“THE HORSE OF SOY” By Payín Imendia.

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Strambotic readings from the Mayan Bible to the Spanish Civil War…

A CHRISTMAS GIFT for my English speaking FaceBook FRIENDS...

This is the FIRST EDITION of Libro 1 of my novel “El Caballo de Soya” trilogy. It is about 50 pages shorter than the SECOND EDITION IN SPANISH, but it remains central to the original LIBRO 1.

I WILL BE PUBLISHING CHAPTER BY CHAPTER during this month of December as a gift to those who speak English or have friends and relatives who only read in English.

It is an in-depth treatise of some aspects of El Salvador, mainly its cosmogonic pre-Columbian back ground; a few strokes of its pre-civil war rural life, and that of the Spanish Civil War to draw a communicating vessel with our character as a nation: a blend of the magical indigenous culture and the aggressive stubborn Spanish character.

This English first edition of Book 1 will be completed next year as soon as the remaining 2 books of the trilogy in Spanish be finished (Book 1 in Spanish is in Amazon in digital, Book 2 is finished and Book 3 is half way)

THE FIRST PART in English has 4 Chapters and is the MOST DENSE reading of the whole book. I´m sure that at least a handful of seasoned readers interested in El Salvador and Meso América cosmogony will go the whole distance.

(I´m including an illustration of the Meso American Cosmogony that is part of the LIBRO 1, so it will assist you in understanding better this complicated set of gods and goddesses)

Hope you enjoy it and have a nice and relax reading on this Holiday Season…

               “THE HORSE OF SOY”

                                         By Payín Imendia

              A MESOAMERICAN SAGA in three books

                                                 (ALL RIGHTS RESERVED)

THE ANIMAL LIBERATION MOVEMENT HAS BEEN MYSTERIOUSLY PENETRATED AND A HIDDEN AGENDA HAS STARTED TO EMERGE. BEGINNING IN 2012 A WORLDWIDE CONSPIRACY IS HATCHED, ONE WITH POWER BOTH ANCIENT AND EVIL, OBSESSED WITH DOMINATING AND ALTERING CIVILIZATION AS WE KNOW IT. THE KEY TO SALVATION LIES IN THE COSMIC MYSTERY OF THE PLUMED SERPENT, AND THE LEAST LIKELY OF MEN WILL BE CHARGED WITH FINDING IT.

 Preface

What I am going to narrate herein is a tale drawn from the recordings, notes, books and documents inherited from my grandfather, Chepe Soya, a peasant who showed up on the doorstep of a small hacienda in Eastern El Salvador on December 21, 1960. He was found playing on a straw mat with a “Deer’s Eye” charm hanging from his wrist, tied with a red ribbon. At the time neither he nor anyone else knew that on his shoulders rested a strange mission that would become an odyssey and which would see him emigrate first towards the North, and later back towards the South ina relentless search for his grand destiny.

It took me several years to read, analyze and listen to all the material that he left me, material which I was finally able to organize into three books which would make for easier reading. Some will be more interested in his story than others but there will be many who will get caught up in my grandfather’s story enough to want to follow it to the end.

The path which these old documents map out is marked along the way by the dawn of the Pre-Columbian era of Mesoamerica, winding throughout many years and traversing some of the most dramatic scenes the world has seen, from Central America and Europe, through the United States, Panamá and Colombia, only to end up back in El Salvador.

On his odyssey, my grandfather would depart from El Salvador and follow the “Route of Death” across Mexico, where millions of Central Americans faced horror, terror and abuse at every step of the way, until they arrived at the United States border. There in that Arizona desert, so cruel and fateful for hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants, my grandfather was immersed in a magical dimension that would lead him to comprehend with shamanic claritythe conspiracy of a race of men, without mouths or faces, who from the remote and ancient Netherworld attempt to destroy the human race, together with the animals that aid in their survival. This dark power is esconced behind the least likely of masks and the unexpected outcome of the conspiracy will transpire in the most mythical of regions.

Many of the events, situations and characters mentioned by my grandfather are to be found in history as written by men themselves. Other events belong to that fantastical dimension within which he had to confront the machinations and the onslaught of a force as ancient as it is evil. Any similarity between the two dimensions is purely coincidental and if any dispute were to arise, you could go looking for him so he could respond and clarify. This is a good moment for a caveat and that is that my grandfather has been living in a parrallel universe for several centuries.

Sebastián de Soya

May 13, 2044

                              BOOK 1

Of how began the age-old conspiracy which currently, in 2044, has the world on the verge of chaos and of how my grandfather was born and raised to become its unexpected adversary.

In this Book One we must reach back as far as the Quiche Maya cosmogony and allow them to recite their epic poem about the creation of man and natural order. Here the Mayan Bible begins with the legend of a beautiful mountain range which was visited centuries ago by beings from another galaxy, and which is alleged to be the birthplace of all the Mesoamerican civilizations. This mythical range is in El Salvador and it is in one of its most delightful rural places, where my grandfather spent the simple and primal early years of his life.

Unexpectedly, his cosmic path is going to take him to the ovens and kneading troughs of a famous San Salvador bakery, which will aquaint him with the intimacies and the history of an excentric and wealthy Salvadoran family of Spanish, German and Indigenous roots. Along the way he will have to re-create the dramatic scenes where this history was forged, and finally it will be with this family that my venerable ancestor’s extraordinary destiny will be cast.

 PART ONE 

The Origins of the conspiracy

“But they could not understand each other’s speech; they could succeed in nothing, and could do nothing.For this reason they were sacrificed and the animals which were on earth were condemned to be killed and eaten.”

-Popol Vuh[1]: The Book of the People (Quiche MayaCosmogony)

“Six million Jews died in concentration camps, but six billion broiler chickens will die this year in slaughter houses..”

-Ingrid Newkirk

Founder of PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals

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CHAPTER I

The Mayan Bible: The Three Creations of the Popol Vuh

I feel great nostalgia and excitement every time I remember my grandfather’s old trunk which contained all of his valuable fortune: his cassettes and notes, his tattered books and his great enigmas. When my grandmother Valentina handed it over to me the day I turned eighteen, I never thought that its contents would be so crucial, not only for my life but for the life of the whole planet.

It was only after I examined it closely and read it with a different mentalility that I was able to understand, among many other things, why we are “Corn Men”, why this prelude to the Apocalypse in which we are living was caused by the “Wooden Men”.

At this moment, in which I begin to narrate the story of my grandfather, enclosed in this trunk, we are in the year 2044. And we are on the verge of destruction.

Since the year 2037 not a single drop of rain has fallen on the earth, while all the coasts of the world have receded due to ever-rising ocean levels, leaving the major cities situated along the old coastline under water.

The eternal ice of the poles and the snow-capped mountain ranges has melted unchecked. And what’s worse: all species of domestic animals have disappeared, and the planet’s fauna is agonizing.

The human species, whose nature is to live free, is about to be extinguished. A powerful and sinister force, born with the ideological mask of animal liberation— which equates animal rights with human rights— has shackled mankind and conspires to replace existing humans with a new, amoral and ideologically fanaticized man, easily manipulated due to his docile spirit and collective mindset. The supposed liberation of all these living creatures has resulted, in reality, in their massive disappearance.

According to my grandfather, this is nothing more that the age-old struggle between good and evil, Corn Men and Wooden Men.

In order to understand this more clearly, he said that you had to hark back to the dawn of creation and examine the chronicles of ancient civilizations, like the Popol Vuh or “Book of the People”, the mythical Mayan bible. There, the beginning of this ancient conflict was recorded.

And so it was that, reading these ancient texts by these tropical dwellers of America, I began to understand the origin and nature of this conspiracy, while at the same time, I learned to value the wisdom and simplicity that primitive American peoples had in their perception of life and of the universe. I am hopeful, because I have an increasingly strong sense that in some part of those enigmatic expressions highlighted by my grandfather in his legacy, the answer which will free us from the terrible malady that afflicts us can be found.

The Popol Vuh was a bundle of worn and faded pages taped at the spine, which ressembled what might once have been a book. It was full of notes scribbled in the margins, and formed part of the strange and archaic things which he left behind and which my grandmother had jealously guarded and protected.

This book had been stuck inside a plastic box along with four other books: a small and rather shabby one titled “El Salvador, Ancient Mayan Homeland”; then another which, more than a book was a voluminous portfolio of typed pages, carefully sewn together with no cover nor title just a gray cover sheet with a small name in the bottom corner that said “Pilar Von Fürstenberg”. There was also a book on whose cover there appeared a white duck with its wings extended, and it read “The Foie Gras Wars”; and there was another called “A Rat is a Pig is a Dog is a Boy”.

The first time I saw them, it seemed to me that these books were about things so old and out of fashion that it wasn’t worth the trouble of delving into them when we were faced with a danger infinitely greater than some harebrained foie gras war. Nor could I imagine at the time that the way that the foie gras was produced had been precisely the thing that had set in motion the great conspiracy which we are undergoing.

What really caught my eye was that, on the top of the box containing these books, my grandfather had stuck a label which read “The Horse of Troy”. As I made strides in the reading and examination of his notes, I was going to realize that he was linking that ingenious trap which the Greeks had built for the Trojans thousands of years ago with the hidden agenda that the vegan extremists had begun developing in the world in recent decades.

Finally, and almost as an act of atonement for the scarce attention I had paid to my grandfather’s mementos, I opted to read the Popol Vuh first. I found it fascinating from the start.

In it is collected the cosmogonic tale of two chronicler gods, of two historians: the goddess Ixpiyacoc, “twice a grandmother”,and Ixmucané, “twice a grandfather”. According to the Toltec-Mayans —the civilizing race of the Aztecs—, they invented astrology, the calendar and the way to keep count of time and of things. These gods, the “twice grandparents”, were like the evangelists in the Popol Vuh but they had magical powers.

With exquisite eloquence these two chronicler gods narrated how and when the Great Creator, called Jurakán or Bolon, had sent his two Cosmic Progenitors to create the world.

The first was Tepeu, called The Great Hunter,who was associated with the constellation of Orion. This cosmic forefather had an especially transcendental significance since, according to the most eminent astrophysicists, it is at this point in the galaxy where stars are born. More specifically they are born on Orion’s Belt, formed by three enigmatic stars replicated by the three great pyramids of Egypt. The ancient Egyptians called this belt the Duat or “The Door”, and it was through it that one arrived at the Amenti or the Beyond, to  so-called paradise.On the other hand, Orion was the equivalent of their celestial god Osiris. The Duat was bridge, path and door. It was somewhat Christic.

The other Cosmic Progenitor was Gucumatz, called “The Plumed Serpent“, who was associated with the Milky Way. He was cosmic energy. But the most important thing is that soon I was to understand that, in the end, this god represented all the genetic information in the universe.

This triad of Mayan creator gods was something like the “Holy Trinity”: Jurakán, “the Father”, Tepeu, “the Son”, y Gucumatz, “the Holy Spirit”. Three gods in one. For the Mayans these three gods were the three stars that form Orion’s Belt, known as “The Three Marias” or “The Three Sisters”.

As I read on, I was impressed by the great parrallellism there was between the Mayan conception of Creation and what appears in the Book of Genesis, in the Bible:

And the gods created the animals…

“Then Tepeu and Gucumatz came together; then they conferred about life and light, what they would do so that there would be light and dawn, who it would be who would provide food and sustenance…”

“First the earth was formed, the mountains and the valleys; the currents of water were divided, the rivulets were running freely between the hills, and the water was separated when the high mountains appeared.”

“Thus was the earth created, when it was formed by the Heart of Heaven, the Heart of Earth, as they are called who first made it fruitful, when the sky was in suspense, and the earth was submerged in the water.”

“Then they made the small wild animals, the guardians of the woods, the spirits of the mountains, the deer, the birds, pumas, jaguars, serpents, snakes, vipers, guardians of the thickets… And the creation of all the four-footed animals and the birds being finished, they were told by the Creator and the Maker and the Forefathers: “Speak, cry, warble, call, speak each one according to your variety, each, according to your kind.” So was it said to the deer, the birds, pumas, jaguars, and serpents.”

“Speak, then, our names, praise us, your mother, your father. Invoke then, Huracán, Chipi-Caculhá, Raxa-Caculhá, the Heart of Heaven, the Heart of Earth, the Creator, the Maker, the Forefathers; speak, invoke us, adore us,” they were told.

“But they could not make them speak like men; they only hissed and screamed and cackled; they were unable to make words, and each screamed in a different way.”

pOPOL- vUH (“The Book of the People”) From the Quiche Maya Poetic Cosmogony. Written long before October 12, 1492.

Here I realized that, according to the Quiche Maya, the world had been created with all of its natural beauty so that the animals could enjoy complete freedom there. But the animals, in the eyes of the creator gods, posed a huge problem: they couldn’t speak. They had no way of communicating amongst themselves so that it was a world which was full of life, but there was no thought, no soul, no morality. The animals were unable to pay homage to the divinity of their creators. Everything was pure instinct.

Curiously the Quiche Maya recognized the role each being played within creation, and in their cosmogonical narration they already establish what scientists will later call “The Food Chain”. The Popol Vuh continued:

“When the Creator and the Maker saw that it was impossible for them to talk to each other, they said: ‘It is impossible for them to say our names, the names of us, their Creators and Makers. This is not well,’ said the Forefathers to each other. Then they said to them: ‘Because it has not been possible for you to talk, you shall be changed. We have changed our minds: Your food, your pasture, your homes and your nests you shall have; they shall be the ravines and the woods, because it has not been possible for you to adore us or invoke us. There shall be those who adore us, we shall make other [beings] who shall be obedient. Accept your destiny: your flesh shall be torn to pieces. So shall it be. This shall be your lot.’ So they said, when they made known their will to the large and small animals which are on the face of the earth.”

“They wished to give them another trial; they wished to make another attempt; they wished to make [all living things] adore them.”

“But they could not understand each other’s speech; they could succeed in nothing, and could do nothing. For this reason they were sacrificed and the animals which were on earth were condemned to be killed and eaten.”

-Popol Vuh

Little by little I delved more deeply into the cosmogonic vision of this Pre-Columbian civilization, and I realized that, according to the Popol Vuh, man was not created in his final form, out of mud as the biblical Genesis states.

The Quiche Maya say, that when the earth was created in all its splendor- in what the Bible calls Paradise-, there was rich animal life but the animals couldn’t speak. Therefore, the Cosmic Progenitors decided to create man so that he would adore them,be obedient and respectful to them, care for that paradise and its animals, and avail himself of the flesh of the animals. The Popol Vuh tells that on the first attempt, in the First Creation, man was fashioned from mud, just like in the Bible, but it didn´t work:

And the gods created the first man…                                                                   

“Then was the creation and the formation. Of earth, of mud, they made [man’s] flesh. But they saw that it was not good. It melted away, it was soft, did not move, had no strength, it fell down, it was limp, it could not move its head, its face fell to one side, its sight was blurred, it could not look behind. At first it spoke, but had no mind. Quickly it soaked in the water and could not stand.”

-Popol Vuh

Worried because time was running out, and because the dawn of Creation was drawing near, The Cosmic Progenitors sought out the soothsayers. They advised the Creators to try making man out of wood, which was not so watery as mud, and that’s what they did on the second attempt, in the Second Creation:

And the gods created the second man…

“And instantly the figures were made of wood. They looked like men, talked like men, and populated the surface of the earth.”

” They existed and multiplied; they had daughters, they had sons, these wooden figures; but they did not have souls, nor minds, they did not remember their Creator, their Maker; they walked on all fours, aimlessly.”

” They no longer remembered the Heart of Heaven and therefore they fell out of favor. It was merely a trial, an attempt at man. At first they spoke, but their face was without expression; their feet and hands had no strength; they had no blood, nor substance, nor moisture, nor flesh; their cheeks were dry, their feet and hands were dry, and their flesh was yellow. Therefore, they no longer thought of their Creator nor their Maker, nor of those who made them and cared for them.These were the first men who existed in great numbers on the face of the earth.”

-Popol Vuh

The Wooden Man, the one from the Second Creation, the one who took the place of the Mud Man, worked well because he was stout and skillful, but he had a great flaw: he had no soul and his heart was also hard, and soon he acted like a tyrant towards all the things and animals that Jurakán, the “Heart of Heaven”, and the Cosmic Progenitors, Tepeu and Gucumatz had created for him to use and enjoy.

But because he was so stiff, he couldn’t bow to adore the creators, didn’t prostrate himself before them nor before any of the other gods that existed on earth. Instead, he loved himself and everything revolved around him. He lived to carry out his own whims and wishes. He destroyed the harmony which should exist between man, his surroundings and the things created for him. The Quiche Maya cosmogony speaks of Wooden Man’s terrifying demise:

“Immediately the wooden figures were annihilated, destroyed, broken up, and killed.”

“A flood was brought about by the Heart of Heaven; a great flood was formed which fell on the heads of the wooden creatures.”

“A heavy resin fell from the sky.The one black bird called Xecotcovach came and gouged out their eyes; And for this reason the face of the earth was darkened and a black rain began to fall, by day and by night.”

“Then came the small animals and the large animals, and sticks and stones struck their faces. And all began to speak: their earthen jars, their griddles, their plates, their pots, their grinding stones, all rose up and struck their faces. ”

“The desperate ones [the men of wood] ran as quickly as they could; they wanted to climb to the tops of the houses. And the houses fell down and threw them to the ground; they wanted to climb to the treetops, and the trees cast them far away; they wanted to enter the caverns, and the caverns repelled them.”

“So was the ruin of the men who had been created and formed, the men made to be destroyed and annihilated; the mouths and faces of all of them were mangled.”

-Popol Vuh

The punishment that Juracán casted upon the Wooden Men stunned me. First they had to suffer through a deluge, then they faced an insurrection by all the animate and inanimate creatures. To top it off their pets and all the little wild animals who had become attached to them, who had lived alongside them despite their cruelty, many of which they killed for pleasure, now turned against them and pursued them everywhere. Desperate, the Wooden Men found the road towards Xibalbá, the Netherworld, and there, in the darkness of the underworld where evil spirits and demons dwell, they were able to finally find shelter.

“And ever since those remote times”, my grandfather wrote, “they have been forging their revenge and emerging little by little from the Netherworld, hiding their faceless, mouthless heads behind masks and false identities.”

The Wooden Men who could not escape to Xibalbá were turned into monkeys and condemned to roaming the forests and seeking out food from the highest branches of the trees.

Nonetheless, earth went on without the presence of humanity, according to the Popol Vuh, and the moment to finish Creation approached. Something like the seventh day in Genesis:

And the gods created the third man…

“And the Forefathers, the Creators and Makers, who were called Tepeu and Gucumatz said: ‘The time of dawn has come, let the work be finished, and let those who are to nourish and sustain us appear, the noble sons, the civilized vassals; let man appear, humanity, on the face of the earth.’ Thus they spoke.”

“In this way their decisions came clearly to light and they found and discovered what must enter into the flesh of man.”

“So the corn entered [into the formation of man] by the work of the Forefathers… of yellow corn and of white corn they made their flesh; of corn-meal dough they made the arms and the legs of man. Only dough of corn meal went into the flesh of our first fathers, the four men, who were created.”

