, but the trend is definitely toward increased production.

The country's coffee problems, however, are far from over. The hard years of the past have left producers saddled with oppressive debt. Much of it came from a special government program and is supposed to be repaid as a special tax. It's due next year. Unless longer terms and lower interest rates can be arranged, a good number of producers will suffer seriously, perhaps terminally.

Furthermore, producers made little effort to replace their aging trees during the 1980's, when no one was sure how the war would turn out. The Consejo Salvadoreño del Cafe estimates that at least a third of the country's trees need to be replaced to reach pre-1980 levels. That represents not only a big expense but also a big, albeit temporary, drop in production.

El Salvador's biggest shortfall may be in its marketing budget. Historically it has been a virtual non-contender in international marketing, spending an average of under $50,000 per year to advertise the single product that keeps the country afloat. That may have been enough during low-price, low-production years, but in the rest of the 1990's, it will have to compete with the name that Colombia has given itself at such expense and a similar campaign being formulated in Brazil.

With the end of the war, the reconstruction of the country and the rejuvenated spirits of the people, El Salvador is experiencing something it isn't used to - optimism. It's biggest problem, soon, might be unprecedented piles of coffee. But as problems go in El Salvador, that one's not too bad.

There was a day when El Salvador ranked among the top five coffee producers in the world - not bad for a country one-fiftieth the size of Colombia. In 1974/75, it hit a peak harvest of 3.76 million 60-kilo bags. But then the government stepped in with questionable policies, and then the peasants rose up with serious weaponry, and then prices collapsed, and by 1988/89, production sputtered down to 1.51 million bags.

But then the government backed off and the peasants settled down, and by 1992/93, production almost doubled to 2.91 million bags. And it looks like the price might pick up if the retention plan holds out. Pretty soon growing coffee might actually pay money instead of just cost money. The break-even point seems to be about $74 a bag.

El Salvador's quarter century of coffee woes may actually have helped it survive the crises that have driven many other countries' coffee growers into bankruptcy or other businesses. During the profitable 1970's and difficult '80's, while El Salvador could barely afford to beat back the weeds, growers in other countries were replacing their crops with more productive varieties of tree. Soon Costa Rica, long blessed with a stable democracy and peaceful populace, surpassed El Salvador in production, thanks to investments in high-tech, high density, high labor, high-fertilization trees.

El Salvador hung in there with its traditional trees. According to the Consejo Salvadoreño del Cafe, the government agency that oversees coffee production and export, about 82 percent of the country's trees are Bourbon, and 15 percent are Pacas, a variety originally developed in El Salvador and ideally suited to its climate and terrain. Another ten varieties make up the other three percent. Especially rare are the fancy trees that need lots of NPK and TLC.

Those numbers are only estimates, however. Incredibly, for over 20 years El Salvador has collected no accurate statistics on acreage, tree types, average production or any other aspect of coffee production - a rather unsettling fact since coffee represents by far the most important sector of the national economy.

These traditional trees and traditional technologies are what have helped El Salvador survive. These particular varieties don't need a lot of fertilizer, and, unlike coffee grown elsewhere, they grow under tall, broad shade trees called pepetos. Dense rows of tall copalchi trees serve to break the wind of the particularly vicious storms generated between the soaring volcanoes and the tropical Pacific sea. The roots of these trees bring nutrients from deep in the ground, so their fallen leaves, which are left to rot, providing organic material that reduces the need for fertilizer. So while Costa Rican coffee staggers under the weight of its expensive maintenance, El Salvador coasts through price drops with relative stability.

Perhaps the most optimistic change in the Salvadoran coffee industry has been the development of cooperatives. In the past, before the war - and indeed in part causing the war - coffee fincas were owned by large land owners who could take care of themselves. A tight-knit upper class could always arrange convenient bank loans to keep themselves afloat. Gradually, the small farmers had to sell out.

During the 1980's, in attempt to steal some of the thunder from the leftist guerrillas, the government doled out small parcels of land, albeit not much and not the best of turf. With the negotiated settlement of the war, however, vast portions of the country were awarded to the guerrillas who had effectively controlled those areas for several years anyway. So suddenly about 20 percent of El Salvador's coffee comes from small farmers who, a few years ago, had neither land nor hope. Now they have a little of both. But is that enough?

It's enough if they cooperate, which is just what they've been doing. Two types of cooperatives are making it possible for the small guys to survive in a business once reserved for big guys. Some of the cooperatives are associations of owners of small plots. Some are several farmers jointly owning a single plot.

One of the more successful of the former type is the Sociedad Cooperativa de Cafetaleros de San Jose de la Majada. Known simply as the Majada co-op, this union of some 600 members dedicates itself not just to gathering coffee but to improving living standards for the 50,000 families that live within its region. Among Majadas many projects are a health clinic and a recreation complex.

Majada's most important role, however, is the improvement of coffee production. Recognizing that growing coffee is a lot more complicated than growing maize, the co-op does everything it can to induce its members to learn and to apply modern techniques. When the co-op bought a big piece of land, it let small farmers buy up plots at low interest rates under the condition that they plant and maintain the coffee trees under rigid rules of agricultural technology. The main objective was to prove to the incredulous campesino farmers that the stuff in books really does work.

The proof has been perfectly clear. In a country where the average manzana (70 percent of a hectare) produces 13 quintales (46-kilo bags), Majada reaps an average of 23 quintales per manzana, with many growers producing over 40.

Oswaldo Antonio Juarez, a member of the Majada co-op, is a classic example of what is happening in El Salvador. He inherited one manzana of coffee land from his father and has been in physical and psychological touch with coffee all his life. But with prices low and a single manzana not producing enough to support itself, he thought for a long time that he'd eventually lose the land and have nothing to pass on to his sons. But Majada let him buy another plot of equal size, or rather mortgage it on a promise to pay with future production. He used the technology they taught him. The first year he produced 3 quintales. The second he reaped 52, then 56, and most recently, 72, fully convincing him that there are right ways and wrong ways of growing coffee. He's going to grow it the right way, pay off the land, and, if things keep going right, maybe buy up a little more.

In other words, he's got some hope for the future - something long thought extinct in El Salvador.

UCRAPROBEX, a union of cooperatives created under the agrarian reform, has been doing similar work. A good deal of its members are former guerrillas who suddenly find themselves participating in the free enterprise system - exactly what they'd been fighting for. The trouble is, after twelve years of fighting, which for many started in their young teens, they're better with swords than ploughshares. They're also strapped for cash and not real good at the process of getting their coffee from the tree to the coffee cups of North America.

UCRAPROBEX alleviates both problems by providing financing, beneficiation, marketing and technical education. The union is also helping the co-ops diversify into such areas as cashew nuts and dried marigolds.

The union's flagship product is a very politically correct organic coffee grown by former members of the FMLN, the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front which once controlled the area where the coffee is grown.* Certified by the Organic Certified Institute of America, the coffee is marketed under the brand name Pipil, an Aztec-Mayan race of Indians who once inhabited El Salvador. Pipil happens to be pronounced a lot like "People," an appropriate name for what could well be considered a "People's" coffee.

The concept of an internationally recognized Salvadoran brand name is rather new. For the last twelve years, what little the country has managed to produce has largely been a generic commodity without renown. In 1989, however, the Salvadoran government gave up its monopoly on coffee trade. Since then, 81 exporters have started up business. Under the pressure of competition, they are likely to start marketing not only fine and gourmet coffees but also the image of Salvadoran coffee as something worthy of respect.

An international name may not be far away. The European Community is already working with the Consejo Salvadoreño del Cafe to develop a marketing plan for Salvadoran coffee on that side of the Atlantic. If the marketing effort is successful, it will be a relief to the whole world to see El Salvador recognized for its coffee instead of its conflicts. After so many years of struggle, El Salvador deserves to see hope grow on trees.

Cute article, no? When I sent it to Tea & Coffee International Trade Journal, the editor, a dingbat, said, "You know, this is hard-hitting, interesting, informative, comprehensive, but you know...I think I'm going to run it anyway." And she did, complete with my caption about the wind-breaking trees.

