William Archila

As I punch the time-clock, I know men will be gunned down at dawn in a distant continent, someone will dart into a café with a bomb nestled in the belly, by the roadside a woman will moan over the body of a man, shrunken, stretched on the earth, that God will finger the forehead of a dying country, all of it funneled through the news on TV. But tonight, instead of tuning in, I’m going to kneel beside the window, recognize myself in the croak of the crow, high above the black tree of winter, claws hooked and rough, wings swept back and hunched, face masked with exhaust. I’m going to try, even if I fail, to see myself whole, complete in the cry, in the beak of the crow.

The ground cracked like the rough pit of a peach and snapped in two. The sun behind the mountains turned into an olive-green glow. To niña Gloria this was home. She continued to sell her bowl of lemons, rubbing a cold, thin silver Christ pocketed in her apron. Others like Lito and Marvin played soldiers in the ruins of a school, running around mounds of bricks, shooting chickens and pigs. No one knows exactly how a light film of ash appeared on everyone’s eyelids early in the morning or how trout and mackerel plunged from the sky, twitched, leaped through the streets. Some say the skin of trees felt like old newspaper, dry and yellow. Others believe the soapsuds washed aside in rivers began to rise in their milk. One Monday morning, a rain fell and the cemetery washed into the city. Bones began to knock and knock at our doors. Streets became muddy rivers waiting for bodies to drop among piles of dead fish. In a year, everyone stabbed flowers on a grave. This explains why women thought and moved like lizards under stones, why men heard bees buzzing inside their skulls, why dogs lost their sense of smell sniffing piles of rubble to get back home. In a few years, no one cared about turtles banging their heads against rocks, bulls with their sad, busted eyes, parrots that kept diving into creeks, the dark swelling of the open ground or at night a knife stained the kitchen cloth. Instead, niña Gloria swept the ground, the broom licking her feet at each stroke. At the bus station, Marvin shined military boots, twenty-five cents a pair, reduced his words to a spit, a splutter of broken sentences on shoe polish, leather. In the evenings, he counted coins he’d tossed in a jar, then walked home, one step closer to the cracked bone clenched in the yellow jaw of a dog.

On the Pan American Highway, somewhere between the north and south continent, you come across a chain of volcanoes, a coast with a thick growth of palm trees, crunching waves of the sea; an isthmus Neruda called “slender earth like a whip.” When the road bends, turns into a street, the walls splattered with “Yanqui Go Home!!!” you see a boy fifteen years old, barefoot, sniffing glue in a small plastic bag. An old woman in an apron will step out, say, “This is the right street.” In the public square, there will be no friend from school to welcome you, no drive to Sonsonate, city of coconuts, no one to order cold Pilseners, oyster cocktails, or convince the waitress into dancing a cumbia or two with you. Instead, at the local bar, you’ll raise a bottle next to strangers, stub your cigarette out on the floor. You’ll watch a country ten years after the civil war: an old man sitting on the curb, head between knees, open hand stretched out. Everything will hurt, your hair, your toenails, even your shoes. You’ll curse dusty streets, demented sun slowly burning the nape of your neck, stray dogs following you to the park. By nightfall, you drag yourself back to the bars, looking for a lost country in a shot of Tíc Táck. Against the wall, three men with their guitars. When you lie on a hotel bed, too tired to sleep, when you feel torn, twisted like an old newspaper, blown from city to city, you have reached the place. You have begun to speak like a man by the side of the road, barefoot.