-Popol Vuh

It was then that the Progenitors, on the third attempt, in the Third Creation, made the Corn Man. It was the most well-balanced creation. Not very, very watery, not so, so hard…

“Since those very remote times the Wooden Men hate the Corn Men and the animals”, my grandfather had scribbled in his own hand on the corner of that page of the Popol Vuh, and at the end he had left another of his grand enigmas: “And in the year 2012, they donned their masks and undertook their revenge.”

 

CHAPTER II

The Cosmic Secrets of the Milpa

Among the things that my grandfather left -and which I, unfortunately, no longer possess- was that really old, worn and mended little volume titled “El Salvador: Ancient Mayan Homeland”, written by a meticulous Salvadoran researcher, Professor Antonio Arocha.

I vaguely remember that he spoke of a very remote era in which some very highly-evolved beings, the “Master Solar Civilizers” (as Professor Arocha called these entities of energy which my grandfather called “Cosmic Brothers”) traveled from a corner of the Universe, astride a comet whose wide orbit drew them closer to the earth every 150 years.

Professor Arocha held that the mayans called this comet, Yuma Netziuit Kuk Yaximun which in Nahuatl means “ Lord of the Water- Mangler of the tail of the Quetzal—Green Bird Yaxum”, and he said that they also mentioned this celestial body as the “Head of the Comet or the God Bolon: the thirteen times gone and the thriteen time returned to the world”

I had to look more thoroughly at these extracts from the Profesor Arocha to understand what they meant by “the thirteen times gone and the thirteen times returned”, and found that the key was in a quote from The Book of Books of Chilam Balam, a compilation of very ancient mayan chronicles from which Professor Arocha had transcripted a paragraph that went more or less like this:

“Awake, rise up early for the Mayflower Katun is settling now. Three moons have past since he´s been present, the Yuma Netziuit Kuk Yaxum- Lord of the Water, Mangler of the Quetzal´s Tail- Green Bird Yaxum. Present is his face in the Bird, present is Bolon Uit, Nine Hills”

The Professor Arocha dismissed it as a simple allegoric description of the comet´s sightings made by the mayas. He sustained that the Yuma Netziuit Kuk Yaxum WAS the comet and the three moons were the three months that have passed since the beginnings of the sightings. Then, after some mathemathical juggling he came up with a number of surprising conclusions: First, he concluded that the discovery of the comet the mayas described was on the 8^th of october of 4935 B.C., and that on the same comet the Master Solar Civilizers have gone back to their home somewhere in the universe after organizing men politically and mate with their women. Second, he said that the year 4935 B.C. marked the beginning of a cycle that was to last 13 sightings of the comet, or 13 orbits of 150 years each. When I multiplied 13 times 150 I came up with 1950 years and when I substracted this sum to 4935 (since I was computing Before Christ) I landed on the year 3135 B.C.!

I was quite surprised since Professor Arocha maintained that it was on that very same year -during the thirteenth visit of the comet- the Master Solar Civilizers had descended to earth and given man the first the first kernels of corn.

The Professor said that the delivery had been made in a place in El Salvador where there was a rural village called Tamacha, nestled on the southern slope of a beautiful volcanic mountain. 1950 years had gone by between the first visit of the Master Solar Civilizers on 4935B.C. and their second visit on the 3135 B.C. I thought it was just marvelous to run into these findings.

Even more, when I learned that this “comet of the mayas” was far from being a simple legend: in a yellowish paper clipping from the New York Times bond inside the Professor´s book talked about a new comet discovered on November, 1965 by two amateur Japanese astronomers. Thus, it was named after its discoverers as the “Comet Ikeya-Seki”. This appearance happened exactly on the comet´s 47^th orbit since the year 4935 B.C. that according to Professor Arocha was the year the Master Solar Civilizers had abandoned the earth after mating with Mesoamerican women and headed back to their distant home in Ganymede, the third moon of Jupiter and the largest of all the solar system. The only thing that didn´t fit it was the difference of orbits. Professor Arocha calculated a complete orbit of the Yuma Netziuit Kuk Yaxum comet around the sun every 150 years and the Ikeya-Seki Comet has an orbit of 600 years. Why had the professor divided it up by four? He didn´t say much:

“The count of the comet´s appearances will be initiated in the year 4935 B.C. assuming that was the year the alleged solar civilizers members of the Heart of Heaven departed from Central American lands. Behind that date, indisputably, there would be a previous appearance of the comet, in the year 5085 B.C. which by the way coincides perfectly with a Sumerian date used to determine one of the divinities descents”

All these computing and contentions made by Professor Arocha short-circuited me. Nonetheless, when I ran into an old notebook of my grandfather my puzzlement was going to grow even more, to the point that eventually it would turn into pure fascination. Especially when I started reading about an ancient form of subsistence called Milpa which according to my grandfather it was a cosmic knowledge transferred to man along the first kernels of the new corn.

I was like swimming in a sea of events so immense that transcended time and space, but at the same time they could be reduce to such apparently simple things as corn, beans and sunlight or jumped into themes so complicated as the origin of man and the interventions of cosmic beings.

My grandfather came to my rescue and shed much light on the subject. He said in his notes that Professor Arocha was right about the arrival of the “Solar Masters” in El Salvador in the year 3135 B.C…. but just to a point. He cited the Popol Vuh as the authentic version and clarified that corn already existed, because man had been fashioned from this grain; that what those “Solar Masters” had brought during the thirteenth orbit of the comet was simply a new kind of corn. A substitute for the vanished ancestral corn.

“What had happened”, he explained about the vanished corn, “was that the ancient Wooden Men who had survived the flood and the animal insurrection at the beginning of time, had returned from Xibalbá, the Netherworld, and as part of their obsessive vengeance against the Corn Men, they decided to starve them to death, and for this purpose, they destroyed Corn.”

“But you have to understand that the corn that the Wooden Men destroyed”, he wrote emphatically, “was the ancestral corn, called “Teocintle“, which means “Seed of the Gods”. That was the first corn, the one from the creation.”

Therefore, so that man would not die from hunger, Jurakán, the “Heart of Heaven”, had sent the “Solar Masters”, the ones who Professor Arocha mentions as coming in the thirteenth orbit of the comet, to bring new kernels of corn. Those were the kernels of modern corn, the kind that went on to substitute for “Teocintle”, that first corn that had been stolen and destroyed by the Wooden Men.

“That’s how it was”, said my grandfather in his convoluted notes, “that those ‘Cosmic Brothers’, without leaving the earth, had returned to her to save man from famine.”

Then he wrote something that amazed me. He said that they”not only brought man the new corn, but also taught him to plant it along with beans, in a perfect marriage in which both benefited, in harmony with water, earth, and sunlight”. This was the origin and the basis for the fantastic system of agricultural production inherited from Pre-Columbian America: the Milpa.

And since then, throughout the centuries, man sowed corn and, between the rows, he sowed beans. What one was lacking, the other provided; and around the beans and corn arose other crops like squash and chile peppers.

It was the Milpa, that notion of harmony and symbiosis between the soil, the moisture, the light, the corn, the beans, and man that opened up a wealth of possibilities for me in a world of calamities like the one we were now facing.

That’s what led me to want to know more about these plants, and I discovered a great number of notes writen by my grand father with suprising  deep knowledge.

To start with, the new strain of corn which replaced the primitive, ancestral “Teocintle” was a marvel of genetic engineering, “with origins in the infinite“, according to my grandfather. “It had a compact, solid ear, its kernels were large and nutritious and it came in its own wrapper, the tuza or husk.” But there was one mysterious difference: the ancestral “Teocintle” reproduced by itself, naturally, since its kernels scattered with the wind upon reaching maturity. On the other hand, the kernels of the new corn had to be pulled out by hand so as to be eaten, sown or planted.

Never were even the most eminent plant geneticists and scientists in the world able to establish the botanical origin of modern corn, nor the reason for that characteristic, that its kernels needed the intervention of man to reproduce themselves.

“The missing link between the ancient ‘Teocintle’ and modern corn”, my grandfather maintained with proprietary zeal, “owed to ‘a purely cosmic intervention’.”

I then learned that modern corn- the only plant in the world that can’t be reproduced without the intervention of man- extracts a lot of nitrogen from the soil. It sucks it up in large quantities to make its valuable nutrients with the help of sunlight, and it is here, in this great need that corn has for nitrogen, where the bean comes into play. Thanks to this cosmic legacy that the Mayans spoke of, the humble bean has the virtue of capturing precious nitrogen in its roots and returning it to the soil. In this way it nurtures its brother and neighbor, corn, so it can mature in all its richness and splendor.

The bean, in turn, needs a pole to reach up towards the sunlight and develop as well the full potential of its fruits. That’s where corn comes in:once mature and ready for harvest it bequeaths its stalks, which make sturdy stakes for the bean to climb, creeping upwards to expose its foliage to that magical sunbath, so full of vitality. The Milpa is a prime example of the kind of collaboration where each party benefits.

Our ancestors, who knew nothing of either biochemistry or soil chemistry, learned to grow corn and beans in harmonious and cosmic association, and they handed down this system of the Milpa to the tropical farmers. Many continued sowing in this way until the soil was depleted, dried up, or just couldn’t give any more, because the milpa was based on the annual slashing and burning of an area, which, once depleted, would be allowed to lie fallow for several years. It was a harmonious and sustainable system… as long as there was no human overpopulation.

In any case, our indigenous peoples never knew they were using wisdom that came to them from the heavens, and a material which contained the power of the stars. They didn’t know that the nitrogen that the bean injected in the soil was pure power: it’s almost 80% of the air we breathe and its fusion generates 90% of the energy produced by the stars. It is so powerful that dinamite and rocket fuel were made from this element. In the soil, the power has been key in providing the boost needed by plants to support life and supply food for the planet. And among all the plants in the world there has only been one with the magical property of capturing nitrogen in its roots and enriching the soil with it: the legumes.

Beans are legumes as are its first cousins the soybeans and others like peanuts, peas, guandú or Pigeon Pea- all that type of plant whose fruit was kept in capsules, from the diminutive and fascinating “sleeping plant” and other species which have disappeared, like tamarind, carao fruit, guabas or ice-cream beans, even the beautiful acacias and the giant and imposing conacaste tree. These were extremely valuable plants that adorned the earth with their flowers, nourished people and animals of the forest with their fruits, and last but not least, enriched the soil through the millenarian trick of capturing nitrogen in its roots.

As a result of single-crop farming, and with water systems in chaos, almost all the legumes disappeared from the face of the earth, and only one survived: the soybean.

Nevertheless, it wasn’t the primitive soybean, the beneficial first cousin of the bean, which remained. The one which exists now is a soybean that the descendents of the Wooden Men have managed to modify genetically, manipulating its essence to deceive the world and bring about its domination. This soybean is their gateway to gaining total power. Its name in code is “Untriseptium”,whose meaning in Latin is the number 137, un, tri, septium.

In their cunning strategy, those manipulated by the Wooden Men have baptized it “The Soybean of Liberation”, because they allege that by consuming only soy and seaweed, man promotes equal rights with animals and liberates them entirely.

My grandfather called it “The Manna of Conspiracy”, and for many years now all of earth’speople have been consuming- by law and the mandate of the worldwide vegan government of ALPHA- this genetically modified soy. It is their Horse of Soy, the secret weapon which is going to unleash the dramatic physical elimination of a generation of human beings… If we don’t find the key to stopping it on time.

 

CHAPTER III

The Range of the Plumed Serpent

The clues began taking shape after much re-examining and analyzing. First and foremost, I understood from my grandfather that those “Cosmic Brothers”, who had brought the new strain of corn thousands of years ago, were the same ones who were going to return and put a stop to the imminent destruction of the human race.

But how were they going to return to earth, I wondered, if my grandfather said they had never left?

The mystery kept swirling around my head with ever greater force. I went back over that part of Professor Arocha’s book but I wasn’t able to resolve this contradiction: according to the Professor, the extraterrestrial beings had arrived on earth from outer space thanks to a comet that passed this way every one undred fifty years. However, my grandfather was certain that if in fact the Cosmic Brothers were from Orion, they had never come to earth from their far away point of origin in the universe but rather…. they had always been here!

That’s when I began to wonder: If these beings have always been here but they come from the cosmos, how do they get around? How can they be on earth and outside earth at the same time? Or what was even more puzzling: if they can utilize a gateway in which neither time nor space exists, where is that gateway?

To my further consternation, I discovered that my grandfather insinuated that “it was an entrance with many doors” and that the first kernels of the new corn had been handed over to man through one of these doors, located in a very fertile land, in the tropical heart of what is now America’s waist.

That’s when I learned that the key that I was searching for was in the simbolism of the imprint that the Cosmic Brothers had left upon delivering the new corn. That imprint that had been converted into a beautiful, volcanic mountain range that had the shape of one of the most powerful and revered pre-Columbian gods: The Plumed Serpent.

Tha Aztecs called him “Quetzalcoatl”.The Mayans, who were older than the Aztecs called him Gucumatz, and the Olmecs, who predated even the Mayans called himTamoanchán, “the hawk serpent”… the cosmogonic “Flying Snake”, master of the deepest mystical symbolisms.

Little by little I began to realize that the Cosmic Brothers or Master Solar Civilizers were the true Plumed Serpent, and that the monumental energy they had generated to travel from Orion to El Salvador and pass through that gateway had formed such a mountain range.

 

The conic shape Izalco volcano stands out at the beginning of the mountain range. The Santa Ana volcano is the cloud covered summit. At the other side of these volcanos is the Coatepeque lake.

The legend that my grandfather’s notes alluded to, about the magnificent volcanic formation, takes on a new meaning when seen from a great altitude. In effect, it has the shape of an immense snake whose head has, trapped in its mouth, what used to be a small and crystalline lake: Coatepeque, which in Nahuatl means, “Place on the hill of the Serpents”, which was situated at the bottom of an ancient crater, at the foot of the majestic Santa Ana Volcano and opposite the cone-shaped and gorgeous Izalco Volcano, “The place of Obsidian Houses”. Coatepeque possesed a small island, Teopán, whose mystical and cultural value has been lost over time. It is said that this was the same site where Mayan civilization was born and which for centuries was a pilgrimage center for pre-Columbian wise men, because here the Corn God was worshipped and it was one of the most important experimental centers where this ancestral crop was developed.

 

Lake Coatepeque-it was also said- was connected to the most remote entrails of the mysterious range. One of the reasons for this belief is that every time there was a great earthquake in the Western region of El Salvador, the water level of the lake dropped abruptly and receded several dozen meters from the shore, only to return with the momentum of an enormous surge, sweeping away docks and shoreline houses. It was as if the lake breathed in deeply, and later exhaled.

The volcanic chain that has the shape of the Plumed Serpent in reality exists. It is situated in Western El Salvador, and has the name “Apaneca-Ilamatepec Range”a series of imposing peaks that start at 10,000 feet, with LakeCoatepeque trapped amid its spectacular topography.

The midsection of the serpent is formed by a succesion of mountains and volcanos in a harmonious and expanded semicircle in whose belly are the cities of Juayúa, which means “Place of the Purple Orchids”, and Salcoatitán, whose original name was “Quetzalcoatitán”, or “The Place Where Quatzalcoatl is Worshipped”. Later the body of the serpent rises to the highest parts of the range where two more cities are nestled: Apaneca which means “The Place of the Rivers of Wind”, and Ataco, “Place of High Springs”.

 

Coming down towards the Guatemalan border, on the northern slope of what would be the serpent’s tail, lies the picturesque town of Ahuachapán, “Place of the Oak Houses”, whose tranquil nature contrasted with the dramatic volcanic activity that its hot springs and fumaroles made dance on the surface.

This place demonstrates the power and energy of nature that exists in the the bowels of the mountain range. A letter written by the Oidor or magistrate Diego García de Palacio, sent to king Phillip II in 1576, sums up his amazement at this earth-shaking treasure emanating from the range like this:

“There are at the end of said place some springs of hot waters that I saw, and they burn so, are so different in color and source as to be frightening… the Indians often bring their pots of corn and meat and cook them in some vent of that water.”

And from Ahuachapán, crossing the range in a straight line, and dropping onto the southern slope you come to the village called Tamacha. According to Profesor Arocha, that name was a deformation of the word “Tamoanchán”, which is how the Olmecs called the Plumed Serpent, and it was the exact place where the delivery of the first kernels of corn by the “Solar Masters” took place thousands of years ago.

Would this be the mysterious volcanic mountain range of Tropical America, the cosmic gateway that I would soon be searching for in the middle of 2044?

It had to be. This was the last resort in order to reverse the chaos that the Wooden Men- now embedded in the highest echelons of vegan power on the planet- had managed to unleash. It was the last hope for defusing their devious plan to eliminate an entire generation of Corn Men, replacing them with semi-cloned men and animals, all under their control.

[1] All quotes from the Popol Vuh translated into English by Delia Goetz and Sylvanus Griswold Morley

From Adrián Recinos’s translation from Quiché into Spanish. Plantin Press, Los Angeles [1954, copyright not registered or renewed]

CHAPTER IV

The Mask of the Wooden Men

It was indispensable to find out more about these Wooden Men that my grandfather spoke about so harshly, even though, due to my eagerness, I began skipping some important parts in trying to unravel their evil nature. Soon I learned that the obsession with vengeance seethed in their dark kingdom, and that they came slowly oozing out towards our world with the mission they had been incubating for centuries: the destruction of their two despised enemies, Corn Men and animals.

The members of this sinister race had spread throughout the planet, but had chosen the towns of the North as a strategic point from which to group and launch their war of recovery and vengeance since all the power in the world was concentrated in the northern part of the planet and there they would be able to fit in better and go unnoticed.

In one of his notebooks my grandfather had underlined a clue for recognizing them:

“The only distinguishing mark that clearly identifies them as Wooden Men”, he said, “is a symbol they are born with, one which is stamped on their buttocks, an ox’s face which is the symbol of ‘Aleph’, the first letter of the Phoenician alphabet, the first alphabet known to man.”

“There’s just one thing”, he warned, “that little ox face that the Wooden Men are born with, that letter Aleph, is backwards. That gives them away as being from the Netherworld, as beings who come from an opposing dimension, where darknes is light and light is darkness. It’s where good is evil and evil is good, where Emeth, the Truth, is falsehood. That’s why they have the ability to place themselves quickly from inside out to outside in and vice versa; it’s their principal means of camouflaging themselves.”

Corn men were also born with a mark that the people from the country used to call “the blue spot of the Indian on the butt”, but this disappeared in a short time. For the descendents of Xibalbá, on the contrary, the mark was never erased, but rather it became smaller and smaller until it became a mole and only a detailed examination of it would detect the ox symbol, or Aleph/Alpha, but backwards.

And so it was that, in the most powerful communities on the planet, the Wooden Men infiltrated little by little. Ancestrally and genetically enemies of the Corn Men and the animals, they sought the most appropriate façade for their thousand-year-old plan to rule the world again from here on out. In the end, they focused on a group they could infiltrate, on a movement that preached equality with animals and which fought to equate their rights with human rights. It was the perfect mask.

And that’s how the conspiracy of the Wooden Men began to hatch from inside the ALF- the Animal Liberation Front- a clandestine organization which was born in England but gained strength in the United States and had extended throughout the First World.

It was easy for the infiltrators from Xibalbá to camouflage themselves and exert their ever-increasing influence,until they got to the point of manipulating all like-minded groups. There in the ALF they set their hidden agenda to do away with animals, provoke ecological chaos and light the fires of hunger.