The article wasn't half as hard-hitting as it cold have been, and perhaps should have been. It's too easy to refer to 80,000 people, mostly civilians, killed. It was more like 80,000 people, mostly peasants, murdered. The armed forces went on killing sprees in the hills, apparently hoping to wipe out the peasant population that was supporting the guerrillas in the way that mothers support their sons. In fact that's essentially what it was: families trying to protect themselves from the army, or run from it, or feed their sons and compañeros who were defending their people. After ten years of resistance, the FMLN managed to maintain control of a large portion of the country. Army forays into these areas were only temporary, without military objective beyond wiping out a village or two.

The Guerrillas of Santa Marta

Santa Marta was one of those villages. Located in the Departamento of Cabañas, it's not far from the Honduran border. When the army came in, the people fled democracy in what is called a guinda, a fleeing of residents and all the food they could carry. Typically they'd keep moving, sleeping in ravines by day, moving on by night. A kid with a rifle might pin down an army patrol or lure it in the wrong direction while the women and children moved on.

One guinda gave the people of Santa Marta no choice but to cross the Rio Lempa into Honduras. Apparently the army was forcing them to the border. Apparently the Hondurans were menacing from the other side. The refugees were trying to cross the river on a rope when eight helicopters came by to strafe them. The helicopters went back and forth, up and down the river, machine gunning everyone they could see. In an apparent attempt to save ammunition, they flew low enough to dunk people under the water. Eventually the rope broke and a lot of people were swept downstream. Most of them were women and children.

The people of Santa Marta and other villages spent seven years in the Mesa Grande refugee camp in Honduras. They returned only after The government and the FMLN had reached a cease-fire. The people came back to nothing except their land. They had to rebuild from scratch. From what I've been told, they all worked together to make sure everyone had a house. No one moved into a house until all the houses were built.

So, having fulfilled my obligations to the international coffee trade, I set off for Santa Marta. I caught a city bus to Terminal Oriente, then a bus to Sensuntepeque. It's an old Blue Bird, no better equipped for the long haul than the city buses, except that it has a ladder going up to the roof rack. Terminal Oriente is just a big parking lot packed tight with colorful buses. Each bus has its destination painted on the back and front in very fancy script endowed with all the serif that letters can bear. Each bus has its name painted across the full length of the side - Karen Nancy, El Discovery, Dos Hermanos, Bam-Bam! I boarded La Preferida to Sensuntepeque.

Not wanting to let my pack out of my sight, I took it with me into the bus. It didn't fit onto the rack over the seats, so I had to hold it between my legs. It became quite in the way as we picked up more and more passengers. They ride quietly, no one talking. Almost everyone carries a sack of something, though a couple of girls seem to be dressed for a job in an office. Whenever the bus stops at an intersection or town, a dozen women and young girls chortle their wares: Pupusas, pupusa! Naranja, naranja! Mango, mango! Limonada, limonada! The lemonade comes in plastic bags with a straw out the top. The girls get right onto the bus with their basins or bags of food. They are all so beautiful in their dresses, with their high, childlike voices, their big, dark eyes. I love them all and wish I could buy all their food. I buy a little of this and that, munching my way toward Sensuntepeque. The girls stay on the bus as it takes off for the next stop, where they descend, I assume to go home the same way they came.

Suddenly rock and roll bursts out of a speaker at the front of the bus, crackling with excess decibels. In a spoiled, high-pitch snarl, some whiny-assed rock and roll guy snarls, " I want (something) and I want it now" in an intense, driving beat. Green lights blink to the rhythm. It only lasts three seconds. We hit a bump, and the music is gone. We're back in El Salvador. But not completely. I'm riding on the same Blue Bird bus I rode to elementary school. Maybe that burst of music came from that same abused speaker. The seats have the steel grab bar at the back at exactly the level for knocking out a kid's teeth if the driver hits the brakes or the bus hits a bump. Some of the bars are wrapped tight in black and orange lanyard stuff, perhaps to hide the little dents.

Among the visual cacophony is a collection of hologramatic bumper stickers on the ceiling and window. Most bear the name of a place: Haiti, Montana, Peru. One is the flag of Greece. An arrow pierced heart is welded into the ceiling over the door. The general windshield decor - fringes, a string of laminated foreign currency, a giant fuzzy pencil, a crucifix - bobs and sways in counterpoint to the rhythm of the bus.

At one unidentifiable bus stop I buy three pupusas and a fistful of pickled cabbage. Under the obligation of courtesy, I offer some to my seat-mate. He accepts. Somewhere else I buy a little plastic bag of mango slices, but the bus takes off before the lady can slap me some hot sauce of salt and herbs. In Sensuntepeque I buy a little plastic bag of boiled manioc. It's very good, fills me up nicely. From there I take a cattle truck to Villa Vitoria. Twenty or thirty people lean against each other and cling to either the fences on the sides or the bar that runs overhead down the middle. Apparently the elderly and pregnant get to sit on the spare tire or somebody's sack of food or firewood. Every time the truck stops, its dust catches up with it and billows into the back. Everybody squints, waits, then brushes it off as best they can.

When the truck drives off, leaving me and my pack at a central square at Villa Vitoria, I hear silence after the day of growling motors. The town has no traffic. The dirt-and-cobblestone streets look incapable of handling anything less hardy than a Jeep. A little girl who got off the truck with me points the way to Santa Marta. It looks like just a dirt lane leading down from the far end of the square. She says she knows of no trucks going there that day or the next and that it is probably an hour's walk. She laughs when I ask if they have a hotel or restaurant there. Then she hoists a bundle to her head and clip-clops on her way.

The silence blossom into a chorus of people singing. The long, baleful notes of a hymn waft out of a church on the square. In no hurry to start my march to Santa Marta, I lug my pack into the church to cool off and to hear the beautiful sound. The voices have the timbre of children's. Everyone in the church is swaying slightly and aiming their voices upward. Some have their arms out, palms upward. They seem to be singing and crying at the same time. I sit on a bench against the wall at the back of the church and dig out my camera. I want to record the sound, but the best I can do is take a picture of it. I start crying as I fiddle with all the stuff a modern Nikon needs fiddling with. Tears fall on it. I'm thinking how much these people have suffered, how all those voices are weeping for their individual tragedies. They've all had family members shot, mutilated, raped, beheaded, tortured, beaten, bayoneted, burned, gutted, blown up, starved or chased all over the hills. I doubt anyone in that church has escaped without suffering unspeakable tragedy. Now they are singing sweetly to God. For some odd, confused reason I'm saying, "God dammit, God dammit," to myself because I can't keep from crying and because the voices are so sad and beautiful and childlike. Still sitting, I put my foot on the bench, set the camera on my knee and squeeze off a loud shot at a very slow speed. The experience slips into the little dark chamber of my camera and stays there, trapped behind the shutter. Then I sit there and think whether it's good or bad for these people to be praying to a God who, in my first-world, middle-class, over-educated opinion, hasn't really been all that loving to these people. On the other hand, of course, what else could they hold on to but God?

Damned well positive I'll never know the answer to questions like that, I wonder why I let myself ask me them. After sitting for a while I mop up my tears, pack up my camera, drop my loose change into a little blue poor box and go out to look for Santa Marta.

In situations like this, the situation of not quite knowing which way to go or why or whether to eat and if so where and of course not knowing where I'm going to sleep that night and whether it's time to start worrying about it, a situation stifled with heat, gnawed with the scream of cicadas, backed with the singing of hymns, coated with dust, part way through a journey to a place quite possibly not worth seeing at all, in situations like this, I'm glad I'm traveling alone. I don't need someone asking me, "Now what are you going to do?" because what I'm going to do first is sit down under a tree and drink something while I have a smoke and see what occurs to me. Situations like these also explain why I take up smoking when I travel. It's something to do when there's nothing to do. I hate to sit and do nothing.

So I got bought some kind of a Salvadoran lemon-lime pop at the only commercial establishment on the plaza. The friendly people therein confirmed that the way to Santa Marta was indeed down the little lane on the other side of the plaza and that no trucks would be going that way for a day or two. So I went to sit under a low, broad tree to drink and smoke and listen to a short man sweep the plaza pavement with a long, fan-shaped leaf that looked like it may have come off a palm. He talked to me for a while, but I understood nothing except that the way to Santa Marta was down that same dusty lane.

So off I went. The lane looked less likely than before, like something that would peter out in somebody's goat pasture. It had a few clumps of cobblestone here and there, but mostly it looked like a trail. I asked a couple of fellows if indeed this was the right way. Yes, they said, it was, and as a matter of fact, they were headed for Santa Marta themselves. They jumped right up and of we went.

