The Problems I Don´t Have on Monday in San Salvador

On Mondays all the museums are closed, so I headed off for El Boqueron, a park inside a volcano outside of town. I caught the first bus, route 101D on Bulevar de los Heroes, the wide street with a mall and a KFC and several Mister Donuts. El Salvador is where old US school buses go to live again. They are painted bright colors and often still have the signs in English: ¨You must stay behind the white line.¨ Anywhere in town costs 20 cents. I was supposed to transfer to the 103 at the second park in Santa Tecla. There are no signs for the bus stops. Signs are for strangers. Everyone here seems to operate by instinct. They congregate on the side of the road and moments later a bus comes. A man told me to get off where there was no park, but no bus came. Someone else told me, at the stoplight. No bus. Around the corner, said another. Eventually, I found the second park. People were selling yucca tostada, four apples in a plastic bag, medicamentos of dubious benefit. Here, here, the bus will come, they said. I waited an hour, got stung by a bee. The 103 finally came, but did not stop. I ran after it, hoping it would get caught it traffic. But I lost it around a corner. Here, here someone else said. I did not believe them. I began walking away from the park, my hand swelling from the bee. And that´s when, under the large gray trees, without a plan, I remembered: I have no problems. I was not late for work. I had no chores to do or conflicts to work out with my housemates or essays to grade. I felt a sense of peace.

I went instead to El Arbol de Dios, which houses paintings by Frank Llort. He paints a world where nature and people and the things people make are all equal in size and bright color. He paints a Salvadoran sliver of the Kingdom of God.

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That evening, I finally began meeting people. I met Sal who is Salvadoran but a naturalized citizen of the US. He came to the States in 1980 at the start of the war, and now estimates the cost of tree trimmings for rich people in San Jose. He has returned to San Salvador to get a divorce.

I met Alfredo, who works the night shift at Jimena´s Guest House, where I am staying. He was in the army for two years, but is too young to have fought in the war. He says he wishes he had fought because war is full of passion and heats the blood.

I met Juan, a cook at the Cafe de ¨T.¨ He used to be an ecology student at the university but he couldn´t afford to continue so now he is learning to make delicious meals. He is part of a Christian community in the city called Ruta 3:16. I may visit them on Sunday.

I met a man whose name I can´t remember; he lives in New York but is originally from of Grenada. He says he once biked around the whole island in eight hours. He told me I should visit Grenada, but only for one day. He said if I went for three days I would spend all three of them on the beach. I didn´t think that sounded bad.

El Salvador and the World

The land here is as beautiful as my Salvadoran neighbor said. I saw it first from the airplane, a dark brown punctuated by volcanos. (The earth has its own occasions of violence, from which mountains are made.) The dark brown earth turned dark green as we descended. It turned into uneven clumbs of leaves and unraveled into Pacific blue. Then the leaves belonged to trees, some of them with gray trunks so thick I could not have gotten my arms around them had my arms been twice as long. On the highway, two cars out of three were crumpled and beltching thick black clouds. Billboards every 100 feet announced that you could buy whatever you wanted on ebay or that the bank HSBC was ¨El Salvador and the world.¨ Shacks made of corrogated tin walled in the road. People went in and out of them and walked beside the traffic.

My first stop was in Juayua, a village in the mountains about an hour and a half from the capital. There were very few other tourists. I had the dorm at Hotel El Mirador to myself. The buildings, like most in El Salvador, were made of cinder blocks painted bright colors. The few roads seemed to lead straight into the mountains; on either side stood canopies where people sold clothes, shoes, crafts, fruit, bread. The trees in la plaza were painted white halfway up their trunks. They surrounded a fountain with a blue bottom.

Juayua holds a food fair in the afternoons on weekends. People grill exotic meats under outdoor canopies. In a basket on display at one of the canopies was a skinned frog corpse with its limbs splayed one in each direction. When I ordered rana a la plancha, the woman wordlessly picked up the frog body with tonges and threw it on the grill. The grill hissed obediently. It was good. More tender than chicken.

Besides frog, the highlight of Juayua was a trip to las cascadas, the waterfalls. They were beautiful, but not spectacular. The exciting part was getting there by mototaxi along a hilly dirt road with deep crevices. I had to brace myself to the seat to keep from hitting my head on the ceiling or my knee on the bar infront of me.

After Juayua, I went to the Barra de Cobana on the recommendation of Manuel, the manager of Hotel El Mirador. It was a tiny, dirty beach town full of Salvadoran families. The water was warm. I kept telling myself it was the Pacific. And so it was: blue liquid out to the sky. I stood in the arch of the waves and let them wash me to the sand. Fat grains stuck to my skin.

I went back to my room: heat, high white walls, and a matress. No shower. I used the bottom of a two litter soda bottle to pour water from a communal sink over my head, arms, legs, feet. Then I tried to walk through the town. But there wasn´t one. I had seen it all from the beach, just a few open-air restaurantes. I was the only tourist. Everyone else was walking arm in arm or calling to their children. I could not stay, not even one night, in Barra de Cobana. I caught the next bus to San Salvador.