They awaited in the shadows of animal rights until the world entered into the phase of a serious socio-ecological disease that brougth about the bankruptcy of nations. That was the unmistakable signal that the time was ripe to carry out their first great strategic maneuver: to place a vegan-who also sympathized with the philosophy of the ALF- in the office of president of the United States of America. This would happen in the year 2017, after the second term of Barack Hussein Obama.

In a few years, the pure, recalcitrant vegan philosophy practicied by members of ALF would extend all over the First World, the northern world, the “developed” world, which had accumulated the majority of the power, wealth and strength.

Vegans were so strict as to verge on fanaticism. They didn’t permit the intake of any food of animal origin, whether they be eggs, milk, chicken, meats of any type, even honey, fish, oysters and shrimp. Those valuable foods were now clandestine and could only be procured through a brutal black market. Besides, the use of any material of animal origin like leather, bone and fur was prohibited, as was the use of animals in scientific research in the development of new medicines for man, and even companion animals for the blind. But the most drastic measure- and the coup de grace for the Corn Men- was the attempt to eliminate the private ownership of animals, that is, eliminate the possesion of pets to accompany and live alongside mankind.

Their strategy was bolstered by the proliferation of animal rights’organizations and extremist groups that, in turn, started gaining ground in the highest spheres of political power and in the realm of worldwide public opinion. One after another, the most powerful nations on earth began electing vegan presidents and leaders who shared their opinions, and little by little the actions of these groups and leaders radicalized more and more. The romantic and anthropomorphic vision of a minority, of turning the world into an immense Disneyland, was moving full speed ahead.

And then Amsterdam 2020 came along.

There the presidents and prime ministers of the leading world powers met for the first time and approved the “Universal Law of Vegan Ethics for the Rights and Freedom of People and Animals”. There they endorsed the words which had been expressed by Donald Watson, the founder of the Vegan Society of London:

“Veganism is a way of living which excludes all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, the animal kingdom, and includes a reverence for life. It applies to the practice of living on the products of the plant kingdom to the exclusion of flesh, fish, fowl, eggs, honey, animal milk and its derivatives, and encourages the use of alternatives for all commodities derived wholly or in part from animals.”

Among the old documents, I found a washed out photograph in which one could see in the background, above the solemn dais of the Amsterdam assembly, an immense poster flanked by enormous arrangements of red carnations on which was written a quotation from the beginning of the century- the words of Ingrid Newkirk, also English and the revered founder of PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

Although quite despicable, the sentence attempted to dramatize the importance that animal rights had over human rights, and it was taken from a campaign launched by PETA decades before, called “A Holocaust on your Plate”, which was nothing more than an indolent mockery of the Nazi-inflicted tragedy of the Jews:

“Six million people died in concentration camps, but six billion broiler chickens will die this year in slaughterhouses”.

-Ingrid Newkirk

It was in that critical year of 2020 that I was born.

And it was in that same year when the world was converted to vegan power, and from the North a mandate was handed down to the enormous masses of hungry people in all corners of the planet to eat only diets designated by the vegan states and guided by animalist policies, under pain of imprisonment or even death.

The hidden agenda of the Wooden Men had escalated to global levels. Their conspiracy had entered into the final stretch…

It was then that I remembered that, in another old photograph of the famous Amsterdam assembly of 2020, another huge sign could be seen. It read simply: “ Untriseptium: The Soybean of Liberation”.Off to one side my grandfather had written the number 137.

It hit me instantly. I realized at that moment that in various places in his notes there was something that had filled me with curiosity and that I had glossed over without stopping to ponder. It was a handwritten, underlined phrase: “Untriseptium Soy isn’t what it seems. The key to destroying it is in the true 137!”.

Little by little I was going to understand that since the year 2020 we were being forced to consume a foodstuff that was promoted as being “miraculous”, but which in reality contained the seed of our own destruction.

Now, with heightened curiosity, and almost with anguish, I resolved to go back over my grandfather’s copious notes and listen to the cassettes of his memoirs, to find out what exactly he meant by the enigmatic phrase.

What all did that Number 137 encompass?

I couldn’t even imagine that, upon going back to this search, I would come across the chronicle of a long and extraordinary saga: one which I myself would have to go through in order to understand my grandfather and learn his secrets.

Everything began 84 years ago, in a remote rural Central American settlement. Lost in a land that once came to be a promised land…

PART TWO

LAS TRES MARIAS

“Orion’s belt is formed by three stars and they comprise the wellspring of our galaxy, for it is there that all the other stars are born. The astronomers call them the Three Marias ”

-Chepe Soya

CHAPTER V

My enigmatic ancestor

When I was finally able to read my grandfather’s fantastic stories with a detective’s eye, I never imagined that a man like him, a peasant from a small country cornered in the belly of the Central American isthmus, was going to find the cosmic and millenarian codes that held the salvation of billions of people and animals.

I remember it only vaguely. I can only say that when I turned 18, my grandmother, obeying his last wish, handed over the beaten chest that held the mysterious paraphernalia of his history: Those ancient books inside a box labeled “The Horse of Troy,” which I made reference to earlier, alongside old photographs, notebooks, drawings, primitive maps…all kept in thick paper bags. But what really sparked my curiosity was a mysterious, impenetrable titanium box, with an unknown digital code that held the key to what was going to turn out to be the most crucial component. I had to crack the code to see what it contained.

I also had to find a way to reproduce a dozen old recordings, from what used to be called “cassettes”, and figure out the meaning of certain unusual artifacts found with the cassettes. It was a world of things that for me, 18 years old and barely out of adolescence, was overshadowed by other pressing concerns. First and foremost among them was to get free of the constant persecution by a group of people whose motives I couldn’t even guess.

On top of all that we were living on the brink of extermination.

That’s why, when I got hold of the ancient chest, my interest in it was based primarily on nostalgia and curiosity. After all, it was a jumble of memories of an old man who I wasn’t even sure really existed and about whom I had only heard stories whose strangeness and mystery matched the way he had lived out his life.

Until, that is, the bizarre circumstances I will talk about later pushed me to read and re-read them with unforeseen zeal. His story was one long mystery right from the outset:

“I was already pretty big when I was born,” he cited in his first notes. That was the first thing that grabbed my attention because, as he tells it, he was left sitting on a straw mat, playing, wrapped up in a coarse cotton shirt, with no other identification except that bracelet made out of red ribbon with a “Deer’s Eye” seed sown into it— presumably to ward off evil spirits.

My grandfather then, just showed up on the doorstep of the Hacienda Las Tres Marias, a small feudal estate in Eastern El Salvador, situated in the middle of a triangle formed by three ancient indigenous towns: Uluazapa, which in the Ulua language means “the rocky place of the Uluas”, Yucuaiquín, which in the Poton language means “The Land of Fire”, and San Alejo, a dusty but tranquil hamlet in the “departamento” or state of La Unión, which was originally called Queiquín, or “Stone Town”. Its name changed when a hacienda called San Alejo del Pedregal was founded.

It was inside this triangle formed by these three towns that my grandfather appeared, in the heart of a territory once occupied by the Ulua, Lenca and Poton peoples. A land of stone and fire.

 

That’s where Felix Bonilla and his industrious wife Maria, through hard work, passionate dedication and profound knowledge of the land, the animals and the people, had transformed this small, flat valley of a thousand acres, surrounded by rocky hills and tuff, into a fertile plot of land where abundant crops of cotton, corn, beans, rice and millet were grown, and where a dynamic herd of cattle grazed from which meat, creamy milk and bounteous cheeses were produced. There they lived harmoniously, together with a group of faithful settlers, among them a family of ranch hands that had emigrated from the Pacific coast of Usulutan years before and had settled permanently in one of the buildings in the old part of the hacienda.

It was Lupe, the head of this impoverished family of Salvadoran cowboys, who found my grandfather at the first light of a strange dawn.

The leather-skinned ranch hand noticed a small bundle outlined against the gleam of the Nixtamalero, as Venus, “The Dawn Star”, is called in these parts—the brilliant star that precedes the sunrise and gives the daily signal to prepare the Nixtamal, the corn dough boiled with lime, which was turned into beautiful tortillas early each morning.

My grandfather had a great fascination for Venus. Yet he didn’t even know that this planet had been revered for centuries the world over, thanks to a strange energy that intensified and was projected every so many years over the earth. For six short hours Venus would travel about the solar disc, inserting itself between the sun and our planet, showing us a face that is usually always on the opposite side.

Because of the coincidences between the Mayan Calendar and the Gregorian Calendar, many people began to think that the energy of Quetzalcoatl was connected to that of Jesus Christ; therefore they anxiously awaited that short cosmic passage. The last time that the Transit of Venus happened was a double event: the first Transit was on June 8, 2004 and the second Transit on June 6, 2012. In the interim, the whole world awaited the return of the Energy of the Creators- some even alleged it would mean the end. Nevertheless, the world did not end in 2012, but many things did happen that year which would alter the destiny of the world in just the way we are experiencing it now.

The man who found my grandfather, besides being the head of the ranch hands – who as a side note it should be explained was the father of all of the ranch hands, with the exception of the occasional local tenant farmer who sometimes worked tending cattle – was a master cheese maker and the story and legend teller of the hacienda. No one ever saw him on a horse, but he walked as fast as a shooting star, even over long distances.

With an astonished look on his face, he stopped chewing his usual wad of tobacco and looked all around, seeking some explanation for such a discovery. A moment later he picked up the robust baby with great care and took him home. His house was nothing more than a long, narrow room at the rear of what had been the main house of the hacienda, an old house with terra cotta roof tiles and twisted posts, pitched on the flat tip of a small hill. Now that the ample living room was empty, it was used only for storing sacks of cotton when the harvest was very good and for several grain bins for the corn, bean, rice, and millet crops. In an adjacent room there was a gasoline generator which, to save fuel, was only fired up twice a day, once in the morning to cool the fresh milk that would later be sent to a distant milk cooperative, and again at night to enjoy the magic electric light for a short while.

In the back, in that room isolated from the rest of the house, Lupe lived with his wife, his five sons, and three daughters. Lupe, his wife and the girls slept and cooked in that room and the boys slept down the hill in a rustic cottage, where the cheese was made in the new part of the hacienda. There, between the old house on the hill and the cheese making shack, my grandfather was to be raised, a parasite son in a family that had always been a parasite itself.

It was December 21 when the discovery occurred, and by my calculations, it must have been in 1960, although my grandfather only talked about how the people on the hacienda Las Tres Marias and in the surrounding area would never forget the day he showed up by the iron gate because, at dawn that day the whole county had been shaken and awoken by the ear-splitting whir of a gigantic meteorite. They say it glowed with such intensity that its light shone through the stalks of the straw houses and between the cracks in the roof tiles of the stone houses. Those who were already awake -Lupe among them- recalled that it seemed as if the Nixtamalero had detached from the sky because it was an immense ball of fire with a great luminous tail that crossed the sky from the Honduran side and plunged into the sea, beyond the Gulf of Fonseca, into the Pacific Ocean.

At noon, Lupe went to show Don Felix the baby and tell him what happened. By that time, the rough ranch hand was already smitten by the little creature’s tranquil nature and lively, happy, curious eyes. The landowner, a practical but kind-hearted man, stood looking at the baby with a certain fascination.

“You’re spread pretty thin already, Lupe,” said Don Felix, stating the obvious just for the record, “but if you want to keep him, we’ll help you out a bit.”

And since it was just before Christmas, Don Felix added, smiling, “This little tyke came as an Aguinaldo, your Christmas bonus, Lupe”.

Lupe had never been fond of his own name, “Guadalupe”, because even though it was a sacred name for the Virgin Mary, it was still a woman’s name. He liked the word aguinaldo since the first time he heard it, and besides it wasn’t a very common name. So he thought, “Hell, I’m going to name him José Aguinaldo, so people don’t give him crap about his name like they did me!”

His five boys already had pretty religious names- Trinidad, Sacramento, Jesus, Santos and Cruz-, and aguinaldo, as he had understood it, had something to do with Christmas and on top of that was a boy’s name. So that’s how my grandfather was baptized: José Aguinaldo.

Soon they began to call him “Naldo,” and even more often by the diminutive “Naldito”, but his brothers and the other settlers’ kids called him “Nalguito” or “little butt”, which, far from annoying my grandfather, made him laugh, much to the surprise of the other kids.

In truth, everything amused my grandfather. Besides that he had a tranquil, pensive air about him that made him seem never quite present; and the unusual mix of calm, reflective moods and a jubilant spirit made him attractive to other people because he made them feel a special connection with him. He also had a highly developed sense of how to land himself in the middle of things, and of quickly fitting in. He was always poking about, as if looking for something, looking both high and low, both outside and inside of himself.

It was that intense searching perhaps that would lead him to cross paths with a strange character who would push him to emigrate early on towards San Salvador… the great capital city where everyone went to find better opportunities for survival, even though later on they would go just to seek refuge, fleeing a terrible civil war that would rage against the rural masses.

In El Salvador, other extraordinary circumstances would also make him emigrate towards the United States, joining him with hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans who undertook the greatest odyssey of their lives. They all sought what for so many years was called The American Dream. Nevertheless, my grandfather seemed to be looking for something else, propelled by a mysterious force to carry out a mission that not even he himself understood entirely.

As it happened, it was because of that search in the North that I came into the world in the United States of America: a surprising, increasingly unpredictable and ironic country which, despite being the land of the greatest freedom in the world, gave birth to one of the most awful worldwide conspiracies, one in which I -unsuspecting at first- was to be trapped with only one tool for survival.

It was to be found locked in the memoirs and the strange mission of my grandfather, a mission which was to become my own and for which he himself was to prepare me, without my realizing it, since I don’t even remember having known him.

 

CHAPTER VI

Love Eggs

When he was ten years old, my grandfather was an accomplished champion at gathering eggs and picking cotton. During the cotton harvest he was exempted from all chores on the hacienda, things like helping out the ranch hands in the barns, helping Lupe with the cheese making and helping his godmother Mariyita, Don Felix’s wife, in the kitchen. The cotton picking was enjoyable for him; besides, it represented a shared obligation to give one’s all at harvest time to get a little extra money in the family’s cash box, especially because the picking season fell around Christmas and New Year’s. But he did find it hard to depart from his every day routine alongside the cows, the calves, the turkeys, the hens, the ducks, the chickens, the parrot, the dogs, the cats, the pigs…that were an essential part of life on the hacienda. He would long to stay with Lupe, helping in the process of separating the fresh milk, extracting the cream, making the curd and preparing the cheeses.

However, what really excited my grandfather was gathering the eggs that the dozens of hens laid in a collection of nests scattered in different places. More than a great cotton picker, diligent kitchen and barn helper, and fledgling cheese maker, my grandfather had become a master “egg keeper”.

He already knew the locations of all the little hiding places and which hens laid in them. In any given dark, out-of-the-way corner that the hens used to discharge their eggs so that no one would find them, there my grandfather would be scooping up the egg, even before the hen had time to cackle. Mother Nature had played a dirty trick on hens: every time they laid an egg, they advertised it with a noisy and triumphant cackle.

“Go see, a hen out there somewhere just laid an egg!” Mariyita, the rancher’s wife would say on hearing the posturing cackle of the hens. But by that time my grandfather was already on his way in with the egg in his hand.

“Get a load of this kid, would ya,” the local women who helped in the kitchen would say in wonderment, “and how is it you know the hens have laid an egg without them even cackling? You’re a little wiz, ain’t you Naldo.”

My grandfather always responded with a playful smile, but the most amazing thing of all was that he knew when a duck had laid an egg. Ducks, unlike hens that make a big fuss, are silent. That’s why some say the hen was the world’s first publicist, since she advertised through her cackling that she had laid an egg, and in spite of the fact that duck eggs are bigger, more nutritious, and require less food to produce, people became accustomed to chicken eggs. But whether they were from chickens or ducks, the eggs in the countryside were more nutritious, because they were “love eggs”, meaning the male duck or rooster had played an active role in their creation, so the females laid fertile eggs. Without the participation of a male duck or rooster there was no “love” in “love egg”.

My grandfather felt a great fascination for those fertile eggs, because he was able to see the whole process, from when they were first laid until a chick hatched out of them. But there was something much more transcendent, something he sensed intuitively but wouldn’t fully understand until many years later and the significance of which I would come to understand from his writings. “In that moment”, my grandfather underlines in the notes of his life on Las Tres Marias, “I was unaware that it would be a ‘love egg’ which would contain the salvation of all animal life.”

His memoirs from those years were full of stories, observations and experiences that were shaping his character, and imbuing him with a deep attachment to things related to the countryside, the farm animals, and the mysteries that surrounded them all— mysteries that for him, thanks to a special condition, were manifest. For everyone else, they were matters both commonplace and incomprehensible.

In a part of his notes narrating the pleasant childhood nights at Las Tres Marias, when Don Felix ordered the generator to be started up, I discovered another of the great enigmas that my grandfather had left scattered through his notes.

The gas generator afforded a couple of magical hours of electric light per night on the hacienda, the only electric light for miles around, or so it was said. This novelty attracted the people of the village who lived beyond the front gate like moths to a flame. Seated in the corridor or on the hardened earth on the patio, young and old sat entranced by the booming radio that Don Felix tuned nightly to musical programs and radio comedies. The radio nights always ended with lively conversation, centered on telling stories or riddles. On one of those nights, Don Felix told the assembled crowd a riddle that for them was somewhat confusing:

“What is it that passes through water but doesn’t get wet?” he asked.

After the long silence which followed, and after some murmuring and giggling, suggesting that no one knew what to say, Don Felix, laughing, gave out the answer:

“A shadow, folks, a shadow!”

Amid the amazement and guffaws, my grandfather blurted out suddenly and with such confidence that he cut right through the jubilation:

“But the ones on the other side of the shadow, they do get wet, Don Felix,” he cried.

A bewildered look clouded over Don Felix’s usually smiling face.

“Always the clever one, eh Naldo,” he said, regaining a half smile and, impatient to satisfy the curiosity sparked by the outburst, he asked, “So, let’s see, explain this thing to me about the shadows on the other side.”

“It’s just that on the other side of the shadow is the owner of the shadow,” he answered, and he continued uninterrupted, “On the other side of your shadow is you; on the other side of mine is me; on the other side of the shadow of a horse is a horse, of a cow is a cow, of a chicken is a chicken; and if the shadow passes through water, the ones on this side don’t get wet, but the ones on the other side, they get soaked!”

Don Felix stared at him, flabbergasted, without knowing that the best was yet to come. And much to the amazement of both Don Felix and the rest of the gathering, my grandfather added:

“And if we grab any shadow and wrap it up- nice and tight- so tight it’s thin as a hair, then each tip of the hair is a point, and we can get inside that point to get to the other side of any shadow. Even the world has a shadow. And through the shadow you can go to another world just like this one.”

Just next to the text narrating this strange anecdote, my grandfather had written with broad strokes, again, the number 137!

CHAPTER VII

Bucolic Sex    

I began to get a pretty good grasp of my grandfather’s personality; especially through some episodes that he recounts from between pre-pubescence and the moment he left the hacienda.