The younger of the two, a teenager, had the crease of an old scar across his upper cheek. The older, gaunt and broken-toothed, wore a straw hat. It occurred to me that they might well lead me into the hills and murder me there for the contents of my pack, but somehow I knew that wouldn't be the case. It looked a little more possible, though, when we left the road to take a short cut down a path which my friendly guides told me would cut off a few kilometers of road. I'm all for getting off the road, and it did feel good to be on a scant path off a dirt trail several miles outside of a small town in a back corner of a nook of a country like El Salvador.

This corner of El Salvador did not have the best of land. It was all clearly defined hills, miniature mountains. From a given elevated point you could probably count a dozen or more within easy sight. Despite the density of the population of El Salvador, I could see few signs of occupancy within the visible radius of five or ten miles - no houses, fences, planted fields or cattle. During our two-hour walk, we passed only three or four houses. One had a small field planted with tomatoes, but that was all I saw of agriculture. I guess lack of apparent planting was because of the dry season. The dusty earth would support nothing without irrigation. I doubted much would grow even with water. What wasn't dust was stone.

Needless to say, my friends did not murder me. Nobody ever does. These guys didn't even try. They kept offering to carry my pack for me, or rather one of my packs, for I had a large camera bag loosely tied to the top of my main pack. I declined the offer simply because I tend not to accept help. Also, I kind of liked the idea of lugging all this stuff by myself. It made me feel tough.

Santa Marta had a big sign pointing the way off the road. It had a home-made look and featured a painting of what the place looked like, or should look like, or looked like in people's minds. Was its intent to lure people of the road, as if someone might just happen to pass by without being aware of the place?

At some point on the trail going into Santa Marta my friends and I parted. Their house was up a certain path, the center of town down the one we'd come in on. I thanked them for their guidance and friendliness, and they wished me well.

Most of the houses of Santa Marta have walls of patchwork lumber and roofs of corrugated galvanized steel. Often the roofs extend outward to form a porch area that has a hammock or two draped between the poles holding up the roof. Small lanes lead off of the main road, which itself isn't much of a byway. Short trees spread scanty shade here and there. They seem to lack a full complement of leaves. It hasn't rained here in six months.

I ask directions to Sean's house, but it's impossible to for anyone to explain how to follow the paths that lead wherever people tend to walk. I wander around a while, following pointing fingers, and finally ask a friendly looking household if I can leave my pack there while I go look for Sean. They're happy to hold it for me.

I feel myself in a place of Hobbits or some such long-lost creature of innocence and yore. The people are all short and live in small houses under short trees. Their streets are just dusty paths. Children run and play and giggle and shout all over the place. From the superficial look of these people, they are happier than anyone I've seen in this country. Certainly they are among the poorest, too. From what I see in yards, all they own is old clothes. I don't see so much as a bicycle.

Sean's house is a box of corrugated steel on the side of a steep hill. Somebody points it out to me but tells me he isn't there. I'm more likely to find him at the church. So I wander on down to the church, the building of which I believe Sean himself oversaw, with funding from various organizations in the first world. I think Peter Melberg's organization may have been involved. As Catholic churches go, this isn't the fanciest around. Rather, it's as stark as the average Presbyterian place. The walls are whitewashed brick, the floor concrete, the roof an arch of corrugated steel, the pews simple benches. A small cross stands at one end of the roof. The doors are heavy steel with a latch for closing with a padlock.

I don't find Sean but I do find a dozen gringos sitting in a circle outside. They're having some kind of meeting, but it soon breaks up. I think they are the group of people working with Peter Melberg's organization. They're touring a few towns before they get down to the business of observing the election. I feel awkward addressing someone with the presumption that they will understand English. I don't like meeting Americans in foreign lands. I guess I like to believe I'm the first to arrive. I guess most Americans are like this. I think we're a little ashamed of ourselves, or our wealth or our flabby guts or out reputation. We are the atrocities of Vietnam in plaid Bermuda shorts. Except me, of course.

The apparent leader of the group, a man in his fifties with a grizzled, crudely hewn beard, knows Sean but hasn't seen him around for a while. He thinks the church is as good a place as any to wait for him. Meanwhile, the group's on its way to someone's house to eat lunch. I'm tempted to ask if I can come along, but I don't.

No sooner have they left than Peter Grant, the photographer, shows up, still wearing the same pants, T-shirt and military jacket I saw him in every day in San Salvador. It turns out he came in on a truck just a few minutes ago. He hasn't seen Sean, either, but along comes another Australian, and his name is Tim.

Tim is Sean's buddy. He has flown around the world at Sean's behest to witness the election. Tim is of short, broad stature with blondish hair a bit out of control. His whiskers are reddish-blondish, and have reached a stage between recently shaven and short beard. When Tim talks to you, he has to lean back a bit to aim upward. He looks like he's trying to counterbalance his great, big belly. His thick arms seem to lean in across it. He wears shorts and a T-shirt. I'm happy to see that shorts are permitted. So far, having seen no Salvadoran in short pants, I've worn jeans. The heat inside leaves me uncomfortably slimy all the time.

We shoot the breeze for a while. Tim had thought me Australian because I happen to be wearing an Australian T-shirt that advertises Red Back beer. I quickly deduce that he's a nice guy but full of blarney and stuff. Something about him hints at insecurity. He wants to be loved, respected, admired, befriended. He got his big belly at the bar of many pubs, I'm sure, or, more likely, many trips to one pub. He's a current events buff and likes to demonstrate how much he knows. He does know a lot. If I reveal a lapse in my knowledge of Australian politics, he's quite prepared to back up to the middle of the nineteenth century to explain how things got to their current state. He's also quick to show how much he knows about American politics and to probe for gaps in my own knowledge. He doesn't have to probe far. Quite sure of his opinions, he backs them up with an air of obviousness with lines delivered over contained chuckles, lines like "If you're in the Labor Party, I mean, you just don't do that!" Such people are fine with me once I get over the realization that they just aren't going to listen to anything I say. After that, I see them as a source of information. He can talk all he wants. He's a constant education. Even though I've written two books about Salvadoran politics, I'm interested to hear what he has to say. What he knows he heard from Sean, and Sean knows, and what Sean knows he sure as hell didn't get from my stupid books.

Sean came to El Salvador at a bad time. He arrived in Guatemala just a week before the murder of several Jesuits in their home in San Salvador. Tim tells me that someone who knew Sean in Guatemala told him that Sean wasn't telling anybody where he was going. He had to sneak into El Salvador and ensconce himself in Santa Marta, which by that time was securely held by the guerrillas.

Tim is on the look-out for scandal or, ideally, some political violence. I'm sure the tales he carries home will include implications of both. The big one so far was a helicopter that had come in low that morning, putting the town on the edge of panic. In past years, that thub-thub-thub-thub-thub sound was death on the prowl. On the eve of the elections, Sean and Tim and probably a lot of locals saw it as intimidation, a reminder, a threat. Apparently it flew over quite low, then came back quite low, with a little circling here and there. We would later find out, however, that it was probably practicing for bringing some government or U.N. uppity-ups for some kind of election activity in the area. They didn't want to get lost, which apparently they did, since Santa Marta was not on anyone's itinerary.

It is from Tim that I learn that Santa Marta has cold beer. It is available in tiendas, which are simply homes that have refrigerators and a bench on the porch. They're here and there, some with little metal signs that say "Tienda" and bear the logo of Regia beer. We agree to meet somewhere for just such a brew a little later on. Me, I have to get back to my pack and see about a place to sleep. Maybe I'll just roll out my bag in the corner of the church.

But the lady of the house, a warm, long-haired woman named Margarita Nolasco de Lopez, insists on sitting me down for some lunch in the cooking area outside their house. She has been keeping it warm for me: beans, tortillas, a fried egg. Boy is it good! I haven't eaten since the manioc in Sensuntepeque. Margarita and her pretty daughter watch me eat, and then a man and a boy come to help her watch. We all shake hands. I explain to the man and the boy that I have just walked in from Villa Vitoria. They say they know. They walked with me. Indeed it is them! I hadn't recognized them because they had removed their shirts. So much for my powers of observation.

However I did observe that a pig had a habit of slipping into the room and rooting around under the table where I sat. The word for "Scram, pig!" is chulé! That's only a short-term solution, though. The pig comes right back.

