32 years later, connect wires, close cycles

This summer vacation trip has been more than just a stress relief. Not only for me, it has been for the rest of my family who accompanied me.

Sometimes the analogy that the threads connect seems to be so real that there is no time for reflection. The summer heat and the desire to go bathe in the river cut the melancholy of the “Right here it was“For a while, but after almost five hours of travel, lying in a hammock, I was able to find the stream Immediate, at the exact pixel almost with the precision that alone Plex.Earth can do it.

This was the place where I was born, and I spent my early childhood years. Half of what he knew and believed was magic; so much so that sometimes I thought it never happened:

• The mañanitas going up to the potrerito where my father milked the cows; we took foam from the milk bucket using a guava leaf. In the background the mistiricuco was still singing a plaintive moan about the hen that could not be eaten at night and the love affairs that he lost at dawn.
• Then I would eat some corn tortillas, fresh, hot, split on a plate of fresh milk. A little salt gave them an incredible flavor ... although when I tell it my children see me again with a downcast eye.
• My dad's waiters used to come for lunch at noon; one of them was don Jerónimo (Chombo), the most boisterous. They killed a hen, they cut its neck there by the pile and there was no lack of “More tortillas for white dona“. Right in that corridor they put a long table for them, before it had an absurd green railing that took away the taste of the clean whitewashed walls.
• And in the afternoon Aunt Leda's cousins ​​would come to play; Materinerero in a coming and going, then they sang one that made me shudder with fear "Doñana is not here, he is in his garden.…” this when the premiums came. And when Wil came we would play top in the patio, or cashew nuts in a hole under the Tamarindo... until we couldn't see anymore because of the darkness and when the guacos suddenly started singing by the side of the door.

I would go to school in the morning, we would leave very early and with almost an hour of walking uphill to the town called La Laguna we would arrive. Half day of school with black chalkboard painted on the wall and handmade pad eraser. The return was faster because we were coming down the hill, shouting and running with friends who had been staying at their houses from where Don Toño Blanco until we crossed the ravine where Wil said goodbye. And that's how we got home. A couple of tortillas with beans and butter were lunch; The rest of the afternoon was to go to bring the cows that grazed in the Plan del Castaño, we bathed totally naked for a while in the La Cachirula pool and then we went up the slope with the cows to La Sabaneta.

This at the school was a consequence of the death of the grandfather, who installed a free school in that place that worked in the morning and where children from nearby towns did their sixth grade for free. In the afternoon, his clinic was operating, where people attended to receive services from the only doctor in hundreds of kilometers around.

The grandfather connection was rather strange. Most of my cousins ​​studied with him, and the unpublished story "El Cuco" tells that some patients with distance died on the way or had already healed when they arrived, and did not return just out of curiosity to meet a doctor from truth. On the way back they were surprised to find out that he didn't get paid and the reprimand for not having sent their children to school this year.

Then came the civil war and abruptly the thread snapped to what I thought I understood my short eight years. It all started when the first group of subversives passed by, with green backpacks on their backs and olive green caps; two of them with beards that gave them away as Cubans, Nicaraguans, or fans of that style; although in my opinion it was just a group of idiots. They took my father's 22 rifle, the stag bone handle dagger and they left that feeling of being on a list with which we rarely communed.

From there shots and bombs rang out everywhere, at all hours of the day, but it got worse in the afternoon when the planes bombed the hamlets of El Tule, Las Raíces and the caves of El Burillo. Suddenly, every day, from all the villages on the banks of the Araute River, refugees came to the house, their husbands and children had joined the Farabundo Martí guerrilla. The mothers seemed unhinged, with tangled hair, some with barely a sandal, looking out the windows at what time the guard would arrive to kill them.

We lived a stress fighting our toys with flocks of children who came every day, who smelled strange, spoke little and cried almost for everything. Then they left, leaving a dog and suitcases in the barn with a promise to return.

In the end there were so many dogs that my mother managed to give them poison with the excuse of avoiding a rabies epidemic. But the truth is that there was no longer food even for us, with so many other people's mouths to feed, with so much war tax to pay; my mother ended up making almost a quintal of tortillas every day to feed the camp above the house, in front of Nance's tree.

It has been interesting to travel this same path, with 40 years in my gray hair. After reading the book Siete Gorriones and seeing that I was about to be part of the El Rosario massacre while We would flee to Honduras, many things make sense. The story connects, with another perspective. People understood such absurd things as that war might not happen but that it was also inevitable. At the end between the lines they identify that it was a fight between the poor, while the leaders now outside the country are millionaires and owners of banking emporiums; while in the mountains it is impossible to return because the roads were lost.

In my view of listening to what those who stayed there think, I have spoken with many people who are now no longer afraid to tell reality. I have been able to go to the museum of the revolution, where I hear the voice of a guide who was a guerrilla since he was 12 years old ... history has another meaning, that of own suffering.

It is no longer worth my selfish perception of why they took away the yard where I played marbles, or why they took my father's cows without asking permission.

When you hear the version of someone who never had anything except the dream of fighting. Convinced that the armed struggle did not leave him much, except the pride of having fought for an ideal. You realize that human beings are intense in everything we do. For some heroes, for others cursed ... as divine as we are human.

The feelings intersect ... I regret the cousin 7 that I lost, the 4 uncles, and other distant family 6.

He regrets losing his only 3 siblings, his dad, and more than 11 close relatives. He regrets that his sister was paralyzed from a bullet in the skull, that his uncle is disabled by stepping on a mine, that four of them could not even bury them because their grave does not appear, that his uncle's two children have been skewered in the air with the dagger of a bayonet and that their older cousins, barely 10 and 12 years old, have been raped before being murdered. Then, he tells one by one how his friends, comrades in the militia died ... on the slopes of the Volcancillo, in the Cerro

Perquín, on the descent of Ojos de Agua, on the slope of Azacualpa, in Chorreritas, in the church of El Rosario, on Pando Hill, at the Crossing of Meanguera, in La Guacamaya, there in San Vicente, in Usulután ...

That's how exciting our life is. As the years go by, our memory automatically defragments and sends bad flavors to the background. Then it brings out the best moments and chains them in a string that comes out to remind us that it was only like that. Already optimized in standards, it returns every time we lean back in a hammock, bringing to mind scenes that seem to be part of a story, and mixes them with the happiness that those who are close to us now produce.

With the difference that 32 years later, there are no differences.

• I was a privileged person whom he hated. Time gave me progressive roots until I switched engineering for a social career.
• He, a renegade willing to die for his cause. Now aware that he is a survivor for something more than a miracle.

That's how healthy it is to connect threads with the past, forget grudges and close cycles. Doing the math, there are more lessons behind this place ...

By the way, the place is called Zatoca. How ZatocaConnect