The cotton fields at Las Tres Marias attracted large groups of people who came from all the surrounding villages and even from nearby towns like Uluazapa, San Alejo and Yucuaiquín. My grandfather was conscientious and reliable in the harvest. He stayed focused all day and consequently was easily able to pick upwards of 150 pounds, notable for a ten-year old. The majority of the other boys were playful and very slow, and by four in the afternoon, when Don Felix arrived riding his beautiful dapple-gray Peruvian horse which bore on its haunches “la romana”—an old scale which would be hung from a wooden beam to weigh and later annotate what each worker had managed to pick that day— my grandfather was already waiting with his sack stuffed, smiling and observing the others.

One by one they hung their sacks from the hook on the scale and Don Felix would call out the reading on the scale’s iron bar:

“Nalguito,” yelled Don Felix, calling him by his nickname to the amusement of all, “162 pounds”. Then he added, clearly making a play on words which launched a new wave of laughter: “Man oh man Nalguito, you did it again. You’re like La Piñica, always doing it.”

La Santos “Piñica” was one of those women who were always around at cotton and coffee picking times. She came to the picking to do double duty…manual and sexual.

“La Piñica” would have been around 30 and was strong and shapely with an attractive face and lots of sparkle. Unlike the other women who wore pants under their old dresses or faded skirts to protect their legs and their private parts from dust and insects, La Piñica wore just a dress with a loose hem that came halfway up her ankles, with no pants or undergarment. This was her “combat uniform”, meaning that, following a certain signal from one of the other pickers – potential customers- she would walk deep into the cotton field and find a dense thicket. There she would lie down between the rows, hike up her dress, and the worker would stealthily crouch down to the point of encounter, pull his member out of his fly, lower himself quickly down close to the meaty but slender legs of La Piñica, who, with her dress already hiked up, exhibited her taut white skin and her hairy mound. This would heighten the desire and the panting of the horny pickers and speed up their ecstasy. The encounters were quick and to the point. There was no kissing, no whispering, no sweet nothings, but the picker’s urges were satisfied and he left the cotton field “nest” triumphant. Then, in the tradition of the “alpha male”, he would let out a whoop as a signal of his fleeting coital achievement. Invariably, the other pickers would answer by yelling, laughing, and making off-color comments.

La Piñica, with professional indifference, fixed her dress and made note of the customer and the date of service in a dog-eared notebook. She was an all-around woman: she picked with the best of them, a single mother of four, easy-going in spite her strong personality, singer of Mexican rancheras, and a “woman for hire” who managed her business affairs efficiently. On payday she went down her list of satisfied customers, and with the same silence, discretion and speed with which she dispensed her brief and exquisite services right there in the cotton field, she collected her fees in the crowded and noisy patios of the hacienda.

La Piñica was terribly fond of my grandfather and looked at him with the eyes both of a mother and of a woman.

“When you’re big enough I’m gonna let you have a taste without charging” La Piñica used to say to my grandfather, flashing her strong white teeth which contrasted with her bronzed face, and later she finished off with a glimmer of passion, “What a shame, you’re not my kid and not old enough to be my man!”

“I already have another “Piñica”, Miss Santos,” responded my grandfather respectfully, smiling, with that precocious, self-assured air that made him more mysterious and attractive to girls his age, and even older women.

Sexual matters in the country were direct, transparent, primitive. The younger kids got their first sex education by simply observing the domestic animals mating- the dogs, chickens, pigs, cows. They lived during the day with sex in the animal kingdom, and at night with sex between adults. In the pitch dark they could hear the whimpers, the sighs and the rustling pita fiber beds or creaking canvas cots. Whether it came from parents or brothers with recently “abducted” sisters-in-law, sex was just a few inches from one’s own mat. It was ritualistic and quiet.

Nudity was not such a big deal as it was in the towns and cities. Here, the classroom where human anatomy was taught lay in the rivers. There children and adults bathed naked, and since it was the communal washtub, women of all ages went to the river to wash clothes, slapping it against the rocks, with their breasts exposed and their torso covered with only a thin undergarment, which when wet and tight against the skin, showed off the outlines of their buttocks and pubis.

Las Tres Marias river ran peaceful and clean. It cut the property of the same name in two and marked the property line at the high part of the hacienda. At its highest point, a smaller stream dumped its waters in it and formed a pool that was called, logically, the Meeting Pool.

The waters were clear and deep enough where it could easily cover a man and a half; to one side of the pool stood a huge cliff that the boys used to climb up so they could dive noisily into the pool from around ten feet up. Below the pool, the channel was wide and the current slow and that was the optimum site for clothes’ washing due to its large, flat rocks. It was crowded with women from the village. It was there that other, pastoral classes in anatomy and sex education took place. The adult men bathed in the nude but stayed where the water reached their waists; the women washed with their torso above water but covered up with slips and baggy underpants. The children and adolescents frolicked naked in the pool or in the washing spot, which was about 30 yards below, unconcerned with their nakedness. It was the appearance of pubic hair that established the level of modesty; nevertheless, it also established the level of audacity to which the young men were willing to go, and this depended on the female spectators who were washing clothes at any given time.

If there were older women present, the climbing and diving happened fast, accompanied by raucous laughter; but if there were only young women washing, especially if there were virgins among them, the diving turned into a sexual rite, full of erotic codes.

Atop the bluff, the young ranch hands of the hacienda lined up naked, accompanied by other boys from the neighboring village, and amid laughter they shook their penises until they got an erection. They stroked and stroked zealously, and right at the moment when their manly juices sprang forth towards the water, they too leapt with a triumphant howl and peals of laughter. The girls, some 50 yards downstream, became flustered in silence or exchanged whispers and muffled giggles. And the first stirrings of their libido ran up and down their bodies and throughout their senses until they blushed. Some, the more daring ones, immersed their hands in the water and stroked themselves subtly and naturally.

It was a ritual as much a part of the landscape as the daily mating they shared with the farm animals by day, and at night with their family members, crowded into their shacks and adobe houses. For that reason it was normal, traditional and accepted that the randiest boys, when they could no longer resist their sexual impulses, simply “carried off” an adolescent girl, and after the act was consummated in some out-of-the-way spot they initiated a conjugal life, one as simple, natural and difficult as their surroundings. The earlier the men and women started their sexual activity, the sooner they began having children, contributing to a runaway population growth that within a few years was to prove tragic for El Salvador.

That was the environment in which my grandfather spent his first years, and in spite of becoming more and more handsome as he grew taller and stronger, he never openly went naked in the Meeting Pool, and that made the local women more curious.

When everyone went swimming, he entertained himself by playing with the fresh-water shrimp, the crawfish, and the slippery minnows. He spent long stretches up to his neck in the water, feeling them with his fingers in their underwater caves, as if speaking to them, unaware of the playful racket and genital upheaval of his step brothers and friends, and seeming to ignore the furtive glances that the scantily-clad girls downstream shot his way.

In spite of this demeanor, he was always part in the group’s mischief and little sexual games without being an active participant. This never sparked any suspicion or doubt about his virility. He was just thought of as a strange, absent-minded but good kid. Besides, his candid way of speaking and the aloof but joyful air he had about him at all times, inspired a certain respect.

The greatest achievement of his gang in its libidinous exploits, so typical of their youth and their rural culture, was to take Olympia- known as la comadre Pimpa- to the house on the hill, where the generator was, and whose main room doubled as a space for cotton storage during harvest time. It was a game where everyone knew what was going to happen but was still suspenseful up to the last minute. Sacramento, one of his step brothers and ranch hand number three in hierarchy after Lupe and Trinidad, was the one charged with courting la comadre Pimpa, a solidly built woman with pleasant features who was approaching 35 and helped out Mariyita in the kitchen. She lived in a neighboring village, with her four children, without a husband, and had a burning, hidden sexuality under her skin that men were able to sense even though she was proper and circumspect. In spite of her sex appeal and no lack of suitors, she limited her sexual activities to occasional participation in the game that the young ranch hands had devised. She was discreet; low profile.

“Come on up to the house on the hill, comadre Pimpa,” Sacramento would say, almost in a whisper, exploiting the fact that Mariyita was not around. “After the generator’s turned off, I’ll be waiting there for you.”

“No, because you always say you’re gonna be alone and you trick me,” retorted the woman while puffing on one of her hand-rolled cigarettes made from coarse tobacco.

“No way, missy, I’m gonna be totally, completely alone, just for you. I’m gonna give you five bucks and you’ll spend a little time with me. C’mon…swing by.”

“No. You’re the biggest liar Sacra, and besides, I don’t want comadre Mariyita to find out” Pimpa would say, but with a complicit, barely perceptible smile. Then she’d take one foot out of her sandal and rub the calf of her other leg softly and sensuously, in a body language full of anxiousness and pleasure, something like “Chronicle of a Fuck Foretold”. That was the signal she sent unconsciously that she was seriously considering going. Sacramento, the sharp young man that he was, knew how to read her and left the kitchen smiling.

At night, after shutting down the generator, Sacramento, three of his brothers, my grandfather and another two local ranch hands, would arrange the piles of cotton sacks in a semicircle that almost reached the ceiling. It was like a bullring, in that the only entrance was the door of the main room of the old house. The biggest boys would get naked and hide behind the stacked-up sacks. La comadre Pimpa waited for everybody to go to bed and went up a steep side road, preferring not to go up the cobblestone. That way she could avoid anyone from the landowner’s house down below seeing the yellow lantern she carried to make her way.

One of those nights, when Sacramento saw the little flickering light coming up the hill, he went in the house and told his accomplices:

“Take cover, here comes la comadre Pimpa. Stay quiet and don’t you laugh!”

That’s when the ritual that had taken place several times before began. La comadre Pimpa arrived and knocked lightly on the door. Sacramento, naked, opened the door and invited her in.

“You alone, Sacra?”

“Yeah, I am, come on in,” he said maliciously, pulling her softly by one arm, “Hurry up or they’ll see you from down below.”

“Hmmm…, you always say that. Are you messin’ with me?” Pimpa asked lewdly, her voice agitated by a delightful tingling that began radiating from her navel.

It was at that moment, when she seemed to be having doubts, that Sacramento, with a vigorous tug, dragged her inside the improvised ring and, running a rough hand and thick, calloused fingers under her shirt, lightly caressed a nipple.

La Pimpa, in spite of having had four children, still had taut, rounded breasts due to the constant exercise she got working around the hacienda, and that caress was the button that completely broke down her resistance.

“Wait, already, let me take off my panties,” she said in a muffled voice, and without hesitation, trembling, she undressed and lay on some empty burlap sacks. In the shadows, the lines of her shapely body and imposing mound could be made out. The boys, looking down from on top of the sacks of cotton, were struck speechless gazing at her.

The act of Pimpa’s undressing and lying down gave the alert for the lustful operetta to begin, staged in the middle of the rural Salvadoran night. At a shout from Sacramento, the group of lads leapt into the spontaneous ring, naked, laughing like naughty cherubim, with erect cocks shaking in the air like machetes in a lascivious dance, lit by the ghostly glow from Pimpa’s flickering lantern.

The woman began to writhe with pleasure on finding herself surrounded by so many young bucks, and after some feigned expressions of protest for having been tricked again, she went along with their game. After making them swear on their mothers that they would never utter a peep about it to anyone, she spread her legs wide and proceeded to dispatch them one by one, relieving the pent up desires of the past few months. My grandfather and “Crucito”, the youngest of his stepbrothers, merely “audited” the proceedings. They didn’t undress and stayed on top of the piles of sacks, their chins propped on their hands, smiling, fascinated by the spectacle.

After half an hour of gyrations and whimpers, plastered over with sex and pleasure, Pimpa grabbed her clothes, her five-bucks bill and her dim lantern. Stealthily, she slipped out the same way where she had come in, lit a rumpled cigarette and swore at Sacramento, between mischievous smiles, that it was the last time she would take him at his word.

CHAPTER VIII

 The Plague

For my grandfather, that ritual with la comadre Pimpa was fun, but he felt no motivation to join in. On the other hand, the thing that kept him always engaged and on a constant high was the work around the hacienda: from chasing after love eggs, tossing out corn and millet for the hens and the ducks, feeding the pigs, and helping to light the stoves in the kitchen— even accompanying the ranch hands at dawn down to the pastures in the lower part of the hacienda to round up the cows for milking. Still half asleep, he had to walk fast enough to keep up with the ranch hands, who rode along singing rancheras and talking about girls or telling tall tales, lit only by the gleam of beautiful Venus, the Nixtamalero of the dawn.

Of all those rituals, the one that really appealed to him was the one that took place every day in the cheese making room. There the officiating priest was Lupe, who was bent on teaching my grandfather- the acolyte- the secrets to making an excellent-tasting cheese. The cheese making room was a structure with walls made of round sticks to provide ample ventilation; the roof was made of terra cotta tiles and it was anchored to a base of talpetate which served as a floor, across from the main house of the hacienda.

Talpetate was a kind of solid, clayey earth, which settled in layers over the ancient volcanic deposits. Its name, like most names in northern Central America, derived from Nahuatl, from tlalli, earth, and petatl, carpet. Petate was also the name given to a bedroll, woven from fresh palm fronds which displaced peasants used in small, cramped rooms in the cities where they attempted to seek out a living.

In fact, the whole main house of the hacienda- the kitchen, the cheese making room, the barn, the house on the hill- was all built on talpetate. Without venturing very far, all the hills surrounding the hacienda Las Tres Marias were talpetate and volcanic rock. The hacienda was in a flat little valley and the only thing on top of the talpetate was a sufficient layer of topsoil to grow crops. The 750 acres of flat land were irrigated even during the driest season thanks to the dam Don Felix had built on the river Las Tres Marias, below the Meeting Pool. There it formed a reservoir that, through the force of gravity, sent the precious liquid towards the entire lower part of the hacienda, all through a system of canals dug in the soft earth. For that reason Las Tres Marias was always green, its cattle fat, its harvests plentiful and its settlers rarely hungry. “Without water, none of this is worth a damn”, Don Felix was often heard to say while looking at the river, consoled by its clear waters and strong current.

To one side of the cheese making room the ranch hands, including Lupe’s sons and my grandfather, slept on hammocks and petates. The other side was Lupe’s domain: five long vats made from hollowed logs and several cubical wooden presses whose top cover could be tightened downwards, turning an enormous wooden screw. Outside the cheese making room, under a shed, was Titán, a huge and imposing Brown Swiss bull who had the grave responsibility of “mounting” the cows of the herd when they were in heat. He was a handsome representative of the phenotype of his breed, one that stayed calm most of the time but became enraged when he sensed oxen in the vicinity. He was the Cerberus of the cheese making room.

Every morning, the fresh milk was poured into the first canoga, as the vats were known, and a tablet of rennet was added. My grandfather was amazed when Lupe would explain how the rennet, produced from cow stomachs, could be used to coagulate its own milk.

“Reticulum, Rumen, Omasium, Abomasium!” my grandfather repeated in silence every time he dropped that miraculous tablet into the milk. “Reticulum, Rumen, Omasium, Abomasium!” This was another astonishing thing. Cows had four stomachs. My grandfather never went to school, but he did learn to read by leafing through the Bristol Almanacs that Don Felix had and which were full of little illustrated stories and lots of interesting facts. One day, Don Felix surprised my grandfather, lost in one of those little orange books, and said, teasing him a bit: “Ahah, Naldo, taught yourself to read, did ya’, son?”

My grandfather looked up at him distractedly and said decorously, smiling,” No, Don Felix, not yet, but I was just seeing here that it says that cows have four stomachs, Reticulum, Rumen, Omasium, and Abomasium. Isn’t that funny? That must be why they spend all day chewing!” Don Felix twisted the tip of his mustache and, thinking aloud, said: “I would have loved to have met the woman who brought you into the world.”

“I came all by myself,” my grandfather replied, smiling more broadly.

At first, Lupe used to place a bench for my grandfather to stand on so he could see over the edge of the vat and so he could show him how, soon after adding the rennet tablet, a thick cream rose to the surface. Then, with a ladle made from morro or jícaro gourds, he would carefully skim the cream and pour it into a cube. Morro was a hard-shelled fruit that grew to the size of a bowling ball, which was dried and cut in half or into quarters. In half it became a huacal and was used as a bowl or multi-use vessel, in quarters as a ladle or cup. These were basic elements of Pre-Columbian dishes that are now museum pieces.

Once the cream was removed and put in a cube, Lupe would cut a papaya leaf and with its stalk used like a siphon, suck out the whey that had remained under the cream and spit it into another container. One part of the ultra-rich cream was destined for the kitchen; the other part was placed inside a drill-cloth sack, a generous quantity of salt was added and it was hung up. As the days passed, the milk fat “sweated” from the sack, and inside remained an exquisite, though salty “sack butter”. It was the most expensive kind in the market.

After skimming the cream came the masterly part of the cheese making process: the curd making. Lupe’s huge, rough, and scarred hands became delicate instruments that pressed the loose lumps of coagulated milk little by little downwards, so carefully that it converted into a mass of clumped affection. He would close his eyes, spread his legs for better balance, becoming one with the vat— one minute serious, focused, the next minute smiling with a flicker of pleasure—and with the calm and care of a surgeon, he began shaping a great sheet of curd, smooth and creamy, clumped at the bottom of the canoga.

“You gotta do it slow, so you don’t ‘spook’ the curd,” he would say to my grandfather with the air of an experienced master,” ’cause then the cheese ain’t no good and you waste it.”

My grandfather, perched on his bench, his hands in the whey, immersed himself in a duet with Lupe, both of them clumping the curd with smooth, rhythmic movements, until they both started to nod off, smiling at the ceiling, swaying softly with the rhythm of their arms and hands. It was the symphony of the curd, which the two of them executed effectively every day around noon.

Later, with a sharp knife and with long, sure movements down and across the vat, Lupe would cut the compacted curd on the bottom of the whey, and later he removed each brick and held it in one hand while making quick cuts with the other, lengthwise, sideways and across the top, turning the brick into little cubes of curd, a little bigger than a die, and flinging them into a second vat, that was already full of brine. They were quick, precise cuts like those of a master chef. The whey that was left behind after the curd was removed was boiled in an enormous pot to extract the last milk product: cottage cheese, that grainy paste, first cousin to cheese, and a faithful, voluptuous accompaniment to grilled tortillas. And there was still enough whey left over after taking out the cottage cheese to dump into an old trough for the pigs and piglets to gorge on. The dogs of the hacienda waited at the ready until the pigs had drunk, and then it was their turn to lap up the delicious liquid. Nothing was wasted.

The following day the ritual would be repeated, only that the cubes of curd from one vat were passed over to the next, and these would harden with the salt as they went from one vat to another, until the consistency was right for them to be kneaded by hand and the lump placed in wooden molds, covered with a towel made of raw cotton. There they would stay for a couple of months, getting turns on the vise, squeezing the curd until it eventually became a huge brick of delicious cheese. Any small mistake in the process would open up the possibility that, on uncovering the bricks after several weeks, they would be rancid, insipid, or even worse, full of worms.

“Hey, pop,” my grandfather said to Lupe one day when they were clumping the curds, “milk is like God, isn’t it?”

“What?” Lupe said, surprised. “How so?”

“The cream is like the Holy Spirit that comes from God, and the curd is like Jesus, who comes from the Holy Spirit,” he said.

“Really?” Lupe egged him on, smiling like a fool.

“Yeah, we’re kinda like cheese. That’s why some of us turn out good, others just so-so, and others can even get full of worms.”