In the distance, someone is making announcements over a megaphone. Margarita says, "Allí - el Padre Sean!" She dispatches a small boy to fetch him, and soon he arrives. He's about thirty, slender, tall, with curly dark red hair and a glint of mischief in his eyes. We discuss my circumstances for a while before he asks me how my Spanish is. I tell him it's all right but sounds a lot like Portuguese. ""Entonces," he says, "Vamos habla espanol para la gente - he indicates Margarita and family with a loving sweep of his eyes - hacer parte. " Or other words to the effect that it wasn't polite of us to be leaving these people out of the conversation. Which was certainly true. It also made me instantly aware that I wasn't going to get special attention, that these good, poor people were the important ones. And for that same reason, Sean had no time for me, though he hoped to see me around. And off he went. I would not see him again except when he was giving a mass in church. I would hear him, however, as he walked around urging people into action with his bullhorn.

I forgot to ask him where I might sleep for a night or two, so I asked Margarita if I could just sleep on their porch for the night. Of course not! I would have to sleep in the house! They immediately installed me at a bed, one of six in their long, one-room house. Most of the wall space was beds. The inhabitants were Margarita, her husband, Bonifacio Escobar Enrique, their son, Marcus, their daughter, Margot , and a young nephew, a sullen boy who had trouble waking up and whose parents had been killed in the war.

They had another son was who joined the guerrillas at the age of twelve. When he told his father he wanted to be a compa (compañero), Bonifacio said, "If that's what you want, go." It was better than spending seven years in a refugee camp. They showed me a picture of the boy at the age of 16, taut and brown, squatting with an M-16 across his legs and a big smile on his face. Such a handsome lad! He eventually got his heel blown off by a mine. Bonifacio had to walk to Chalatenango to carry his boy home. The boy had some kind of chest wounds, too. Later he had some sort of plastic implant put in his foot, and last year he went to California, where he is now. he left behind, temporarily, I suppose, a 25-year-old wife and five kids, all of whom are under the age of about eight. They live just across the path from Bonifacio and Margarita. The wife teaches at the school.

Bonifacio lost three brothers and a father during the war. All were murdered by the army. His father was murdered while he slept. Everyone living in their house now had spent the seven years in the refugee camp in Honduras. They were among the people who crossed the Rio Lempa on March 18, 1981 .

This family seems just a bit better off than most of the other people in town. Their house and yard are a bit bigger, anyway. Their walls are of wood, not sheet metal. They are close to the spigot, one of two in town. They have a plot of land for planting not too far away. Part of their wealth is endowed upon them because of the boy who was a guerrilla. Guerrillas got land as part of the negotiated settlement with the government, and the local elected directoria allotted certain benefits to these veterans. I think the planted land is owned commonly, with plots, called milpas, assigned to families.

The spigot on this end of town is the only source of water. It extends from a low concrete pillar. At any given time, half a dozen girls bathe there, fill plastic jugs, wash clothes, wash corn. With little inhibition they take off their shirts to dump water over themselves. They keep their dresses on, however, and simply let them get soaked. I'm not sure how the local men see bare breasts. In San Salvador, I saw plenty of pornographic items that featured women with breasts exposed. Here, however, it seems no big deal, though I did notice a few of the younger guys hanging around the spigot during bath time. At the little tienda where Tim, Peter and I hang out, the young mother who serves the beer has a baby to her breast almost all the time. At one point she went to her concrete sink at the far end of the yard, stripped off her blouse and bathed while we very actively didn't look. Tim, blessed with an inadvertent view, narrated for us.

It's rather amusing to see how hard we don't look. We often had to cross a little stream that divided the town. The crossing spot was also the place where women washed clothes and themselves, and half a dozen or so would be half naked. They fell silent as we passed, and we aimed our eyes at the ground in front of us as we said Ola and kept moving. I had the feeling that the women might have been slightly embarrassed, perhaps suspecting that the gringos would see their breasts differently from the local guys. I wonder if breasts become pornographic to the local guys only then they're presented in a certain way or maybe only when they're attached to the kind of girls found in North American magazines. I tried to explain this to Tim, but he just didn't understand what I was getting at. Somehow he related it to Australian politics, and off we went on a long lecture toward nowhere.

We are not the only gringos in Santa Marta. The town is rife with them. Brenda and Juanita (Jane, really) are two physical therapists specializing in helping women recover from the post-traumatic stress of the war and the refugee camps. There's a young Scottish doctor and his skinny wife. There's a Belgian medical student doing his intern work, and his girlfriend. There's a Spanish girl named Anna who is organizing the school. I don't think this is typical of all towns in El Salvador.

March 15, 1994

Everybody in Santa Marta and Villa Nueva - these are two distinct political entities, though I have yet to figure out where the boundary is or what difference it makes - woke up well before dawn on this day. It is election day. Well before any hint of sunrise besides the roosters that started up hours earlier, women started filling water jugs at the spigot. They also used the cover of darkness to wash themselves, removing their blouses and dumping dishes of water over their heads. During a few moments between women, Bonifacio urged me to bathe as well. I did so but for some reason was too shy to strip to my underwear like everybody else.

the sky was barely light when the truck and bus started honking. Sean was already on his megaphone, urging people to get up and get ready to go vote. The trucks honked long and insistently, somehow generating a tone of urgency. Bonifacio, Margarita, Marcus and I hurried to an intersection of paths. A few other people showed up, and then the truck arrived. I guess it was a cattle truck, with high slatted sides, a beam running stem to stern, and, for this high-passenger occasion, ropes running from left to right for people to hold on to. Some of the younger guys rode atop the sides. The men all wore straw cowboy hats, which they don't usually. The women did not seem specially dressed up, though it's hard to tell. Their day-to-day clothes are often nice little outfits, albeit frayed and ill-fitting. Everybody held onto the ropes and sides as the truck slowly worked its way up the road, negotiating holes and gullies one at a time. Since it hadn't rained in six months, the dust rose in billows behind the truck, then swirled in from the back. Everybody squinted to keep it out of their eyes, and whenever the truck stopped, they wiped the dust from their faces.

The trip from Santa Marta to Villa Vitoria took about half and hour. Everybody climbed out and spanked the dust off their clothes, then walked up to Calle Principal, the main plaza, to figure out how to vote. The first task was to figure out which of the 10-15 tables was the right one. It was a matter of alphabetical order, but no one was real sure which of their typically long Latin names was the one that applied.

The officials wee still registering the official vigilantes, the representatives from each party who would watch over each voting table. The vigilantes wore white vests with their party's logo on it. the government's conservative ARENA people stood around with the guerrilla's FMLN coalition people, nobody shouting at anybody else .

By mutual agreement of all parties, there is no military presence besides the Policia Civil. Armed with pistols, their ranks composed of former Treasury Police, FMNL guerrillas and new recruits, this force is laudably benign and relatively harmless. They stand around as if too shy to let themselves be noticed. The real military has been told to stay in the barracks. In the same spirit, by local agreement, no one is to wear any politically significant clothes within the roped-off parameters of the plaza. No one is to carry any weapons over that line, not even a machete, not even a Swiss army knife, which one enthusiastic PC spotted in the little pouch on my belt. He made the first movements toward confiscating it, writing out my name on a label which he then attached to the knife. "You can pick it up at the station right over there, when you're leaving," he said. I had a strong suspicion that my beloved knife tool kit might never make it to the station, or if it did, never again into my little leather pouch. So I said, "Oh! But I am leaving! I'm off to Santa Mata. The truck leaves from the other side of the plaza. I'm on my way over there," and he let me go.

All day the chicharras - cicadas - fill the plaza with a constant shrill scream that is close to the pitch of jingle bells. Traditionally they crank up their call on Palm Sunday, which is next week. Just as Americans associate sleigh bells with Christmas and peace, Salvadorans are voting to the sound of resurrection and hope. It is their first truly free elections, assuming one considers the financial disparity between the government and opposition parties to be fair, in recent history. Three thousand foreign observers are in the country to make sure all is fair. At least a dozen are here in Villa Victoria. They wear blue t-shirts with the U.N. logo and the logo of whatever other organization they are with. The town has only a couple of actual U.N. employees. The rest have paid their way down here to keep an eye on things.

