Dark air rushes through the bus window, melted cheese, bean paste, seedy brothels, cheap beer. Permanent sign on the wall, "Girls over 18 needed. FREE FOOD!" This is one of the dangerous places, we should sit in the middle of the bus. And I am always safely tucked next to the window, blasted by exhaust, music pounding, music that beats your heart to its own rhythm.
This is one of the dangerous places, with music that threatens to make your heart skip tracks. After a moment of silence or intense sound, I may find myself back in the same song, a few seconds on. Or I may find myself in a new song entirely. One brimming with the acuteness of immediate life and death. Maybe when your death walks close beside you, its shadow makes life the brighter. All jokes here are about death, the way the closer you are to a friend, the more pointedly you jest them, the more honest your jokes become.
Death is close here. Danny explains the shadows it casts, translates through the haze of my pointless phrasebook Spanish. She lost her brother to the gangs this spring. Those guys, they're cool. But their brother got mixed up with some bad characters and disappeared a few years ago. The guy in the hammock who painfully blinks swilling out of his eye has just survived meningitis. I was out of my body, he tells us, I heard voices calling. I came back.
It sounds like you still have something to live for, Danny says.
After years working here, Danny knows many of their stories. The adults shake his hand, smile. ¿Daniel, qué tal? The children, less restrainted, flying and hooting like winged monkeys to latch on to his shoulders, waist, legs, ankles. ¡Buuuuurrrriiidge! Or the cool pass of the Salvadoran fist bump from the boys. These teenage boys are the focus of the open school at La Chacra Parish. When families are fractured and traditional role models -- parents, police, professors, politicians -- are absent or fight against you, it is no surprise that teens search for identiy, community, and safety in gangs. The open school is trying to rebuild something from the foundations of community still standing after the civil war.
And the people of the parish that we meet radiate the feeling of community. (Or so it seems through my rose-colored glasses, my sunglasses stowed away to leave my eyes open and uncovered. Look honest, look friendly. Try to look bad-ass and you might get shot.) This sense of belonging is what I have missed since leaving the intentional communities in England. I have been here less than a day and already a group of girls detatch themselves from Danny to throw their arms around my waist. Through curious gazes, the women assess me honestly. Pretty, you could almost be Latina. Nice eyes. Voice like gravel. Incomprehensible Spanish. But open. I feel a rhetorical nod of approval.
They return to frying pupusas or plantanes, children chase a hard plastic ball along the abandoned train track. The human and animal smells swirl within a thickening of the air, a dense network of ties among people that wraps like a hammock around the stacked buildings, swaying in the motion of so many lives.
I wonder if I am the sensitive one, seeing community everywhere here because it is what I am searching for. Why do I find community in a place so grasping for family and community that children turn to the family of guns? Is the gringo life, the American dream, so devoid of extended human connection that even this small gossamer community can draw me in, fill that space? Or is it the Salvadorans who are sensitive, so dependent on the human web that a few broken strands can lead to systemic failure?
Or maybe it is not related so much to country as to condition. My cynic's lenses see the web of the "American dream" attached at many material points, the
stuff on which we build our lives. Break a strand and I will buy you a new one. This web is resiliant, but perpetually lonely.
Then there are webs entangled in the human experience, each line tying one life to another. When something (i.e. the war in El Salvador) tears through these life-lines, the whole ephemeral structure tumbles in on itself. Those at the center draw closer together, but those at the fringe are left dangling, grasping at that breeze of passing lives for what once connected them to the world.
And what can I do? Where do I fit? My song is playing with motifs of family, stability, and security. I could play out my life this way. Why give up these things to drown in the flood of "what could be done"? In San Salvador, each street needs a year to be cleaned, each river a lifetime. Each life needs something I almost certainly cannot give. But I tremble when I think of an indefinite return to my secure, and isolated, steel web.
My time in El Salvador must be a journey of balance. My current song is not yet over, and I do not think I am ready for a drastic skip in the record. But I can allow a change in the rhythm as a new motif takes shape. My heart skips a beat and returns with a side of salsa.
¿Quién dijo que todo está perdido? Yo vengo a ofrecer mi corazón.
Who said all is lost? I have come to offer my heart.
-Fito Paez(?)
With love,
Lys
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