Lupe laughed out loud, amazed, and said to him:

“Only you would come up with such nonsense, Naldo”

In a short time my grandfather had developed such skill, that his cheeses had a creaminess, a saltiness and a texture superior to Lupe’s, which already enjoyed a certain notoriety.

With the passing years, his diligence, skill and perennial good nature earned Naldito, who one day had appeared on the doorstep of the hacienda, a special place in Don Felix’s heart, as well as in the hearts of the other farmers and workers on the hacienda and in the village. And now, on the eve of his fifteenth birthday, he was a seasoned cowhand, expert cheese maker and kitchen helper, and zealous egg collector. This last skill was to provide my grandfather with a surprise that would influence him for the rest of his life.

One day, my grandfather recounts in his notes, it shocked him to find a huge egg drop in a nest under a granary. On plucking it up he realized it was a gigantic duck’s egg. He took it to Mariyita, who, after holding a conference with the other women in the kitchen, speculating as to how a duck had managed to squeeze under the granary and without the hens getting in the way of her business, settled the matter by giving my grandfather the choice of finding the duck’s nest or eating the egg himself.

It was a beautiful egg, and without giving it another thought, my grandfather put it back in the hen’s nest. After three weeks, he went back to check the nest, and amid the brood of yellow chicks, a little duck’s head stuck out playfully. So back to the kitchen he went to consult Mariyita again and she, accustomed to making quick, wise decisions, told him:

“Well, Naldo, since you refused to eat the egg, keep the duck and take care of it.”

Once again the matter was settled.

When it was bigger, he took the duck to the cheese making room, made him a nest out of drill cloth like the kind used to wrap and squeeze the cheeses, and baptized him Pascual. Everyone was surprised by the name but he said simply that he had seen it in a Bristol Almanac.

Pascual began to get handsome. Soon he learned to follow my grandfather, until one day he followed him to the Meeting Pool, and there he swam blissfully next to him, who took pleasure in watching him swim elegantly and enthusiastically about on the cool waters of the river pool.

At first he slept in the nest that had been fashioned for him in the cheese making room next to his mat, but since he was an “Indian” duck, originating in the jungles of Darien, between Panamá and Colombia- and they are conditioned to live as much in the water as in the forest- he figured out how to climb the tree where the hens slept and moved his bedroom there on the lower branches.

But one day in December my grandfather noticed that egg laying had decreased and some of the eggs had odd shapes and bumpy shells. He took them to Mariyita and, after a cursory examination, with a gloomy expression; she cracked one that came out with the white almost like water.

“Good God!” she exclaimed with anguish, “the plague is upon us!”

The “plague” was a disease that the veterinarians called Newcastle, which attacked mostly chickens and hens, and in the succeeding days battered the hacienda and the surrounding farms relentlessly. The hens began to get sad with the onset of fever, panting and letting out little sneezes. They curled up listlessly, with blisters on their eyes, and in their most critical phase, they twisted their necks and turned in on themselves. Then began the difficult task of slaughtering them and burying them where the dogs couldn’t get at them, and when the number of dead ones grew, they were burned. Suddenly there wasn’t a hen anywhere nearby. No eggs, no chickens. Just a few ducks and geese resisted the attack, Pascual among them, who just kept climbing up to his usual spot in the hens’ tree, now alone in its languid, empty branches.

My grandfather looked on desolately as the best-laying hens, the fattest chickens, and the proudest, liveliest roosters fell one by one. He knew all of them, and they had become accustomed to his presence; and in the moment of throwing them in the hole that was dug behind the stone fence, one by one, he gave them a final caress.

Don Felix and Mariyita left to spend Christmas in San Miguel, and to leave behind the sadness that had closed in on the hacienda, and to make sure to send vaccinations, disinfectants and vitamins to try and save the few strong chicks that had survived, regenerating in that way a new brood.

December 24 rolled around. In the old house on the hill, in the back room, there was more bad news: the turkey which they had been fattening and nurturing for months, looking forward to serving it on Christmas Eve, had been found dead that morning. It was the first time they were going to have a turkey, and Lupe’s entire family had been praying in recent days, begging God for it to be spared, at least until it could turned into the banquet they had been dreaming about for so many months. And now they would have to make do with what little was left of their share of corn from when Don Felix had emptied the granary and divided it up among those who worked on the hacienda and the poorest villagers.

Halfway through that same day my grandfather was seen approaching, not from the main part of the hacienda but from the opposite side, from the dam. He came holding a bundle. It was Pascual.

“Here you are, mom,” he said to his stepmother, offering her the beautiful duck, who moved his head back and forth, looking around, “so we can eat him tonight.”

“How are we going to eat Pascual, Naldo? He’s your duck. He’s like a dog to you!” said Lupe’s wife, who was usually laconic and spoke only in monosyllables and grunts.

There was a silence as dense as the knot forming in Lupe’s throat.

“Don’t feel bad, mom” my grandfather answered, and with his voice lowering slightly, he added “I already took him for a walk, we went swimming at the dam, I took him to see the cows and to the cheese making room. He’s happy, knowing we are going to eat down to his last bone.”

Emotions were running high, and even Sacramento, the tough guy in the family, was moved. Lupe’s eyes welled up and he told his wife with an encouraging gesture: “Go on and cook ‘im up”, and turning to Santos, the son who was the same age as my grandfather, ordered him, “You, go down to comadre Pimpa’s and compadre Tano’s and tell ’em to come around later to eat with us…it’s Christmas today and nobody’s gonna go hungry.”

He exchanged a look with my grandfather, and without moving a muscle on his face, with a fleeting glimmer of gratitude in his eyes, approved my grandfather’s generous gesture with a faint nod.

That night Pascual swam for the last time inside a huge stockpot and fed more that thirty people from Las Tres Marias.

“Hey Naldo” asked Chungo, the most outgoing and cheerful of his stepbrothers while chewing away like there was no tomorrow, “What did you feed that animal, the sonofabitch never ends.”

My grandfather answered with one of his usual cryptic answers:

“It’s ’cause inside Pascual there was another Pascual!”

CHAPTER IX

 The Departure 

A few weeks later, when the usual tranquility and routine had settled back in and the racket of the hens was coming back again, Don Felix called my grandfather over and told him that from that day forward he would be assigned a horse and would be promoted to foreman. Lupe was so proud he could barely contain himself.

That was the beginning of a marvelous period for my grandfather when he began to gallop freely through the pastures, rounding up the cattle without having to go running after them. He found out that Güico, the horse that nobody else wanted because it tossed its head clumsily when walking and besides had a droopy ear- the reason for the nickname- was really a strong, efficient, wise, and happy horse. When the time came to make him go after the stubborn cattle that strayed from the roundup he became a deft steed who skillfully controlled the herd. Other times, with double-traction agility, he would take my grandfather up to the hilltops at sunset for him to watch enraptured as the sun became a huge orange ball that lit up the sky and sank into the sea, taking with it the fine line of its golden horizon.

Boy and mount began understanding each other splendidly. In the meantime, my grandfather was already developing a man’s body and a handsome visage, and with the cowboy look, his cheerful nature and his pure heart, the coquettish looks coming his way from the prettiest girls in the county multiplied.

It was on one of those afternoons as he was coming down from the hills- stopping at the river, as usual, to water the horse- when he had a strange encounter. He would normally dismount with a leap and then throw himself face down in the river alongside Güico but a little upstream from where the horse dunked his snout so as not to drink water seasoned with spittle. Suddenly, as he was drinking the cool water that runs calm and clear in that part of the river, he managed to make out the reflection of passing bird hovering above him, but actually it was that of a short man sitting on a rock on the opposite shore. He had taken his shoes off and, dangling his feet in the water, smiled amicably at my grandfather and greeted him with his arm outstretched. Next to him was an enormous barrel-shaped basket like the ones used by itinerant vendors who from time to time passed through, going from village to village selling bread. It was a scarce commodity in those god-forsaken fields and was therefore in demand. There were people, above all children, who could go for months without seeing a piece of those wheat delights that these foot peddlers brought from faraway towns.

There were some peddlers who, in addition to selling bread, pulled teeth. Just like that, with no more anesthesia than a mouthful of alcohol and with no other instrument than a pair of pliers. Dentist and bread seller: a valuable combination in those times and in those remote places.

“I only sell bread,” the dark, chubby little man clarified courteously when my grandfather asked him if he could pull out some of his stepmother’s molars—for days she had been walking around with a rag wrapped around her jaw, smeared with menthol and herb of grace.

“I don’t like to pull teeth because that makes people feel pain and suffering,” he added, “me, I like to bring joy and pleasure, with tasty bread of unbeatable quality.”

My grandfather thought that what the stranger said was funny and liked the amusing way he said it.

“And you, Naldito,” he went on “I’m going to give you a treat, one you’ll never be able to forget,” he said.

My surprised grandfather asked him, smiling:

“So, my friend, howdya know my name?”

“It’s just that I know my clientele well,” the old man responded with self-assurance, handing him as he spoke a round, golden roll, sprinkled with sugar and wrapped in a dried cornhusk. “Here, this bread is special and they bring it to me all the way from the Estrella, in San Salvador, just for me, but I want you to taste it!”

“What’s this star you’re talking about, sir?” my grandfather asked anxiously, and the old man, laughing, answered:

“From the Estrella bakery, that is, and it’s sweet egg bread, made only with love eggs.”

“Sweet egg bread?” he asked again.

“Yes, sir, the best there is,” he answered. And making a mysterious gesture, gazing at him with a challenging look, he added, “If you eat it, you’ll never get over the urge to go to the Estrella to taste it again.”

When my grandfather sank his teeth into the spongy, sweet ball of bread, it seemed like he’d gone to heaven. He had never tasted anything like it and the delightful treat that melted in his mouth made my grandfather close his eyes and he even saw faint stars…At that, the old man interrupted his ecstasy.

“Listen here, Naldito,” he told him confidently, “when you go to San Salvador, go to my house. I live in Colonia Guadalupe, Pasaje 1, number 37. I’m going to give you the key right now. It’s in a place they call Soyapango. You can’t miss it. Just remember Soya and the number 1-37.”

And hoisting the wicker basket onto his shoulder, he smiled resolutely, got back on the path that followed the river, and disappeared into the dense twilight, heading east, towards San Alejo. Behind him tiny whirlwinds playfully kicked up piles of unsuspecting leaves.

A few mornings after that meeting with the strange and cheerful bread vendor, when my grandfather and Lupe got up early to admire the majesty of Venus, the Nixtamalero, from the corridor of the house on the hill, my grandfather broke the news: “I’m leaving for the capital, tata,” he said with absolute calm.

Lupe uttered that sound that affirms and inquires at the same time, and my grandfather continued:

“Famine is heading this way, and awful things, worse than the plague. People are going to die like the hens.”

“Well, you always seem to predict what’s going to happen” Lupe said, sucking on a cigar butt without taking his eyes off the enormous star, “and you’re a grown man now”.

“I’ll be more help to you if I go there,” my grandfather said in consolation.

Lupe remained silent a while and his only reaction to such heart-rending news came in a tone that sounded like a warning, since he said it wagging his index finger: “I’m only going to ask you one thing…that over there where you’re headed, don’t let anybody call you Naldito. You’ve got another name, José, and lots of Josés go by Chepe. That’s better, let people call you Chepe, ya hear?”

“You got it, tata,” my grandfather assured him and, staring at him, added, “though me, what I’d like is to be called Lupe, just like you.”

Deep inside the tanned heart of the old ranch hand, unfamiliar feelings were stirred up again by those things my grandfather said when it was least expected. He looked at him again, then towards Venus and for the first time in his life, he put his arm around his shoulders.

On the hacienda and in the village there was a great silence the day my grandfather left. The feeling in the air was as if the plague had reared its head again. Even the hens and the cows were quieter than usual.

But my grandfather left, like a passing breeze, in the same way they saw him come and go always, fetching eggs, making cheese, rounding up cows, bathing in the river, helping to light the stoves and grind the corn in the kitchen. Putting Güite through his paces.

When he climbed atop the piles of tied-down cotton sacks that the Jeep Land Rover was taking to deliver to the cotton cooperative, my grandfather was radiant, his hair gleaming with the gel that Don Felix had given him along with a couple of his old cotton shirts. They had starched them for him so he’d be presentable when he got to San Salvador.

Lupe watched him through the cracks in the walls of the cheese making room. He was kneading curd to put into one of the cheese molds, and he suddenly realized it was the last time he would see him there, under the same iron gate of the hacienda where he found him. And silently, the swarthy old ranch hand, his soul calloused by his precarious, difficult life, shed plump tears that gave an extra saltiness to the ball of cheese.

Under the same gate, the sun behind her, someone was waiting for the truck to pull out.

“Naldito,” she cried out. It was la Santos Piñica. It had been three years since she had shown up for the cotton picking, and the rumors and various versions of what had become of her had faded with time.

“I dreamed about you two nights ago and felt something was happening to you. I’ve been walking since yesterday to come say good-bye,” she said, between anguished and relieved. She was thinner, more sun-baked and with locks of gray hair sprouting on either side of her forehead.

“I knew you’d come niña Piñica,” he said cheerfully as the Land Rover gained speed, “Sheez, we’ve been expecting you for days. You’ve been missed at picking time, but I knew you were busy!”

As they crossed through the village, people came to the doors of their shacks to say good-bye, surprised to see la Piñica, as if possessed, yelling back and forth with my grandfather. She was running obstinately behind the truck while he waved good-bye to everybody, flashing his perennial smile.

They forded Las Tres Marias river and la Piñica, with goat-like skill, leapt from rock to rock, without falling or slowing down, and followed the truck until it began groaning up the steep, stony hill that led from the Tres Marias Valley to a mesa; and from there the road led towards Uluazapa.

“One of these days I’ll come back for you, niña Piñica,” cried my grandfather for the last time.

La Santos Piñica dropped behind little by little, until she stopped dead and managed to catch a glimpse of him waving wildly good-bye.

“God be with you, Naldito!” she answered with the last of her breath.

She sat to one side of the rough road on a flat rock, and- just like Lupe- her hardened heart cracked for a while, and then la Piñica cried out of sadness and happiness at the same time. She had managed to see my grandfather before he left for San Salvador, but knew it would be the last time. She cried like a mother and like a woman because that’s how she had loved him since she first saw him picking cotton with singular skill when he was just a child. And she had seen him grow into a dashing young man.

In the end, la Piñica had cried the sweetest tears that had ever escaped from inside her. Perhaps because she sensed that not long thereafter, she too would take her leave of the world: a horrific civil war that was just brewing would sweep her up along with it. She would be left lying in some scrubland on the Salvadoran coast, a bullet from a G3 rifle in her chest, looking towards the sky; smiling in peace in her final agony, recalling that last time she saw Naldito, waving good-bye, happy and radiant, with his hair gleaming in the sun- his used, well-starched shirt- carrying the eternal hope of la Santos Piñica with him towards new worlds.

(Will continue with Chapter X  in PART III…)

 

PART THREE

Chepe Soya

 

“It would seem that the slaughter of Indians, after the insurrection had been completely crushed (Anastasio Aquino uprising, 1833), foreshadowed the massacre that would occur 100 years later under similar circumstances.

-Alastair White, from his book, “El Salvador”.

 

 

Chapter X

 From Las Tres Marias to Soyapango

The road from Las Tres Marias to San Miguel was long and arduous due to the roughness of the road which wound through hills and pastures in an endless sea of talpetate. They passed through Uluazapa — a hot, sleepy, rocky village — stopping for a while to have a cocoa, rice and calabash seed horchata across from the church of San Benito (the patron saint of Uluazapa, along with Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception). My grandfather recalled the three times he had come with Lupe and his brothers to see the Dance of San Benito that was performed once a year, and constituted one of the main attractions featured in the town festival. At that time the stretch of road from Las Tres Marias to Uluazapa seemed really long because it was about a four-hour walk, but for a bunch of ranch kids like them it was a world full of colors, music, food vendors and electric light…the whole day! It was like going to Disneyland.

The greatest present my grandfather ever received in his childhood was a San Benito medal that Lupe had given him but that, after a few months, had rusted due to the cheap material. Still, it was the only piece of “jewelry” he had and he appreciated it as such.

“This medal is going to protect you from ‘The Evil One’,” Lupe had told him when he put it around his neck on a piece of string “And if he ever appears in front of you, you say to him, ‘ patermetro satanas!’, and San Benito, who is the toughest saint for standing up to the devil, he’ll scare him away.”

Lupe was referring to the incantation that is written on the medal in long strings of initials. The most well known, VRS, stood for vade retro Satana! Even though Lupe’s version of Latin was pretty much of his own invention, it sounded similar. In the end, the string holding the medal broke one day while my grandfather was working the curd into shape. It fell into the vat and he was never able to find it. From time to time he wondered if maybe it had ever turned up in somebody’s cheese. “Then that cheese would ward off hunger and the devil at the same time!” he said to himself, smiling.

With a slightly nostalgic feeling brought on by the San Benito medal, he got back in the Land Rover and, after another hour and a half, my grandfather Naldito was able to see the landing strip that the Cotton Cooperative had in El Papalón, on the edge of the Inter-American Highway. Taking paved streets from there in a short while they were in San Miguel de la Frontera, the bustling capital of the province of the same name. The city was built in an ancient territory of iguanas that were equally happy living on the rooftops as in the tops of the few trees that still stood in the districts, and it was spread above a sweeping valley at the foot of the conical and elegant Chaparrastique Volcano — “Place of Beautiful Orchards” in Poton language. This was as far as Naldito had ever ventured from home, and even then it had only been a couple of times in his entire life.

He slept on a soft, wide hammock in Don Felix’s house, and the next day he awoke with the light cast at dawn by Venus, the Nixtamalero. Then he boarded an old van with other crammed-in, sleepy passengers heading towards San Salvador, a place he had heard so much about, but which sounded to him like a place that was so far away it might not even exist. The van left San Miguel and soon he could make out the imposing mass of the Chaparrastique Volcano.

He would only arrive in the capital after almost four hours of gulping down roads and panoramas. As he got farther from the view of Chaparrastique, my grandfather began leaving bits and pieces of heart and memories strewn along the entire length of the Inter-American. He dozed, with one of his Bristol Almanacs — his toys and treasures — squeezed tightly in his hands, and between his legs a woven sack that contained a few totopostes — hard-toasted tortillas— and love eggs that Pimpa had fixed for him, “so you won’t go hungry on the road.”

With a buzzing in his head that intimated mild carsickness, he closed his eyes and saw once again the sparkling light that had enveloped him when he bit into the egg bread from “Estrella” that the mysterious little man had given him. He chewed on memories that quickly made him feel glad inside and calmed him down at the same time. “And how is it that guy knew my name? And how did he convince me to come to the capital?” he wondered, recalling the encounter with the mysterious baker. Later, he fell into a deep sleep.

The screeching of the market women on the Cuscatlán Bridge, which stretched majestically over the wide and pompous current of the Lempa River — which in Nahuatl means “At Water’s Edge” — woke him abruptly. The traditional mixed pupusas, those surprising and delicious corn tortillas, filled with ground beans, dense cheese and soft pork, were an essential snack that reigned as the ubiquitous ancestral Salvadoran dish par excellence. They were the Salvadoran version of Mexican tacos except that all the ingredients were cooked in their own exquisite package. They were the cousins to the South American arepas.