Things are going smoothly, as far as this observer can tell. Except for the chicharras, the plaza is remarkably quiet. No horns, no engines, no shouts, no radios. the only human sound is the low rumble of a well behaved crowd. The most alive thing is a man and a boy playing a little game of soccer with a rounded stone in a few feet of free space. Most people are just standing in lines. For the second time in fifteen minutes, the church, the one where I'd been crying the day before, launches a barrage of bells, clanking hard for a minute, then speeding up, the same inarticulate urgency heard in the truck horn this morning. Under other circumstances I'd think it was an emergency, but it's only urgency to get to the mass.

Among the official observers is Yvonne Dilling. She was at the crossing of the Rio Lempa. In her book, Search for Refuge, she related the massacre in detail. She helped bring some of the weaker people across the river at the rope which later broke. She and a certain Sr. Bonilla hid under a tree while the helicopters passed back and forth. Now Yvonne is overseeing the election and Sr. Bonilla is FMLN candidate for mayor of Villa Vitoria. Yvonne was there to yell at me after I took photos of Marcus voting, then rushed over to tell him that I'd be sending these pictures to his brother who had fought for this glorious day. Marcus, who was standing at the little booth where voters took turns marking their cards, gave me a odd, confused and almost hateful look. Then Yvonne yelled at me, "Hey, you can't talk to him! He's voting!"

Boy did I feel stupid. I rushed away from Marcus and over to Yvonne's side, apologizing, feeling quite the heel. Half the problem was that she was timing him, trying to calculate the average voting cycle and how long it would take all the registered voters to finish. They were supposed to move through the cycle in a minute and a half, but it was taking more like four minutes, and even more if a gringo had to explain why he was taking pictures at the sacred moment.

I didn't know who she was until later, when somebody told me that she'd written a book. Later, when I found out, I wanted very much to talk to her. I kept circling in on her, but she was always doing something. At one point, for example, a peasant was complaining that he'd been unable to vote. his name wasn't on the list of registered voters. He was very miffed. The official U.N. guy, a tall Chilean in handsome blue uniform and beret, was of no help, nor was the cute chick who was with him, some Yvonne saw to it that his problem was officially registered. Then some ARENA guys showed up in nifty red-white-and-blue official ARENA jackets and hats, walked around with all the confidence of a death squad. It was utterly amazing how different these guys looked from the rest of the crowd. They were whiter, taller, much fatter, and carried an air of being in charge and above it all. When someone reminded them that no one was to wear political garb, they said there was no law against it, which was true. They took their time attending to their business and strutting around and finally went away.

I'm not sure how much good these observes are doing. If there's any cheating, it isn't going to happen at the tables where the red, blue and yellow boxes sit. Actually, it happened over the course of the last few months, with virtually all the newspapers reporting negative things about the FMLN and great things about ARENA. At two political rallies in San Salvador the week before, some ruffians, huele-pegas, made a little trouble, and the editorials accused the FMLN of campaigning unfairly. Full-pages full-color spreads about the ARENA rally were balanced with reports of violence at the coalition rally. Dozens of ads for the ARENA party were balanced by one or two for the FMLN, one of which was an explanation that the FMLN had nothing to do with the guys who messed up the rallies.

I wandered around the plaza until about noon, occasionally crossing paths with Peter, who was snapping pictures for purposes he did not yet know. Tim was there, too, with Sean, Sean seemed impatient with me. I wish I had time to talk with him, o rather that he had time to talk with me. But apparently he's somewhat obsessed with saving the bodies and souls of the people of Santa Marta, and gringos only get in the way. Or so it feels to me after just two short encounters with him. I'm actually quite glad he's that way. he and Tim are on their way into San Salvador in Sean's Toyota Land Cruiser. Tim says that's the best way to travel. I say fuck Tim.

I moseyed on down to an eatery which was basically a big roof on poles. Beneath it were large tables, enough for maybe fifty people, and half a dozen wood-fueled griddles. The women at each served the same basic things: beans, tortillas, chicken soup. I had the soup and some tortillas and a bottle of warm orange pop. Soup is always a good bet in a dirty place. It's bound to be delicious and sterile, and indeed in this case it is both. In fact, so far I have not suffered any of the intestinal ailments so rife in this country even though I have yet to be in a place that a person would call clean. When a dogfight breaks out under a nearby table and the diners scatter until it's over, I am only amused. I feel myself at home.

Early afternoon I took a truck back to Santa Marta. Having run out of film, I missed a great shot of all the hands gripping the beam that ran from the front to the back of the truck. Each peasant hand had a finger dyed blue as evidence that they'd voted.

For the two days before the election and the day of the election, the sale of alcohol was prohibited throughout the land except in Santa Marta. When Peter returned in early evening, we went out for a few beers. The lights had gone out for a long time, so nobody had cold beer. We ended up at a house where five other men were drinking. A couple of them were quite drunk. Another was a man distinctly different, though I'm not sure how I knew. It turned out he was Italian and had been living in El Salvador for many years. He was in Santa Marta to oversee the building of the new clinic, which would be done the next morning, several months late. Only in talking to him did I realize that I really did know Spanish, that it was the local's who didn't speak it well. They slur over their consonants and let their vowels leak out the nose, a hillbilly accent, I suppose. their S's have no sibilance. It's also especially hard to understand a drunk and even harder to understand a radio. The radio was announcing election news, and the men were disturbed by what they were hearing. One drunk translated from radio to drunken hillbilly, the Italian translated that to Spanish, and I translated into English for Peter.

As I understood it, the guy on the radio was saying that the government was suddenly prohibiting all release of information about the elections. he said it was the first time in thirty years that he'd seen that happen. The government announcement came after initial reports of fraud in San Salvador and Santa Ana.

The Italian put a European perspective on the election. He said it was absurd to expect everyone to vote in just one day. In Italy they gave you three days. This is good, he said, if, say, you have someone dead in the house, which happened to him. Who can vote on such a day?

So no new news came from the radio. We started talking of other things. I missed most of it because of the language. But then one drunk, a man in his sixties suddenly laid hold of the conversation with two hands reached across the table toward me. Laughing in a phlegmish cackle, he said, "You know there's one thing you can never forget. One thing you can never forget..." His laugh rose in pitch, staggered, hesitated... "It's when the army takes your brother into the quartel and cuts his eyes out. You never forget that. You never forget. You never forget..." He used his fingers to show the slicing motion at his eyes and kept repeating himself until his laughter broke down into the realm of weeping. His friend thumped him on the back and told him to knock it off. The old man slipped into something like a stupor. Later, when the three left, the old man was so drunk he fell down. They had to carry him by his armpits. We had another beer with the Italian, then left.

The next day Marcus told me that the election had been canceled. Apparently twelve percent of the population hadn't been able to vote because the polls closed before everyone got their turn. A lot of names hadn't been on the list of registered voters.

But by the next day, reports had it that the elections hadn't been canceled. I'd either gotten wrong from Marcus or Marcus had gotten it wrong from someone else. At my current understanding (which turned you to be correct), the presidential elections would go on to a second round because neither candidate had gotten half the votes. ARENA took more seats in the legislature but did not hold a majority. ARENA had won in Villa Vitoria. That surprised me. I'd thought we were in solid leftist territory.

This puts the FMLN in a relatively good position. In the runoff election, the minor parties will not participate. Presumably most of the votes will go to the left rather than the right. Though it's doubtful the FMLN will win, there's a certain coup in the embarrassment the government must feel because it is being challenged by an upstart party just barely out of the bush.

Among the most bummed out by the news of ARENA's victory in Villa Vitoria are Brenda and Juanita. They are American physical therapists helping the local women recover from post-traumatic stress which is affecting their physical well being. The norte americanas are helping them get in touch with their physical selves as well as teaching them how venereal disease spreads. Brenda has been here for four years and likes it very much. She lives in a simple, one-room mud-walled house with a dirt floor. Her kitchen is a separate little building just across a path. One of her horses tends to get in there and make a mess. Her bed, made of timber, has two pillows. Her laptop, a Mac, has a 40 meg hard drive. Her big coffee mug says "El Salvador" on it. She's pretty good looking, if you ask me, slender, quick to smile, with ruddy-gray hair. I'd guess she's in her mid- to late forties but has the freckles of a kid. When Peter and I went to talk with her, I came to like her very much. She's very independent and intelligent and has moved beyond the need to find satisfaction in things bought. She likes to ride her two horses. She and Juanita are going to ride down to the Lempa later that day to bathe and picnic. I sure wished I could go. Alas, I barely say anything as Brenda and Peter go on and on about their past lives. She was an audio technician in the U.S., then an English teacher in Japan. He, too, taught in Japan. She's probably in love with his long, wet eyelashes. I am in love with her long, tan legs and intelligence.