But being on the shore of what was then the majestic Lempa River, it was a must to try the exotic fish pupusas that stood out in the long list of offerings shouted out with shrill, nasal voices: tortillas with grilled beef, fried fish, cassava with pork rind sprinkled with pepescas — those tiny, dried, salty fried fish which used to abound in Salvadoran rivers when they hadn’t yet become dusty, dry riverbeds— sodas, fruit drinks, slices of watermelon and green mango with lime and algüaishte — the seasoning powder of pre-Columbian origin made from pumpkin or ayote squash seeds — all kinds of foodstuffs were shoved in the windows in fierce competition for the few cents the passengers carried.

Perfectly synchronized between shouts rose an impudent cry from a jocular vendor who offered ice-cold water from the Lempa River, “¡Cooolempaw-water!” which in Spanish, “Laguelempelada” sounded like “they sniff it when is peeled back” and had a clear Freudian double sense. This famous cry spiced up the mood of the passengers and vendors alike with a pinch of humor and wit.

The driver let the passengers get out for a few moments to stretch their legs and eat something. A “four eyes” — those comical fish that swam on the surface of the water with two eyes above water and two under water, like a double periscope scouting out potential food above while watching out for predators below— lay fried atop a beautiful tortilla in my grandfather’s hand while he, without even giving it a nibble, looked spellbound at the magnificent landscape that opened up before him: the Cuscatlan Bridge, stretched across the Lempa River. It was a hanging bridge which was christened in 1942 and which, along with 54 other bridges — including the other hanging bridge on the lower channel of the Lempa, the magnificent Golden Bridge, almost a kilometer long from end to end, the longest in Central America, designed and built by the same company that built the Brooklin bridge and the San Francisco Golden Gate — would soon after be destroyed by Salvadoran guerrilla sappers.

The towers that held the enormous cables stood out from afar; to his right, my grandfather was captivated by the huge 15th of September hydroelectric dam, roaring 400 yards upriver from the bridge. The dam on the river Las Marias, which had always seemed to him like a large structure, ingenious and complex — designed and built by Don Felix himself — now seemed like something so simple and small compared with the magnificent floodgates, and the enormous outpouring of turbulent waters from the Lempa River which came out at the foot of the dam.

The Lempa was the most extensive river in Central America, and at that time still had water. It was the pocket version of rivers like the Nile or the Mississippi, but it had its transcendence: the Lempa was an historic dividing line, geographical and cultural, that cut El Salvador in half and divided Central America into two regions. The river was born in Guatemala, behind the temple of the revered Black Christ of Esquipulas; later it flowed to the foot of the Antigua Volcanic Chain, bordering Honduras, then turned abruptly towards the Pacific Ocean at a 90° angle and crossed El Salvador from north to south.

 

Its abundant channel finished forming in the Early Pleistocene, almost two million years ago, and for centuries it was the point of reference on the millenarian route that the Pre-Columbian people used to emigrate from northern to southern Mesoamerica and vice versa. The Lempa carried water and life along the full length of its formidable 260 mile journey and its rising waters converted the lower floodplains into an immense basin of fertile lands. Getting to the shores of the Lempa was, for all bygone peoples, as its name in Nauhuatl suggests, getting to “Water’s Edge”. It was a formidable boundary.

From the north and west the Lempa brought the Pipil chieftains, descended from Aztecs and Mayans and speaking a language incorporating Nahuatl and Mayan; from the south and east came the Lencas, Uluas and Chontales who spoke a language of Mayan origin, but related to Chibcha — the magnificent Pre-Columbian language — which spread throughout Nicaragua towards southern Central America, getting as far as Panama and spilling out as far as northern Colombia and western Venezuela.

The Lempa also defines another two mountain ranges on either side of its banks by cutting in half the young volcanic chain that traverses Salvadoran territory: towards the west is the Cordillera del Bálsamo, which begins at the San Vicente volcano and runs along the coastline, and the Cordillera Apaneca-Ilamatepec, the mythical range of the Plumed Serpent which abuts the Guatemalan border.

Towards the east of the Lempa, the volcanic chain turns into the Cordillera Chinameca-Tecapan, which stretches along the coast of the provinces of Usulután and La Unión, ending at the Chaparrastique volcano in San Miguel province. In front of the volcano the last in this extraordinary series of chains and volcanic ranges rises up: the Sierra Jucuarán-Intipucá situated between Jiquilisco Bay and the Gulf of Fonseca, bordering on Honduras and Nicaragua.

This is the age-old geological structure that created the most fertile and spectacular corner of America’s waist: a fantastic array of four volcanic ranges traversing El Salvador. Nestled between them and the old volcanic chain are a series of valleys rich in alluvial deposits and irrigated by innumerable rivers that would make it a prized jewel of a mere 13,000 square miles. A miniscule paradise over which chieftains, tribes, and armies have fought since time immemorial.

For centuries many of the peoples who emigrated from the north or south looked to settle in this lush tropical Eden. It’s not just happenstance that Cuzcatlán — the name of the principal chieftainship in Pre-Colombian El Salvador, encompassing from the Rio Paz on the Guatemalan border to the Lempa River — was called “Land of Riches”.

It was the Pipils — the most aggressive and warlike of the people who laid claim to this spot — who had prevailed at the time the Spaniards first set their horse’ hooves in El Salvador. The ancestral aggressiveness of the Salvadoran inhabitants would forge their indomitable and feisty character; but the fertility of their environment would prove to be, after several centuries, the cause of great social upheavals in the fight to get and keep even a small piece of that volcanic landscape of delightful valleys. That is, until this land, every inch owned by someone, could no longer provide food for so many people.

That is why, when my grandfather crossed the bridge over the Lempa, he perceived the portentous physical, anthropological and psychological magnitude that had united and separated worlds, languages, destinies and histories. He looked back behind him, towards San Miguel, and felt with absolute clarity that he was leaving behind the world of his origin and childhood; looking towards San Salvador and far beyond towards the North, was the world of his future and his surprising destiny.

Leaving behind the lowlands of the Lempa River the van struck out, struggling, up the sinuous and steep road to reach the plateau of the central zone of El Salvador, soon arriving in the stunning Jiboa Valley, which spreads out like a multi-colored carpet of cane fields, milpas and pastures, at the foot of the stately San Vicente volcano, called Chinchontepec, or “Hill of Two Breasts” in Nahuatl, because of its double peaks which emulate a maiden’s well-rounded breasts.

My grandfather had scarcely recovered from the impact caused by the vision of the Lempa River, burrowed deeply into the expansive background of a formidable amphitheater formed by blue, sheer mountain ranges, when his senses were assaulted anew by the emerald green Jiboa Valley and its lofty dark sky-blue volcano. And again he was distracted by the cacophony of the whirlwind of women surrounding the truck, selling plump fresh tortillas in one hand and metal skewers of grilled pork chunks in the other.

At that moment he wished with all his might that his people from Las Tres Marias were traveling with him to share the warm reception that life was bestowing upon his senses and his spirit.

Almost at noon, and before arriving at the Oriente bus terminal, the ticket collector of the truck let him off a few blocks from the town of Soyapango, and by walking and asking directions, he arrived at Pasaje 1 in the Colonia Guadalupe and stood in front of house number 37. It was silent and there were so many overgrown plants in the little front yard that he could hardly see in the window.

“You must be Chepe, Don Miguelito’s nephew” interrupted a white-haired, hunched-over woman coming out of the house across the way. My grandfather, surprised that she had called him by his name, only managed to gaze at her and mumble a few words, his voice faltering.

“Don Miguelito left for the United States more than a year ago and we haven’t heard from him since” the old woman continued, now in an explanatory tone but also a little surprised by my grandfather’s gesture. “He always talked about you and said you’d be coming this way; that you were going to help him sell bread.”

Trying to conceal his growing surprise in reaction to such a strange turn of events, my grandfather just nodded amicably, thinking that if he told her that Don Miguelito had been conversing with him just a couple of weeks ago on the banks of Las Marias river, the old woman would think he was a liar or a nut.

“Yeah, I’m Chepe ma’am, and Don Miguelito,” he went on, recovering from his shock”…I mean my uncle Miguelito, gave me this key to get in the house.”

“All right, son, I’m glad you’re finally here,” she said in a much more relaxed tone, adding with a faint smile, “You come from Intipucá, don’t ya? That’s where they say Don Miguelito was born…Well, he left as a mojado for the North to find some relatives he’s got in Wachinton, “the old woman went on despondently, with her gaze lost in the depths of the dark passageway.” But who knows if he even got across the border…”

And turning to my grandfather, she said in an almost-maternal tone, “The house is empty but clean. I’ve got another key and once in a while I give it a once over, so you should be comfortable.”

The old woman stared into my grandfather’s eyes, paused, and then looked about, and as if telling him a secret, she whispered, “But don’t be alarmed. Some nights you can see a light inside there that passes in front of the window and goes around the living room…but I think it’s a good spirit or, God help us, maybe Don Miguelito never made it to Washington and his spirit is restless.”

“Don’t you worry about it, ma’am, I can see even in the dark,” answered my grandfather, smiling, and taking advantage of the opportunity to ask, “Say, how do I get to a bakery I hear tell about — Estrella?”

“Oh, it’s real easy. I’m going to write down the address for you on a piece of paper. Or better yet just look for it on a calendar Don Miguelito has on the wall of the living room.”

The living room, along with three small bedrooms, a small bathroom and courtyard, made up the entire house. There was nothing more than a cot in the room facing the street, a rustic little table with two chairs in the living room, and a kerosene stove with two burners in the kitchen. That was all. But for my grandfather, who had spent every night of his life so far on a mat set down on a piece of dirt floor shared with his step-brothers, or in a hammock — strung snugly between the hammocks of the four ranch hands in the limited space of the cheese room— this house was huge, never-ending. It didn’t matter that there was no furniture. It was like the wide-open space of the hacienda that he so enjoyed and where he felt free, with its plains and pastures, the cool pools of water, the exuberant orchard, the rice paddies, the milpas, the cotton fields…all of that open horizon now seemed like it was inside of a house, under a roof, with cool, shiny floors. He sat down on the bed as carefully as if he had hemorrhoids, and felt like he was in heaven. It had a thin little mattress, but to him it seemed like a cloud. He moved up and down a little as if galloping on Güico and, smiling like a little kid, tested the rustic springs of the cot. What a delight! He laughed to himself out of pure pleasure.

Under the bed he found a couple of huacales de morro. They were those traditional cups made from dried Jicaro gourds that looked like a soccer ball cut in two, used since Pre-Columbian times. In one of them he carefully placed the love eggs he had been carrying since leaving Las Tres Marias, nicely wrapped in dried corn husks, and in the other, the totopostes that comadre Pimpa had baked for him.

He put his change of clothes on the bed, the only decent clothes he owned. The hen’s eggs, the corn totopostes, the cotton shirt and khaki pants were all that my grandfather brought in the pita-fiber knapsack, but for him— for whom the only possessions he’d ever had were Pascual the duck and the Saint Benito medal— it was a fortune. And now in that house — just for him alone — he felt like he was flying.

He left the room and looked around, saw the calendar from Estrella Bakery on one of the walls of the living room, checked out the other rooms and realized that mirrors were the only other furnishings. Some were large and were placed in such a way that in one of the rooms he could see himself from different angles. This detail attracted his attention somewhat and, returning to the living room, he approached the calendar and read the address under the name of the bakery: “Pasaje Fajardo, a block from El Calvario.”

 

 

Chapter XI

 Estrella Bakery

 

The Central Market— the heartbeat of the capital city’s commerce— lay between El Calvario church, the National Palace, and the San Salvador General Cemetery, spilling out in tentacles of shouted sales pitches for several blocks around. Across from El Calvario church was the National Hospital whose square and solid construction had been erected there around 1809 to house the Hospital de Indias, a large hospital built and equipped with funds from a Spanish citizen, Don Fernando Escobar. After amassing a considerable fortune in El Salvador, one fine day he decided to bequeath all of his wealth for the construction of the Hospital de Indias; and in an even more moving act, he left his house, donned a brown robe and became poor. He went to live on the streets with no more wealth than a walking stick, his frayed tunic and coarse sandals and with no more food than what charity permitted and what his elevated mysticism would sustain. In that same historic neighborhood of the National Hospital, the Central Market, and El Calvario church was Estrella Bakery.

 

The white edifice, built on the Pasaje Fajardo, had a tinge of Art Deco typical of the buildings of the period when it was built and was a hectic beehive and landmark in the San Salvador of that era.

Throughout the December holidays, the August festival or Holy Week, the demand was such that long lines of people formed, competing over the fresh batches of classic Salvadoran pan dulce, which came out of the ovens hot and seductive. Their style of making bread, with the zeal of genuine gourmets — as much for the high quality of the ingredients as for the art of mixing the formulas and managing temperatures and textures — was the reason for which the bakery had acquired acceptance and fame in recent decades. Starting with the salpores de almidón made with cassava flour and the quesadilla (Salvadoran cheese pound cake), the meat or pineapple pies, torta en tuza in a corn husk, jam-filled semitas and the voluptuous empress of the kingdom of Estrella: the special sweet egg bread, made exclusively with lots of love egg yolks.

For a few brief moments my grandfather stood in front of the bakery, shocked by its size. He wondered how it was possible that the whole place was a bakery. That was understandable, since his earlier point of reference was the bulging adobe wood-fired stove that niña Mariyita had at Las Tres Marias. It fascinated him the way they’d pull out the red-hot coals and put in the little dough balls for the totopostes, and the square pieces of dough for the rustic salpores.

As if moved by an uncoiling spring, he came out of his trance, walked resolutely inside and plunged into the hustle and bustle of the bakery. The sweet, seductive aroma of hot pan dulce struck him immediately. He closed his eyes and stood motionless in the center of the sales room, inhaling the symphony of fragrances, that mixture of flour, fertile eggs, brown sugar, vanilla, and butter. He opened his eyes and examined the cases and shelves: he had never seen such a variety of edible shapes and colors; and now with the addition of his sense of sight, the delicate and exciting aroma that danced about the whole space of Estrella made him smile like a fool, until he was assaulted by a mild and rich dizziness from the intense pleasure enveloping him. He felt his roof of the mouth tickling.

Some customers and clerks began to take notice of the lad — gracious despite his obvious country-boy appearance, his hair smothered in Yardley gel — who stood in the middle of the bakery, sniffing the air like a bull in search of females in heat. He closed his eyes, sniffed the air with his nose lifted up high, opened them to take in the carnival of aromas set off by the warm bread, and closed them again. Without realizing it he rocked his body softly back and forth until, in one of those pleasurable calisthenics, he noticed that on one of the shelves the sweet egg bread rolls gleamed with their own light, spongy and yellow with fertile eggs. He zeroed in them like Aladdin spying the magic lamp; only the genie that appeared was the owner of the shop.

“I can see you like pan dulce, young man,” she said in a soft and leisurely voice, behind his back. “Is there one kind one in particular you like?”

The voice came from a tall woman — nearly six feet — with a tawny complexion, hair already highlighted with gray stripes, dressed modestly but with meticulous elegance. It was Doña Maria Gonzalez: founder, owner, and master baker of Estrella.

“I haven’t tried any before ma’am,” my grandfather answered. “Actually, a few days ago I tried some of that sweet egg bread that’s over there, see. I’d say that’s the best. It’s made with love eggs, ” he clarified with an expert air.

“All the bread here is made with love eggs. All of the ingredients must be the finest in order for the bread to be excellent,” Doña Maria Luisa replied, smiling at him.

“Me, I’d sure like to learn how to make that bread, ma’am,” my grandfather said to her with his usual smile and almost cocky confidence. And after a pause he added with an air of pride, “over there on Las Tres Marias, where I used to live, I learned to make cheese that people said was the best. My tata Lupe had a reputation and he’s the one showed me how.”

Doña Maria Luisa noted the country upbringing in my grandfather’s voice and his humble, smooth, and self-assured manner struck her.

“Well, if you want to learn you can come every Tuesday and Wednesday and we’ll teach you right here,” Doña Maria said kindly, and, reading my grandfather’s quizzical expression, added matter-of-factly, “I am the owner of the bakery. My name is Maria Luisa.”

It was a typical gesture on her part. As the bakery grew and its reputation expanded, people who worked in baking and wanted to learn Doña Maria Luisa’s bread secrets stopped in, and she, with an absolute lack of egotism, accepted them under the condition that they had to learn it right there in the bakery. This reputation for generosity and total transparency would bring Don Raul Molina, founder and proprietor of the Lido Bakery — her biggest competitor — to call upon her expertise, which Doña Maria Luisa extended with her proverbial good nature.

My grandfather, on hearing that he would be admitted as an apprentice at Estrella, said to her smiling and crossing his arms childishly: “How ’bout that — you’ll be the second ‘Niña Mariyita’ that I help to bake.”

“And I’d say we’re going to learn from you,” she answered without a hint of sarcasm. And with a bemused air and growing curiosity she asked him, “and what is your name?”

“Chepe!” he answered enthusiastically, and immediately realized he’d never had a last name. His step-father Lupe’s was Ramirez but he had always called him “Naldo” or “Naldito”, just like that, without a last name. Even when he was picking cotton, Don Felix put him down in his notebook as just “Naldito”.

“Well, now I live in Soya,” he said to himself. In a flash he remembered the house in the Colonia Guadalupe, right next to Soyapango — the town everybody called “Soya” — and he realized that for now, that’s the place where he lived. In “Soya” was the house that, as modest and small as it was, seemed huge and beautiful to my grandfather. He loved to lie on the cool stone tiles, and even though it had no furniture it did have a lot of mirrors.

“My name is Chepe, ma’am… and I’m from Soya.”

“All right then, Chepe. And you say you’re from Soya,” repeated Doña Maria Luisa, smiling.” And right away, being the fair woman she was, she said, “look, every time you come to bake bread, and you help us out with other things, we’re going to pay you for it.”

With a big smile my grandfather thanked her and headed for the door with a spring in his step. Some sales clerks who had seen him and heard him say My name is Chepe and I’m from Soya twittered jokingly.

But they weren’t the only ones who had paid attention to his conversation with Maria Luisa. From one corner of the bakery, one of the customers who had observed him surreptitiously with great interest the whole time gazed at his back as he left with a look of infinite curiosity. Her intensely yellow huge eyes, hidden behind thick glasses, followed my grandfather until he was out the door. She felt her heart pounding and she blushed. At that moment neither suspected the extent to which each of their lives would be marked by the other.

 

 

Chapter XII

 The Church of The Pilar

 

Doña Maria Luisa Gonzalez, the owner of Estrella Bakery, had been born at the turn of the century, on the 29th of April, 1900, in the tranquil town of San Vicente, a collection of adobe houses with shingles that gleamed like an un-ironed handkerchief in the middle of the Jiboa Valley. Among its outstanding features was the Church of The Pilar.

From the upper end of the hundred-year-old street that lead towards San Salvador, one could appreciate the small yet monumental overview of the valley, strewn like a huge multicolored quilt of cane fields, thickets, and corn fields over the expansive skirt of the Chinchontepec volcano. This was the sight that had enraptured my grandfather on this way towards San Salvador, and he had no clue at that time how much he would later learn about that Virginian land from the lips of a very special woman.

In that natural setting, so anointed by great historic events, Doña Maria Luisa had grown up, and from when she was a little girl she had helped her mother to knead, bake, and sell salpores, little sweet rolls whose ancestors were the Pre-Columbian bread called totopostes. These were made from maiz salpor, a type of spongy white corn that the indigenous people used to make many foods and beverages.

The primitive totopostes had salt added to the dough since granulated sugar didn’t exist. It was over time, and under Spanish influence — with the addition of sugar, lard, and eggs — that salpores were born. Later on they were made with rice or cassava flour, adapting the flavor to European and criollo taste.

The totopostes had evolved along European lines until becoming salpores. The same thing had occurred with the Pre-Columbian chocolatl, which in Nahuatl means “food of the gods”. Before the arrival of the Spaniards it was an infusion of toasted, ground cacao— high in caffeine— that the nobles and the powerful few drank hot with salt and hot chili. It was the Europeans who had the idea of mixing it with sugar and milk and turning it into the modern and renowned chocolate. Mexican chronicles tell about how it was some nuns from Puebla who came up with the idea of sweetened chocolatl. Other older chronicles recount how Moctezuma, the last of the Aztec emperors, drank around 20 cups of the powerful potion a day — besides having as many as 300 concubines, many of whom were pregnant at the same time. These stories corroborated the reputation of this drink as a powerful sexual energy booster.

By the beginning of the 20th century in El Salvador, chocolate — and coffee— were widely accepted beverages and salpores a highly prized snack to accompany them.

Doña Maria Luisa and her mother had managed to infuse these rolls with just the right taste and texture. Salpores had become the in-demand delight of the locals who swarmed about the two main town squares of the sleepy town, one across from the cathedral and the other opposite the colonial, historic Church of The Pilar.

This church had been inaugurated in 1769 and its construction owed to an engraving of Our Lady of The Pilar. Also known as the Madonna of Zaragoza, she had saved the life of a Spanish benefactor and great devotee named Jose Merino on three occasions.

Don Jose’s wife had gone mad with jealousy, and one night, waving a dagger, she attempted to plunge it into her husband’s chest while he slept placidly. But every time she raised it, the image of the Virgin shook with anguish, mysteriously paralyzing the murderous arm of the would-be widow until she came to her senses. Upon finding out what had transpired, Don Jose and his now obedient and sensible wife Doña Manuela de Arce disseminated the news of the miraculous event, whose fame and veneration grew with the passing years. When they died, a close friend of theirs, Don Francisco Quintanilla, and his daughters, Maria Manuela and Micaela, devotees of Our Lady of The Pilar, the Patroness of Hispanity, erected a chapel that finally became the august San Vicente church.

But the Church of The Pilar had been witness to other extraordinary scenes inside its thick walls of colonial masonry. It was there, according to legend, that the Nonualco Indian Anastasio Aquino was crowned “King of the Nonualcos,” donning the robe and crown of the Saint Joseph statue.

The Nonualcos — Nonualco in Nahuatl means “Place Where They Speak Prettily”— were a Yaqui-Pipil tribe of bellicose temperament who emigrated towards the south from the legendary city of Tula, center of the Toltec culture, the “civilizing race” of the Aztecs. Finally they arrived at the end of the last millennium and settled in three idyllic spots in what was one of the most fertile regions of Salvadoran territory.

On their arrival, the evangelizing Spanish priests baptized these Nonualco settlements with the names of Christ’s favorite disciples: Saint Peter Nonualco, Saint John Nonualco, and Saint James Nonualco.

In this Nonualco territory, with its rich volcanic soils, mountains and coastal plains that stretched between the plentiful Jiboa and Lempa rivers, two crops had been prevalent before the arrival of the Spaniards: the highly prized cacao — employed as currency due to its noble lineage, and used to prepare the “chocolatl” — and Xiquilite, which in Nahuatl means “Blue Herb”, and was later called anile or indigo. It proliferated in the warm lowlands and was used to dye the robes of priests and nobles as well as for painting pottery, pictographic manuscripts and hieroglyphs. Xiquilite was so abundant in this region that the greatest marine treasure that El Salvador had until the mid 2030’s had been the Bay of Jiquilisco, which in Nahuatl meant “The Place of the Xiquilite Men”. Its beauty was such that, before being called Jiquilisco, the Poton tribes that possessed it before the Nonualcos called it Xirigualtique, which meant “The Place of the Bay of Stars”. What used to be the rich Jiquilisco Bay, with its 27 islands and 250 square miles of estuaries and marine canals rich in flora, fauna, and mangrove forests, now lies below water, and a large part of its coastline is barren and polluted.

That was the territory conquered by the Nonualcos and later by the Spanish. The Spaniards called Xiquilite “anil” — a word of Sanskrit origin which meant blue —, and made it the single crop in the area, at first tearing away the ancestral lands from the Nonualcos, then yoking them into its ill-fated manufacture, and finally, draping a mantle of hunger and disease over them.

Anile remained a viable crop for 300 years until the English invented aniline, a synthetic colorant that the German Friedrich Bayer commercialized later, displacing the natural colorants. But at its apex of production and exportation to Europe, El Salvador had been the undisputed champion, with almost all of its lowlands infested with indigo crops and manufacturing, at one point producing 90% of the entire production of the Central American isthmus between 1783 and 1792. The Peninsular Spaniards grew rich on the backs of the indigenous population, but when Central American independence came in 1821, the exploitation passed on to the big landowners and merchants of Spanish descent — criollos — fomenting the first accumulation of wealth on the part of the Central American criollo gentry.

The Nonualcos, along with other Salvadoran ethnic groups, entered into the eternal vicious circle of Nature: the greater the hostility of the environment to a living organism, the more the organism produces to assure the survival of the species. In Man the circle intensifies since an increasing population puts more stress on the natural resources, and having the land and the resources compromised by monocultures and huge estates, the size of the famines increases, causing greater rises in population.

The manufacture of anile required a lot of manual labor, and the method at that time of extracting the indigo color demanded a lot of heat and humidity, with its consequent toxicity and abundant infections and diseases. The manufacture of anile was an inferno of heat and flies.

To aggravate the situation of the indigenous people and the poorest mestizos, the independence from Spain in 1821 uncorked a string of wars between criollo political bosses to grab the power and divide it up among them. So they took over the land, the privileges, and the wealth that the Peninsular Spaniards had left behind on being defeated. It was the second “agrarian reform” in El Salvador.

Now the indigenous people were worse off than before, since on top of the labor they had to render in the manufacturing, they had to pay higher taxes and tributes to pay for the wars. And worst of all, through forced recruitment, they had to serve as cannon fodder in the violent disputes between liberals and conservatives, a duel between those who had a lot and those who wanted more. The native peoples were screwed on all sides: they worked for the landowners in exchange for a salary of mistreatment that included beatings, whippings and even the stocks; and if they didn’t work for the landowners, they were obliged to die in the battles waged by the same social caste that crushed them beneath a land they were deprived of possessing even a tiny parcel of. The royal and communal lands on which they had been granted collective use were privatized, decree-by-decree, in leaps and bounds.

Hunger and lack of land and freedom led the Nonualcos to rebel in 1832, following the lead of an indigenous chieftain born in Saint James -Santiago- Nonualco: Anastasio Mártir Aquino.

“The Indian Aquino” refused to continue working in that inferno of manufacturing— which by the way needed to be next to a river or spring due to the huge amount of water required for the extraction of the blue dye. He no longer wished to pay new taxes or live without land to cultivate, or be recruited to wage the wars of the powerful.

He gathered a force of between 3,000 and 5,000 Nonualco and poor mestizo troops, and armed with crude lances took the city of Zacatecoluca — in Nahuatl “The Place of Owls and Hay” — and later captured the strategic city of San Vicente.

In four battles he defeated the Salvadoran army sent by the president at that time Don Mariano Prado, who, exasperated by this outcome, abandoned the capital city of San Salvador, leaving it unprotected. Nevertheless, Aquino and his troops were not an organized ideological movement and never even found out about this fact that would have allowed them to take the capital, the government’s center of gravity.

The re-grouped Salvadoran army marched against Aquino, who took refuge on an enormous cliff that would later be called “Indian Aquino Hill”, where there was a difficult-to-access cavern. This hill, originally called  “Tacuazín Hill” for its opossum-like shape, was in the San Sebastian district, and according to my grandfather, that enormous cavern held a very important secret I was soon to learn about.

Aquino was later captured in 1833, thanks to the intervention of a priest sent out from San Salvador who threatened to excommunicate him if he didn’t lay down his arms and turn himself in. The priest, Juan Bautista Navarro, took advantage of the opportunity to spy on how the Nonualcos —who fervidly knelt before the cleric spy and kissed his ring as a sign of respect and fear of the Catholic Church —were defending the town square.

The father Navarro turned this key information over to the national army, facilitating the defeat and capture of Anastasio Aquino. The Nonualco who rose up requesting land and freedom for his people was beheaded on the outskirts of San Vicente, and to dramatize the fate that awaited anyone who might dare to rebel in the future, his head was exhibited in a cage until it filled with worms.

Ironically, five years later in that same church— the one where the Indian Aquino was supposedly crowned “King of the Nonualcos” in his eagerness to free his people from virtual slavery — Dr. Jose Simeon Cañas was buried. He was a hero of the independence movement and went on to be the head of the Royal and Pontifical University of San Carlos in Guatemala, and because of his struggles to abolish slavery in Central America he was called “The Liberator of the Slaves”. He was born in Zacatecoluca and buried in San Vicente, the two cities where the Indian Aquino made a stand.

The irony became even greater since a private Jesuit university was named after him — the Central American University José Simeón Cañas — where, 150 years later, on November 16, 1989, six Jesuit priests and professors, including the chancellor, were executed by an army commando unit on the campus during the final offensive of the Salvadoran guerrilla, the FMLN, against the government of El Salvador.

It was in this setting of old plazas, of churches with extraordinary stories and legends, of seismic forces and struggles between political bosses and exemplary men; in this Jiboa Valley surrounded by lofty mountains and spectacular landscapes that Doña Maria Luisa Gonzalez, owner of Estrella Bakery, grew up. And there she remained until the age of 20 when, due to her independent character, superior intelligence and restless nature, she decided to move to San Salvador with the idea of setting up her own bakery and moving forward towards a new course of progress. Her sister Natalia, who was a mere five-year old, went with her.

 

Chapter XIII

The Road to the Orión Bakery

 

Once they had arrived in the capital, young Maria Luisa and her little sister set themselves up in a modest boarding house in the old Candelaria neighborhood of San Salvador. There, in an isolated corner in the back of the house that ran along a ravine overlooking the Acelhuate river — which at that time was fairly clean and simultaneously possessed cold and thermal waters that poured down from the Candelaria Slopes and San Jacinto Hill — the young woman from San Vicente began baking her salpores.

The salpores made by the novice baker surpassed the ones made by her mother in San Vicente and soon she began attracting a small clientele, and when, on February 22, 1929 her son Guillermo was born, seeing herself alone and with the responsibility of an infant son and an adolescent sister to look after, she managed to get a job in a bakery run by a Mr. Lemus, located in the attractive neighborhood of San Salvador called Santa Anita.

This booming, lively neighborhood was known as the “gay district”, a favorite spot for Salvadorans emigrating from cities throughout the interior of the country looking for brighter horizons in the capital. Maria Luisa made a deal with this Mr. Lemus whereby she would work for him in exchange for being allowed to use the last vestiges of heat left in the wood-fired baking ovens at the end of the day to bake her own pan dulce.

In a short time she managed to buy a small lot and little by little, on Sundays, she herself would plaster mud onto a rustic wattle framework, a type of house known as bahareque. From Monday to Saturday she kneaded pan dulce to bake and sell and on Sunday she kneaded mud to make her home — and first bakery.

In 1935 an event occurred which would turn her life upside down: a tropical storm which would be known for years to come as “The Cyclone” raged against El Salvador, tragically impacting 7 of the 14 provinces, overflowing 14 rivers and leaving 400 dead. That was Nature’s first warning in response to the brutal deforestation visited on the entire Salvadoran geography, provoked by monocultures and the wholesale tearing up of woodlands inflicted by a growing population in search of firewood.

San Salvador flooded in many quarters, causing a health crisis and food shortages. In the Santa Rita neighborhood, just as in other neighborhoods, speculation abounded and every commodity rose in price. Everything, that is, except Doña Maria Luisa’s bread, which, faithful to her generosity of spirit and unyielding honesty, not only held its price but doubled its production to alleviate the demand and the hunger suffered by so many defenseless victims. This gesture on the part of the young woman makes it possible for lots of people to experience the quality of her bread for the first time, and from that moment on, the demand increases at a dizzying rate. That was her reward for her zealousness as a person and as an entrepreneur.

The tiny artisanal bakery housed in the bahareque house could not meet the demands of such a clientele, and with the eyes of a visionary she acquired half of a dilapidated old house, located on the Pasaje Fajardo, where she built the new and imposing edifice. In 1942 the bakery was unveiled and made its debut with the name La Orión Bakery; but later, for some reason, it is shortened to Orión Bakery and with that name it would become famous.

Doña Maria Luisa was a serious and proper woman, yet in spite of that, she had an easy rapport with everyone, especially her employees. She was always concerned about their welfare. She knew that in order to make exquisite bread, two fundamental things were required: the dough must use generous amounts of the finest quality ingredients, and the people who kneaded and baked it must do so with care and dedication.

My grandfather— with the cheese-making school he had been put through by Lupe, and the zeal which niña Mariyita had inculcated in him with her cooking back on the hacienda —was very skillful and dedicated and this ensured that within three months of having ventured into Orión he was already apprenticing with one of the bakers and earning a small salary. But his greatest reward was to be inundated constantly by a torrent of aromas coming out of the ovens and flooding the whole bakery before escaping along the length of Pasaje Fajardo.

The wheat, rice, and cassava flours were wedded perfectly with cinnamon, honey, dark raw sugar, butter, fertile eggs, aged cheese and curds, vanilla, cream, and pineapple jam so that the yeast and the heat would elevate these delightful mixtures to a sublime expression of flavor and sensuality. Every type of bread had its own personality, in spite of the fact that the ingredients varied only slightly, and the recipe which remained constant for almost all of them had been created by Doña Maria Luisa.

Structuring the recipe for the dough and giving it the right amount of time and perfect temperature level was her secret and her mastery, acquired over long years presiding over the kneading trough and the oven. And she didn’t keep that secret to herself— she shared it with any serious, enthusiastic person who approached her bakery to learn. Out of Orión came other master bakers who later became small entrepreneurs, and their gourmet—quality products converted the San Salvadorans into great consumers and connoisseurs of good pan dulce.

In the Orión Bakery the ingredients had to be of the utmost quality even if many of them needed to be imported from abroad, like the flours, the lard, the prunes, the raisins, and the extracts. That’s why the first words of English my grandfather learned came printed on boxes and tins of butter and flours imported from places like Seattle, Washington.

The eggs were something special: they had to be genuine love eggs so they would impart the special flavor that industrial, unfertile eggs couldn’t match. The legendary Torta de yema — the egg bread that had hypnotized my grandfather the first time he tried it, from the hands of a mysterious bread vendor one afternoon on the banks of Las Marias river— was very sought after for its flavor, texture, and long-lasting freshness.

My grandfather was surprised and even more appreciative of that golden spongy bread when he realized that Doña Maria Luisa’s recipe demanded 1,000 love eggs for every 100 pounds of bread dough. Those fertile eggs— upwards of 30,000 might be used per week— came at first from a town called Sensuntepeque, but when they could not keep up with such demand, Doña Maria Luisa, reluctant to use industrial, unfertile eggs, began importing them from Honduras, and by the truckload they came, packed in sawdust in protective boxes.

That lasted until 1969, when the terrible, fratricidal 100-hour war between El Salvador and Honduras — known as the “Soccer War”— shut down the border for years and dried up the precious supply.

My grandfather had gotten as far as the Orión Bakery on his route towards the North. A country boy who had been a cowboy, cheese maker, and kitchen helper; a duck, pig and hen keeper, cotton picker and egg gatherer, was now an apprentice in the troughs and ovens and tireless in the stock room. On top of that, he helped deal with the wholesale bread buyers, and even lent a hand in the sales room when the clientele had to stand in long lines, which was a frequent occurrence.

Also frequent was the presence of an oddly attractive woman — impeccably dressed, harmoniously proportioned, her hair always tied up in a bun, with square eyeglasses that made her look more serious and hid her beautiful yellow eyes, and with a mole on a mouth given to slight, fleeting smiles. She had a subtle air of a nun about her and was invariably accompanied by a man, always dressed in khaki, who helped her with the various bags of pan dulce she carried. Her name was Lolita and she was the cook for a long-established, socially and economically powerful family that lived in the most exclusive part of San Salvador at that time, Colonia San Benito. That’s why she always wore an impeccably starched, sky-blue uniform and white shoes.

It was precisely this woman who had been in the bakery the day that my grandfather had arrived for the first time, and had seen him standing in rapture and closing his eyes every time he breathed in the exquisite aromas of Orión Bakery. She had felt such an intense attraction for the youngster that it took her by surprise. Oddly, the things that attracted her were his presence and his character, clearly country-bred, but standing tall and strapping with pleasant features. At first she managed to skillfully hide the crush she had on him, but little by little she let up her feigned indifference to the point where first she began exchanging looks and polite greetings, later smoothly formal exchanges, and finally, fleeting, nervous smiles.

They soon introduced themselves, and she found out that my grandfather was named Chepe because he had been baptized Jose Aguinaldo, and that until he left Las Tres Marias he had been called Naldito. My grandfather learned that her name was really Dolores de la Cruz but they called her Lolita. She had been born in the Guatemalan highlands but had been raised in the service of a high-ranking family.

Every time Lolita arrived to buy the special bread from Orión, a very subtle ritual would begin whereby they would woo each other by putting their hands in the bread bags at the same time. Trying to act naturally and amid the warmth and softness of the bread, their fingers brushed nervously together. And she would begin to seek out my grandfather’s hand ever more eagerly, and with impulses that seemed uncontrollable to her, she gave him tender little squeezes. It was at that point where she would put the brakes on and blush. Her face got rosy, but not so much from the strange and pleasant sensations that took hold of her but because she was drawn back to reality and remembered that she was 15 years older than my grandfather. And the worst part was that she knew that giving into the intense and inexplicable desire she felt when she was near him was something that would outrage her ultra-conservative godmother, Sagrario de Von Fürstenberg.

 

(PART FOUR WILL CONTINUE…)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hola otra vez!

Vuelvo nuevamente al insondable mundo del Café Especial.

Tenía muchas lunas en las que había dejado abandonado este mi blog.

Me metí a redentor, o más bien a quijote, o más bien a asumir mi papel de soñador empedernido, y me tiré al ruedo de la sucia politiquería de mi Patria.

Quise llegar a la Asamblea Legislativa, pero como DIPUTADO INDEPENDIENTE, NO PARTIDARIO, y salí corneado y trasquilado. No hay forma de romper la tiranía de la PARTIDOCRACIA a menos que se sobrevenga una revolución inmensa de resistencia pacífica que rescate el CARÁCTER NACIONAL que ha sido tirado en un pantano de corrupción y espejismos.