I'm also in love with her independence, her shirking of the traditional materialistic values, her disregard for the standards of prettiness that have been foisted off on women - lipstick, plucked eyebrows, fancy clothes. I love her high regard for women as an oppressed race. Hanging beside her door, on the outside, is a sign that reads FMLN vertically, the letters here standing for Frente Mujer Luchadora Nueva.

She has little good to say about the men in town. Without really condemning them all, and she did express respect for certain ones, she referred to the alcoholism of men who don't stay around to raise the children they fathered, men who lack the energy to improve their lives. Women, on the other hand, seem to wok all day, doing everything by hand, including lugging jugs of water from the spigots to home.

One of the most peaceful sounds and beautiful movements are those of a Salvadoran woman forming tortillas. Actually it starts with mushing up soaked corn with a stone roller scraped against a stone slab. The movement is reminiscent of a certain sexual movement, a rocking back and pulling forth, again and again. (Little Margot, Margarita's fourteen-year-old daughter, does this especially well.) The next step is to pat out the tortilla on the hand. The first movement is to squash it between the palms. Then the tricky part: to turn the patty around while forming it into a disk just slightly bigger than the palm. The fingers of one hand have to cross those of the other just so, with one thumb forming the outside contour as the disk forms. Once it gets to a certain size, the woman pats it, giving it a slight turn with each pat. The fingers on the bottom side seem to bend further back than fingers normally would. The soft, gentle, pat-pat-pat is comparable in spirit to the whipping that pigeons and doves make when they take off, or like the tender tunk of a water jug lifted from the head and set down.

Peter and I went down to the school to take some pictures. It isn't much of a building, but the town is happy to have it. The brick walls rise only six feet or so. It's chain link fence from there up to the steel roof. The floor is concrete. Classroom equipment consists of chairs and a vast piece of slate across the front of the room. The teacher in one room is the wife of Margarita's son, the former guerrilla who went to California. The day's history lesson, it so happens, is that historical day when the people of Santa Marta tried to cross the Rio Lempa into Honduras. The blackboard shows the story in a map of pictures - the river, the helicopters sprinkling bombs on the Salvadoran side, the soldiers with machine guns burning houses, more soldiers on the Honduran side, the rope that broke, a dozen stick figures floating in the river, presumably face down.

After four days in Santa Marta it's time to leave. Peter and I arrange to be on the morning truck. Marcus tells us there will be two or three trucks leaving, and any one of them will get us to Villa Vitoria in time to catch the only bus out. Early in the morning, Margarita is feeding me black beans. As usual I'm the only person eating. I've given her more than enough money to feed me for these days, so I don't quite feel guilty, but I have to wonder why I'm always eating alone. In fact, I've never seen the others eat at all. I assume they eat while I'm out, which is most of the day. I'm spooning down the beans when the truck starts honking. Suddenly Marcus is telling me to hurry. It's the only bus leaving Santa Marta that day. I abandon the beans, hug Margarita as much as I can without getting in trouble, shake hands all around, bubbling with gracias upon gracias. I put on my pack and dashed, with Marcus, toward the truck. But a few paces down the road, the top bar of the frame snaps off. The only way to carry it is in my arms. This pack is a remnant from my boy scout days thirty years ago, so I can't complain about quality. Still, I'm depressed, truly depressed, to think that for the rest of my trip I'll have to carry my pack in my arms.

Peter missed the truck, of course, because we'd figured on taking a later one. I couldn't imagine how he'd ever find his way home without the language to explain all that happened. For starters, he'd have to walk to Villa Vitoria or wait for whenever the next truck left. Once I arrived in Villa Vitoria, Marcus told me there was no bus to Sensuntepeque, that I'd have to continue on the truck, another hour standing up and jostling back and forth, up and down.

All the way back to San Salvador, an all-day trip, I worried about how to fix my pack frame. The best Idea I could think of was to hammer a piece of bamboo through the bar and somehow lash it or wire it to the frame.

I booked into the Panamericano again and headed straight for the Orange restaurant. Sonia didn't seem pleased to see me, and the first words from her mouth were inquiring where Pedro was. I explained that he might be back in a few days. I sat drinking beer and writing letters until it occurred to me that I could find a welder and have him weld my pack frame back together. A few minutes later, Peter walked in. He'd caught another truck and followed one bus behind me. In fact, he'd caught a bus in Villa Vitoria and had an easier time than I. I was a bit disappointed to see him so soon. I'd been looking forward to some solitude and a lot of writing.

It took me ten minutes to find a welder, a fellow known as El Gato. I found him sitting on the threshold of the doorway of his little shop, his goggles lifted up to his forehead as he wiped at something with a rag. As soon as I showed him my pack frame, he called his helper and set him to work, said I could come back in a couple of hours. It would cost about $4.00. I felt very good about this. If my frame had broken in the States, of course, I'd have tossed out the frame, wiped my eye and coughed up at least fifty bucks for a new one, a pack that probably wouldn't last long enough to build up a little history and spirit.

El Museo de la Revolución

The next day Peter was off to Guatemala to shoot Antigua in the moonlight on Easter. I decided to go to Perquin to see the Museo de la Revolución. I set out at dawn, again going to Terminal Oriente and taking a series of buses to that far-flung corner of the country, or at least as far as a place can be flung in such a small country.

At San Francisco I misunderstood somebody's instructions and ended up standing there while my bus drove away. I went into the only little eatery around, a place that called itself a cafeteria. The place had five identical plastic tables with plastic benches attached, plastic flowers on the wall, fake tapestry on the walls, a radio playing disco. I asked the girl at the counter if she had good coffee. I was suspicious of the ten-gallon brewer behind he, a sure sign of bad coffee. She said it was good, so I took a seat. She then came forward to mix a cup of instantaneo, which I declined in time to stop he. I had a gaseosa instead, a Fanta. Then I left, preferring to sit on the sidewalk at precisely the spot where the bus was to stop. A nice lady sent her kid over with some little fruits the name of which I wanted very much to remember but could not hold onto for more than five minutes. I sent the kid back with some gum.

Again there was a misunderstanding of destination. I said I wanted to go to Perquin. They said they didn't go there, and off went the bus. Then a lady asked why I hadn't gotten on. She told me that there were no buses to Perquin at all but the one that just left passed close by. I could still catch it if I ran to the next stop. So off I trotted, a long, hard run uphill. I made it just in time but ended up very awkwardly squeezed among a lot of people.

As with my trip to Santa Marta, I had the feeling of leaving civilization farther and farther behind. The roads grew worse, the buses more crowded. For the last half hour, I was hanging onto the ladder that went up the back of the bus to the roof, along with half a dozen other desperate riders. I got off at the turn-off to Perquin, a miserable little intersection that also had a sign pointing to El Mozote, site of the terrible massacre. I thought I'd go to Perquin first. Some people waiting at the intersection told me there was no transportation to El Mozote. I'd have to walk the five kilometers if I wanted to go. They told me Mozote had no restaurant, hotel or electricity, which meant no cold beer, which meant it was not the place to walk to on that particular day. It was already mid-afternoon and very hot.

Somehow these people knew a truck would soon pass on the way to Perquin, so I waited in the shade of a cliff. I asked a man where he'd been during the war. He'd been right there, he said, and in San Salvador. He hadn't fought on the side of the left or the right. he'd stayed in the middle, with God. If a soldier asks him for bread, he gives him bread. If a guerrilla asks him for bread, he gives him bread. He wants to be a friend of everyone. I asked him if the guerrillas had obliged kids to join their ranks. He said that for a while they had, but later they saw that that policy - that was the man's word, "política" - was counter-productive, so they stopped.

A pick-up truck came along and gave me a sturdy, Indian-looking girl and a few other people a few kilometers up the steep road toward Perquin. The girl and I were the only ones to walk the rest of the way, another three or four kilometers uphill. I tried to get he into conversation, but she wouldn't tell me anymore than minimally necessary. She wasn't cold or unfriendly, just not eager to talk, though I doubt she was as out-of-breath as I. Several times she told me we didn't have far to go. My pack was getting a lot heavier than it had been when I left home. I asked her if there was a hotel in Perquin. She said there was. I asked he the name of the evergreens on the side of the road and the big birds circling overhead. The birds were zopilotes, the trees, of course, piños. I asked he who won the elections. FMLN. The only information she volunteered was that a wonderful woman had won the mayorality, a truly remarkable victory in a country like this.

I did not ask this girl to tell me when we passed the hotel, so she let me walk right on by and another kilometer up the road to the center of Perquin. The little town sat atop a mountain. The view was beautiful, the air refreshing. I could see how the government had never been able to oust the guerrillas from this territory. Though the area is only about 3,600 feet above sea level, it seems to think itself much higher. The vegetation is low except for the pine trees. The steep terrain of jagged ridges makes the horizon look impossibly distant. Helicopters might fly in, and indeed they did, but nobody was going to chase anybody very far.

I found the only comedor in town and had their late afternoon left-over beans, rice, tortillas and a hard-boiled egg. Then I walked over to the little plaza in front of the little church, where two gringos a young man and young woman, sat. I asked them if they spoke English. They did, but not much. They were Spaniards. They'd come there to look for work. ¿Look for work? Yes. ¿In El Salvador? ¿In Perquin? Yes. They were agrarian engineers. ¡Oh! They tried to explain to me where the hotel was, but it was kind of complicated because it had no sign, so they walked me down.

Stupid hotel. It was new, but the owners just didn't seem to get what hotels are about. They had two sets of bunk beds in each room. You paid a certain price of the room whether you had one or four people in it, which left it rather expensive for a single person like me. The girl in charge didn't seem to care much whether I stayed there or just dropped dead at her feet. Same dif. It was the only place in town. She had me.

The promised shower was just three tiled stalls at the back of which ran a cistern of clear, cold water. The act of showering was executed with a plastic bowl. The toilets had toilet seats, a rarity south of the Rio Grande, so rare that obviously men didn't know enough to lift them. Despite the luxury, I had to do as I did on all other toilets in Latin America: stand on the rim and squat.

This was also the only place in town that had electricity, but only for a few hours each evening When they started up a horrendously loud generator so that a few light bulbs could be turned on, I was too tired for light. I just wanted to sleep. I drank a little Tico-Tico, a local vodka-like substance, and conked right out until the generator stopped.

The next morning I went to see the Museo de la Revolución. It was closed, and a nearby person thought it might not open because it was the day before Palm Sunday. Since a lot of the museum was outdoors, I climbed over the gate to have a look around. One little memorial honored the dead of El Mozote. Little stands had typed eye-witness accounts in slips of plastic. Here's what one said:

Animals ate them - the dogs, the zopilotes, the canchos, they all ate the dead.

When the soldiers left Mozote, or rather, when the guerrillas ousted them, after the massacre, they sawe the animals walking around with pieces of the dead, eating them, chewing on the bones. There were large ossuaries of the dead. There were distinct skulls of different sizes, the majority of children.

Now there are dead people together with the animals they killed.

Another said:

In that village, for me, was happiness, women and children. Why precisely here? I grabbed a gun and went to kill at first combat. I could take it no more.

Someone with the FMLN's Radio Venceremos reported the following:

How could it be a thousand campesinos? It had to be a mistake of arithmetic. We came expecting to see three compañeros dead but found a thousand or more. On Christmas eve we went on the air with the news.

Other attractions included the crater of a 500 pound bomb, an unexploded bomb of that size, some smaller bombs, some examples of the low, tubular, black sheet plastic pup tents the guerrillas had lived in. Behind one building was the helicopter of Col. --, who had supervised the massacre at Mozote. The sign said, I swear, that it had been shot down with a missile, but an article I later read in The New Yorker said that they'd downed it by letting him capture the transmitter of Radio Venceremos, which had been packed with explosives set off by remote control.

If the museum was to open on the day before Palm Sunday, it would do so only later in the day, so I decided to go look for the new mayor of Perquin, Miriam Ramos.

I readily found her house and clapped a few times at the door to announce myself. A kid came to the door and soon returned with his mother, a slender woman of humble gesture and stance. She invited me right in and sat me down in her living room, which had no furniture besides the chair she sat me in and the one she brought for herself.

She didn't have much time. She was getting her four kids of to church and she herself had to catch a ride into San Salvador to see about some contributions to the town health clinic. As I took her picture and scribbled notes in two languages - I tend to write in the language I hear, but, not knowing Spanish too well, I wobble - she told me her story. she speaks quietly but confidently, answering questions in intelligent directed detail.

Miriam Ramos had been with the frente all during the war but never as an armed fighter. She'd been an organize, keeping life livable in Perquin while it was cut off from the rest of the country. At least once the army had bombed the place. She started an organization of women to improve their lives and to help them help the town.

During the election she was concurrently confident of victory and concerned about he well being. In past elections, leftists tended to bleed to death before they could receive votes. But this time, there was no violence. She received one threat, but it came to nothing.

Now she's in charge of a small town on the top of a medium-sized mountain. The town has little or no electricity -it does have street lights, but I never saw them lit - and is controlled by a party which the government party has no interest in helping. ARENA would like to use the next three years to prove that the FMLN is incapable of governing. The FMLN has three years to prove it is no longer the party of destruction, which is what they specialized in for ten years, at least as far as the people in the capital could see. Miriam's biggest challenges are to find a way to provide schooling to the several small villages in the region, which have no potable water, no roads leading to them, no schools and no electricity.

Alas we do not have enough time for a real interview. She has to get her kids off to church, herself off to San Salvador. I won't be able to write the article I'd hoped to write, but I come away satisfied to have been able to interview someone in Spanish and to have met an intelligent and beautiful woman who is going to apply motherly love to a town that needs it.

The museum opened a little later. A bunch of Salvadoran tourists and I followed a guided tour through the buildings. They showed the different kinds of homemade mines and bombs the guerrillas had used, the pathetically toy-like rifles. Their telephone system was built of Radio Shack intercoms connected by kilometers of wire.

Down the road I found the unexpected but thoroughly predictable: the FMLN crafts shop. I passed up a chance to buy a Che Guevara tie tack but couldn't resist the FMLN Key Chain, a pad of wood painted with a voting ballot that showed how to check the right party.

Zacatecaluca

Worried about making it to the airport three days hence, I retrieved my pack from the hotel and went to wait for a supposed bus. Although I could have driven from there to the airport in a matter of hours, the trip threatened to be a complicated one, rife with possible obstacles. First of all, I wasn't sure if there really was going to be a bus down to San Francisco, where I'd have to get another bus to San Miguel, which I hoped would have a bus to Zacatecaluca. I've learned not to trust people's word or anybody's bus. I wasn't sure when the last bus left San Miguel for Zacatecaluca, which was within striking distance of the airport. Since I was starting this trip on a Saturday and buses might not run on Sunday and I had to be near the airport on Monday morning, I had to be on my way early Saturday. Still, I don't know why I didn't go see Mozote, having come so close to it. I guess I thought I'd feel uncomfortable wandering around looking for signs of slaughter. I also thought it would be a long 5-K walk into the place, then 5-K back out again, then a long wait for a bus which I had no idea would even pass by that day. Perquin is near the end of the line. A bus would have no reason to go beyond that.

The bus, filled to the gills with peasants, crops, fowl and firewood, was over an hour late because of mechanical problems, but it did get me to the turn-of into San Miguel, where I had to get a city bus to the terminal. A nice kid made sure I got onto the right bus and off at the right place.

The bus to Zacatecaluca was easy to find, and I got a seat on the floor in an open space in back behind all the seats, back with a lot of very poor people and their market goods. One of the people was a person of considerable brain damage, I guess, who had no teeth and seemed to have his tongue in a knot. He couldn't talk and seemed even to have trouble breathing. About all he knew how to do was hold his hand out for a coin, which I readily gave him. Other people who got on the bus seemed to know him. They kept telling him to sit down. People with no money to spare handed him a little something.

I was sitting on my pack, a relatively comfortable place, down low enough to stay out of the clutch of passengers higher up. Soon someone set a two-year-old girl next to me. I got to hold her steady for a long time. It was nice to have my arm around her back. Then a father got on with a one-year-old in shiny black shoes. He was standing, so I offered to hold the baby. That felt good, too. The little guy sat on my knee the whole way. I got to hold his head up against my cheek and smell his sweet, clean hair. He fell asleep against me. A puddle of sweat built up between us. I was so, so happy and content to be holding these two little kids. Making the trip perfect, the cobrador failed to see me down there buried under so many people, so I got the forty-cent ride for free.

In Zacatecaluca, the little girl's 11-year-old brother led me around the corner to grubbiest hotel I've ever been in. The price was 30 colones per hour or 60 for the night. The owner of the place seemed just the sort of person you'd find in a cheap hotel on a tropical shore. He had a hammock strung up in his room, and he didn't bother to rise from it as I negotiated the room. He just pointed to the key on the wall.

Until this moment, I'd never seen a hotel that had the toilet paper roll right over the bed instead of in the bathroom. The floor is sticky. The toilet, five feet from the bed, leaks at the base, spreading a puddle to the shower drain. The shower is just a three-inch stub of pipe sticking from the wall. It takes two hands to turn the knob, and not much water comes out. You have to lean against the wall to get under it, and it's had not to stand in the toilet puddle. The room actually came with a white towel, but it has faint yellow stains on it. The sink is down extra low so a short guy could wash himself without getting up on his tippy-toes. The heavy steel door, scorching hot in the setting sun, has a peep-hole door within in. Tiny ants scour the wall and floor. Wondering if the bed perchance had clean sheets, I lifted the raggedy blanket. No sheets at all. When I lie down on the blanket, I sense myself besieged by minute bugs. The germs in the air are palpable.

So I didn't hang out there very much. Instead, I did what I like to do best: go out with a pad of paper and a pen and go drink beer in a bar or two while I write letters. I found a reasonably good place and settled in until a drunk kid came over and tried to start a conversation. He knew two words in English: yes and please, and he wanted to talk. He cold barely utter real words, and his attempts were studded with hiccups. He had trouble holding onto his little plastic cup of clear liquid. He took tremendous attempts at my unwillingness to converse with him about whatever it was he was trying to talk about. I think his mother owned the place, so there was no getting rid of him, so I left. I found another place and set up at a nice big table in a corner in the back under a poster of a bimbo standing in surf and wearing a wet T-shirt with the Alka-seltzer logo on it. Soon a big fat drunk came along and said, "Neil Diamond." That's all: Neil Diamond. I think he wanted to talk about it, but his drunkenness, like that of the fellow in the previous bar, was a one-way street. Nothing went in his direction. Fortunately a big, strong bouncer-type came over and suggested the drunk go sit where he'd been. The fellow simply got up and did it.

Enjoying mugs of beer and bocas of fried salami, I wrote down some story titles. a Reason to Drink Warm Beer. Vultures over the Cathedral. F22. The Realm of Weep.

Back at the hotel, the night is not an easy one. I have to burn pieces of green repellent to keep the mosquitoes away, but they never go far. When the pieces go out, the mosquitoes return. I slap myself in the ear a couple of times, then light up another piece.

The next day was Domingo dos Ramos, Palm Sunday, which called for a parade. First came the religious aspect of the day, some typical Catholic stuff. Choir-boy types held a rectangle of rope inside which walked the faithful and their Catholic accouterments. Two boys in white gowns carry a bier bearing a car battery and a small amplifier. Another carries a tall pole with something significant up top. Another boy, in jeans and red shirt, sings into a microphone that is connected to the battery on the bier. Some of the crowd sings along, but only quietly.

Behind the religious comes a 12-man military band playing battle-weary drums and brass. After the religious contingent sings a hymn or something, the military band plays a march. I don't know if anyone else sees significance in this. The audience seems to pay more attention to the religious half than its followers. One little girl, however, runs into the parade to grab hold of the pocket of her father, a tuba player. She marches along with him in her pretty purple and white dress, pigeon-toed in patent leather shoes and smiling, smiling, smiling. Up ahead, somebody sets off a little rocket. It leaves with an invisible whoosh, then bursts in a little smear of brown in the baby blue sky.

Later, in the Santa Lucia cathedral, among a dozen or so faithful, I am accosted by a pleasant-looking woman and her pleasant-looking daughter. The girl, her chin on her arm on the back of the wooden slat pew in front of me, maintains constant eye contact. She does it so steadily that I suspect she is following orders. The mother yammers on, but I can't understand her. I ask the girl her name. It's Iracema. I ask her age. Eleven. And don't you know...it's her birthday. Son of a gun! What a coincidence that I happened to ask. And they're having a little party at their house and wouldn't I like to help them out?

I don't answer them. I just look at them, first at the mother, then at Iracema, then the mother again. I hate this. They were befriending me to hit me up. How did I suspect this so accurately so early on? I say little after that. The mother asks me a couple of questions she'd already asked. The girl runs off. The mother finally excuses herself. The Cathedral fills with the rattley drone of prayer and response issued over a loudspeaker. On the stone floor, a tiny, dry, red flower blossom, small as a bug, scoots bit by bit in a breeze from the altar toward the door.

The circus is in town! Or just outside of town, just beyond the soccer field, beyond the streetlights. It's a very low budget affair consisting of a small striped tent and rickety bleachers. A couple hundred people could fit inside, but only a few dozen show up. Even with that many the bleachers are dangerous. They're made of planks set, unfixed, on a metal frame. A fat guy could break one. A nervous kid could knock one down. I try to keep to a seat by myself.

First up, la Princesa del Circo. She looks no older than nine, though the tautness of her little body may be a result of her profession. She could be ten, or eight - in either case, younger than most death-defying acrobats. She works a revolving ladder. If the mechanisms of the ladder are in the same condition as the tent above, she is more courageous than the audience can imagine.

The announcer removes her little royal red cape. The little scamp takes a few bows and yanks her emerald green two-piece bathing suit out of her crack. She can't reach the ladder in its horizontal position - the axle is a good ten feet from the ground - so the announcer calls for an audience member to come help. A young clown, maybe 12 years old, volunteers. He climbs a rope that supports the ladder structure, then, with a scream of fear, swings down and hops off. The Princesa hops on and scampers up to the point where the ladder begins to spin. Round and round it goes! The little girl is quick to slide up and down to keep it going. Eventually the clown climbs on, confusing the matter. It tilts one way, then the other. While he clowns around at one end of the ladder in horizontal position, the Princesa has to slide forward and back to keep it balanced. She grips the ladder with arms and legs. At half the boy's weight, she has to be terribly quick. Her muscles are taut the whole time, but she never loses cadence on her chewing gum and has plenty of slow moments when she can reach back and yank on her bathing suit. The clown turns out to be the real star of the show. The Princesa is just a counterbalance. But what a job! Ten years old and she's a death-defying acrobat in a circus! I wonder if she likes this. I wonder how it is.

Among the motley crew is a very feminine transvestite. When I'd first stopped by the circus to see what time it started, he sauntered out of the tent so slow and smooth I thought he was a girl. He was wearing two earrings and tight jeans and blouse open to the second button. He asked what he could do for me.

His role in the circus is to join the fat announcer in a transvestite song or two. The fat announcer, of course, looks ridiculous ins woman's clothing, but the other guy struts and postures and does a really fine job. I bet a lot of the audience can't tell or isn't sure.

Peter Grant (the Australian) had told me that trouble always starts at the end of things. Since the circus gets pretty dull after the Princesa's act - after that, it's just clowns slapping each other around and telling jokes I don't get - I decide to slip out before anyone gets prepared to follow me. Also, in the morning, I have to get up before dawn to catch a bus to a certain fork in the road from which I hope to hitch a ride into the airport, where I hope to get a plane to Miami instead of Mexico City, and from there change flights in Washington to get a plane to New York, where I can get a bus into Manhattan, from where I can get a train to Stamford, where I can get the AmTrak to New London, from where I can hitch-hike the thirty or so miles to home, which won't be too easy by that time of night.

It's a long, dark hustle from the circus to the nearest street light. No one kills me. They don't even try. I wander down streets I haven't wandered down before. I'm not worried about thieves as long as I've escaped the dark loneliness of the circus area, where they could have been waiting to ambush me. It's very quiet among the low, plastered, one-story houses. The streets are dusty except where mysterious trickles curl among the cobblestones and patches of asphalt. Just as everywhere else in the country, the air smells of urine either distant or close. Most people are either asleep or watching TV. When I get back to my hotel, the door is locked. I have to bang and bang. A drunk comes along and takes a leak not ten feet from me. Another joins him. They both sway as they empty their very full tanks. Their two moonlit trickles, black as blood, converge to snake around the cobblestones. Finally the door opens. I'm home.

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