Veremos si puedo rascar el tiempo de mis proyectos y obligaciones literarias para mantener vivo y activo este mi blog.

Cheers! Desde EL VALLE DE NUBES…

MOVIMIENTO “MANO JUSTA” DE EL SALVADOR

¡HOLA AMIG@S!

Abajo encontrarán el link a la versión de Youtube, de 2 minutos y medio, de la Campaña “Mano Justa” de El Salvador.

http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3Dkgj779kTBdQ%26feature%3Dyoutu.be&h=CAQHxcfb-

El segundo link de abajo es el de la Fan Page en Face Book

Pronto estarán alojados aquí también, las 3 cuñas de radio de 1 minuto cada una, que transmiten mensajes relacionados con tres de los grupos más golpeados en los últimos años:

La Mujer Salvadoreña, el Productor Agrícola y la Juventud en Riesgo, llamada “Maras”

El gobierno de Funes, lejos de establecer programas de rescate e inserción a mediano plazo, los ha utilizado para fines politiqueros

Esperamos que ustedes se apropien de estos mensajes, los apoyen  y ayuden a difundirlos.

Las elecciones de el 9 de Marzo, en El Salvador, no son sobre un candidato o un partido. Son sobre la decisión de dos caminos: el del fracasados y totalitario “Socialismo del Siglo XXI”, o la ruta difícil, pero perfeccionable de nuestra imberbe democracia.

http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3Dkgj779kTBdQ%26feature%3Dyoutu.be&h=CAQHxcfb-

https://www.facebook.com/ManoJusta

Además del vaso de leche, del par de zapatos y del uniforme, los maestros deben dignificarse con mejores salarios y condiciones para forjar en el bien, a las futuras generaciones de niños rurales

MONITOR LIBERTARIO: Los kubano-chavistas reprimen a una manifestación del pueblo

VENEZUELA “EL FARO SOCIALISTA Y REVOLUCIONARIO QUE ALUMBRA A TODA LATINOAMÉRICA Y EL CARIBE”

–Profesor Sánchez Cerén, candidato truculento a presidente de El Salvador.

 

Esta es la libertad y la democracia que nos ofrece el voto por el FMLN el próximo 9 de Marzo.

Valientes estudiantes protestando por un Socialismo del Siglo XXI que en el país con las mayores reservas de petróleo del mundo y a $100 el barril de crudo, tenga la mayor inflación del mundo! La más raquitica canasta básica, casi inexistente, el aparato productor agropecuario desmontado y los índices de violencia más altos de Latino América.

Maduro salió a echarle la culpa de los muertos al fascismo internacional, a la ultraderecha y al imperio Yanki. Prometió mano más dura a los que quieran salir a protestar.

En el enlace de abajo pueden ver cómo los cobardes militares venezolanos que ahora viven en la opulencia y el poder, disparan a mansalva contra estudiantes armados solo con piedras y gargantas.

https://u4y9usi8t5zbg6zcefy4.r.worldssl.net/asesinos-momento-en-el-que-el-sebin-dispara-contra-manifestantes-desarmados/#.Uv0omeipLAg.gmail

EN LOS SISTEMAS TOTALITARIOS DE ALBA/SOCIALISMO DEL SIGLO XXI, EL CONTROL DEL PUEBLO SE HACE MEDIANTE LOS VOTOS O LAS BALAS. EL CONTROL SE LOGRA MEDIANTE EL EMPOBRECIMIENTO SISTEMÁTICO DEL PUEBLO Y EL TERRORISMO LIGHT DE ESTADO.

Leí la obra máxima de Ayn Rand, el “Atlas Shrugged” (“La Rebelion del Atlas”) hace unos 20 años. Es una oda a la libertad individual que según ella, solo puede darse en modelos liberales como el capitalismo. Desprecia el modelo del estado asistencialista y seudo socialista.

El profesor Sánchez Cerén hablando en un foro democrático, con Fidel Kastro detrás.

ALBA FUE UN DISEÑO DE LOS CUBANO-KASTRISTA Y FINANCIADO POR LOS DÓLARES DEL PUEBLO VENEZOLANO. CERÉN ES PARTE DE ESTA RED QUE PROPUGNA EL ESTABLECIMIENTO DEL SOCIALISMO DEL SIGLO XXI MANEJADO DESDE LA HABANA.

SANCHEZ CERÉN ES PARTE DEL ENTRAMADO DE LOS CASTRO-CUBANOS PARA SOMETER A LATINO AMERICA AL MODELO CUBANO

PARA ALLÁ VAMOS, SI EL 9 DE  MARZO NO SALIMOS A VOTAR LOS DEMÓCRATAS, ESTA VEZ AMARRADOS A LA CRUZ TRICOLOR DE ARENA. (A ELLOS LES PODREMOS PEDIR CUENTAS, AL PROFE, JAMÁS!!)

MONITOR LIBERTARIO: “El Salvador agoniza”

Me enviaron un escrito de José Roberto Sánchez Velázquez, arenero auto proclamado. Lo comparto con ustedes porque refleja un sentimiento que cada día crece más: el darse cuenta que el futuro de El Salvador está en juego en este próximo 9 de Marzo.

No soy arenero pero pienso que debe propagarse este tipo de expresiones.

Las fotos alegóricas sí son mías.

El futuro de esta bella piojita que vende semillas de marañón, no se asegura con un par de zapatos y un vaso de leche cada vez menos lleno.

SALVADOREÑA, SALVADOREÑO: EL SALVADOR, AGONIZA

José Roberto Sánchez Velásquez

Nuestro País, El Salvador, está enfermo. Enfermó hace cinco años. Ahora, agoniza.

El Salvador se desangra. Su sangre es roja, del mismo color que la de todos nosotros, la diferencia es que la sangre que circula por las venas y las arterias de nuestro país, es sangre séptica. Sangre corrompida.

Sangre de la mala clase política: dirigentes y seguidores.

Sangre resentida, sangre extorsionista, sangre corrupta, sangre traidora, sangre terrorista, sangre asesina,

Si queremos que El Salvador viva, si lo queremos salvar, es necesario hacerle una transfusión de sangre buena, de sangre trabajadora, sangre amante de la Paz, defensora de la Libertad y de los Valores Humanos.

La cita es el próximo 9 de marzo.

Cada centímetro cúbico cuenta. (Un centímetro cúbico equivale a un voto). A cada buen salvadoreño se le pide que acuda a  la cita y le done a El Salvador un solo centímetro cúbico. Es mucho pedir?

Si El Salvador no recibe esa transfusión, morirá. Morirán con él, la esperanza, la paz, el progreso, la libertad…

Si eso sucede ya no habrá tiempo ni espacio para lamentaciones.

Salvadoreña, Salvadoreño, Republicano Nacionalista, Ciudadano de Bien: votemos todos el 9 de marzo.

No querramos, a estas alturas, conocer propuestas políticas. El mandato es claro: Contribuyamos con nuestro voto a que nuestro País, El Salvador, recupere su salud.

 

Vota ARENA.

 

San Salvador                                                                                                  Febrero 11 de 2014

ALBA FUE UN DISEÑO DE LOS CUBANO-KASTRISTA Y FINANCIADO POR LOS DÓLARES DEL PUEBLO VENEZOLANO. CERÉN ES PARTE DE ESTA RED QUE PROPUGNA EL ESTABLECIMIENTO DEL SOCIALISMO DEL SIGLO XXI MANEJADO DESDE LA HABANA.

EN LOS SISTEMAS TOTALITARIOS DE ALBA/SOCIALISMO DEL SIGLO XXI, EL CONTROL DEL PUEBLO SE HACE MEDIANTE LOS VOTOS O LAS BALAS. EL CONTROL SE LOGRA MEDIANTE EL EMPOBRECIMIENTO SISTEMÁTICO DEL PUEBLO Y EL TERRORISMO LIGHT DE ESTADO.

Estos niños del campo salvadoreño merecen crecer en paz, sin hambrunas como las que se avecinan en Venezuela, a la que el Profe Sánchez llamó “El faro revolucionario y socialista que alumbra a América Latina”

¿De que sirve un vaso de leche, si las vacas que lo dan no son salvadoreñas y cada vez están más flacas…?

¿De qué sirve un par de zapatos si no hay caminos seguros, ni oportunidades de mejorar la vida de estos niños?

¿De qué sirve un uniforme escolar, si los maestros huyen ante las amenazas de los mareros?

AQUELLOS SALVADOREÑOS, COMPATRIOTAS, QUE VOTARON POR EL FMLN PENSANDO EN QUE ELLOS GENERAN RIQUEZA Y LA COMPARTEN, LES DIGO: ELLOS GENERAN POBREZA, LA REPARTEN Y SE QUEDAN CON LA RIQUEZA QUE OTROS GENERAN.

El camino hacia el progreso en paz y libertad de estos preciosos niños campesinos, no es el del SOCIALISMO DEL SIGLO XXI

SÁNCHEZ CERÉN MANTIENE VÍNCULOS CERCANOS CON EL TOTALITARISMO DE LOS CHAVISTAS EN VENEZUELA. UN MODELO FRACASADO DEL SOCIALISMO DEL SIGLO XXI

Este niño pescador merece crecer con un libo de pesca en la mano y no con el dedo en el gatillo de una kalashinov rusa.

Además del vaso de leche, del par de zapatos y del uniforme, los maestros deben dignificarse con mejores salarios y condiciones para forjar en el bien, a las futuras generaciones de niños rurales salvadoreños

LUEGO DEL TORPE GOLPE DE ESTADO ASESTADO A CHAVEZ POR LA OPOSICIÓN VENEZOLANA. EL TENIENTE CORONEL BUSCA EL CONSEJO DE KASTRO Y ALLÍ NACE ALBA Y DEMAS INSTITUCIONES QUE APOYAN LA INSTAURACION DEL SOCIALISMO DEL SIGLO XXI

La filosofía de los Kastro-Kubanos es: “Es más fácil empobrecer a un pueblo que enriquecerlo. La pobreza facilita el control, la riqueza fortalece a las clases medias y estas se vuelven pensantes y difícil de controlar”
Esa fue la filosofía que Kastro le enseñó al finado teniente, y es la que predomina en el SOCIALISMO DEL SIGLO XXI

Pensemos bien en cuál es el camino que debemos tomar para mejorar el futuro de nuestros niños

POR TODOS NUESTROS NIÑOS, DEBEMOS SALIR A VOTAR EL 9 DE MARZO Y PENSAR BIEN CUÁL ES EL CAMINO HACIA EL TOTALITARISMO Y EL CRECIMIENTO DE LA POBREZA, O EL CAMINO EN EL QUE PODEMOS PRESIONAR PARA IR PERFECCIONANDO NUESTRA DEMOCRACIA TERCERMUNDISTA

Niños atrapados en espejismos y engaños tiene el futuro enjaulado

El niño es el padre del hombre…mejoramos al niño, mejoramos al hombre.

La obligación principal de un gobernante es asegurarle tres cosas a su pueblo:
1- Abundancia
2-Alegría
3-Paz

PORQUE EL NIÑO ES EL PADRE DEL HOMBRE, HAY QUE SALIR A VOTAR EL 9 DE MARZO

EL CABALLO DE SOYA 2

Pequeño artículo aparecido en la edición del mes de Febrero del 2014. Darle click al enlace abajo:

http://selectaenlinea.com/2014/02/02/una-trilogia-mesoamericana-el-caballo-de-soya/

En el Estudio de PRO ART, grabando el audio book. El ingeniero de sonido y asesor de producción fue Tito Martínez Daglio. Pasamos tres semanas encerrados en este estudio, acompañados de las vibraciones de su hermano, y mi gran Brother y compañero de colegio, Manuel Antonio Martínez Daglio, quien compusiera la música complementaria para mi novela hace 18 años (aunque ninguno de los dos lo sabía. Solo Tito).

La fundadora y editora de la Revista SELECTA MAGAZINE, Anabella Nahem.

El Libro 1 pasta dura y pasta suave

MONITOR LIBERTARIO: ELECCIONES EN EL SALVADOR–SEGUNDA VUELTA

ALBA FUE UN DISEÑO DE LOS CUBANO-KASTRISTA Y FINANCIADO POR LOS DÓLARES DEL PUEBLO VENEZOLANO. CERÉN ES PARTE DE ESTA RED QUE PROPUGNA EL ESTABLECIMIENTO DEL SOCIALISMO DEL SIGLO XXI MANEJADO DESDE LA HABANA.

500 MIL VOTOS NO ESTÁN EN LA COLA DE UN VENADO. EL 9M PODEMOS DERROTAR AL TOTALITARISMO Y AL RETROCESO.

1-      El enorme ausentismo el 2F fue una protesta ciudadana al deterioro y corrupción al que ha llegado el sistema político partidista actual. Los candidatos y las propuestas tan mediocres que los partidos decidieron presentar, han sido frustrantes para todos, incluyéndome a mí. Solo que yo sí decidí votar en contra del sistema totalitario y empobrecedor con el que Sánchez Cerén y Cía.  amenazan a El Salvador. No hay que ir muy lejos: SC&Cía tienen vínculos estrechos con el sistema Cuba-Venezuela-ALBA, y de carambola, el todo poderoso José Merino de ALBA tiene un cuestionable vínculo con la narco-guerrilla de las FARC colombianas.

2-      Este peligro que está allí mismo, el 9M, a la vuelta de la esquina es el que hay que derrotar con la poca democracia que nos queda.

3-      Pero debemos entrar a esa lid, con armas limpias y justicieras. Una componenda con Toni Saca, sería un contrasentido: El Sr. Saca, gracias a la movida del otro señor Funes, se ha puesto a tiro del banquillo de los investigados por robo y corrupción, junto al mismo Funes y a los otros expresidentes que han venido haciendo oscuros malabarismos y negociados, y ocupando la chequera privada de Casa Presidencial.

4-      Un arreglo de ARENA con Saca, sería clavar la cruz a la tumba de ese partido, pero lo peor: sería poner a nuestro pueblo ante el paredón del totalitarismo. Yo apuesto a que crearía una estampida de votantes, en la cual me incluyo yo, pues siempre iría a votar, pero en blanco. A mi parecer, ARENA estaría afirmando el pecado por el cual fue castigado por los 245 mil votantes que se abstuvieron de votar por ellos. La corrupción politiquera no se limpia con más corrupción. Si los que estamos por la libertad y el progreso de El Salvador somos derrotados el 9M, que sea dando una batalla limpia, con la frente en alto y no con una mancha de corrupción. Que sea el profesor Sánchez Cerén &Cía que se lleven a Saca a su madriguera.

5-      Nuestra meta debe ser LOGRAR MEDIO MILLÓN DE VOTOS EL 9M DE LOS QUE NO FUERON A VOTAR EL 2F. El partido del profesor Sánchez Cerén/ALBA sacó el mismo voto duro histórico, 25%. La única forma de remontar ese porcentaje es que recojan los votos adicionales para ganar, de entre los que se abstuvieron y de aquellos que votaron por Saca que van a aceptar la componenda Saca/SC&Cía y obedezcan la orden de su oscuro caudillo. Yo percibo que hay muchísimo más democrátas dentro de la masa que se abstuvo y que el 9M votarían por ARENA y en contra del totalitarismo real y potencial de SC&Cía.

6-      Si ARENA perdió 245,000 votantes, hay que recuperar esos, más otro tanto: medio millón de votos. Suena quimérico, pero no estamos lejos de lograrlo. Solo hay que aplicar una sencilla lógica que es la que todos los medios y analistas proclaman: EL AUSENTISMO LE FAVORECIÓ AL FMLN.  Esto quiere decir que EL NO AUSENTISMO LE VA PERJUDICAR AL FMLN. Estamos más cerca los demócratas de ganar la segunda vuelta, que los que se amparan en un fracasado SOCIALISMO DEL SIGLO XXI. Queda un mes para que esos salvadoreños que no fueron a votar tengan tiempo para reflexionar. Ayudemos nosotros a que esa reflexión sea realista, profunda y comprometida con la libertad y el progreso. Ayudemos también a convencer a los que votaron por la opción roja, que el camino hacia un país con mejores oportunidades, no solo está pavimentado de zapatos , uniformes y paquetes escolares. Ayudemos a que vean su futuro por ese camino: vivir por siempre en la pobreza y llegar a acostumbrarse a ella, como ya lo es en Cuba, y como ya está sucediendo en Venezuela.

7-      NO HAY QUE DARSE POR VENCIDOS PORQUE LA OPCIÓN POR EL TOTALITARISMO TAMBIÉN TIENE LA LUCHA CUESTA ARRIBA.

Por mi Hogar, por mi Patria y mi Fé:

DIOS UNIÓN LIBERTAD

GALERÍA DEL SOCIALISMO DEL SIGLO XXI

SANCHEZ CERÉN ES PARTE DEL ENTRAMADO DE LOS CASTRO-CUBANOS PARA SOMETER A LATINO AMERICA AL MODELO CUBANO

SÁNCHEZ CERÉN MANTIENE VÍNCULOS CERCANOS CON EL TOTALITARISMO DE LOS CHAVISTAS EN VENEZUELA (JOSÉ LUIS MERINO, EL  PODER TRAS EL TRONO DEL FMLN Y ALBA PARTICIPA DEL CORDIAL MOMENTO)

LUEGO DEL TORPE GOLPE DE ESTADO ASESTADO AL TENIENTE CHAVEZ POR PARTE DE LA OPOSICION VENEZOLANA, ÉSTE BUSCA LA ASESORÍA DE KASTRO Y NACE ALLÍ EL “SOCIALISMO DEL SIGLO XXI” CON SUS ORGANIZACIONES ESTRATÉGICAS COMO ALBA,UNASUR, MERCOSUR, PETROCARIBE.CELAC, ETC.

RUSIA Y EL SOCIALISMO DEL SIGLO XXI

ALBA Y EL SOCIALISMO DEL SIGLO XXI: GOBIERNOS TOTALITARIOS O EN VÍAS DE SER TOTALITARIOS Y EMPOBRECIDOS. CHAVEZ, KASTRO Y EVO MORALES

LOS VINCULOS DEL SOCIALISMO DEL SIGLO XXI: EL CARNICERO DE SIRIA

 

 

El profesor Sánchez Cerén hablando en un foro democrático, con Fidel Kastro detrás.

 

IRÁN Y EL SOCIALISMO DEL SIGLO XXI

MADURO DIJO QUE “ASSAD ES EL MÁS GRANDE DEMÓCRATA DEL MUNDO”

EN LOS SISTEMAS TOTALITARIOS DE ALBA/SOCIALISMO DEL SIGLO XXI, EL CONTROL DEL PUEBLO SE HACE MEDIANTE LOS VOTOS O LAS BALAS. EL CONTROL SE LOGRA MEDIANTE EL EMPOBRECIMIENTO SISTEMÁTICO DEL PUEBLO Y EL TERRORISMO LIGHT DE ESTADO.

EL AUDIO BOOK DE EL CABALLO DE SOYA

En el Estudio de PRO ART, grabando el audio book. El ingeniero de sonido y asesor de producción fue Tito Martínez Daglio. Pasamos tres semanas encerrados en este estudio, acompañados de las vibraciones de su hermano, y mi gran Brother y compañero de colegio, Manuel Antonio Martínez Daglio –QDDG–, quien compusiera la música complementaria para mi novela hace 18 años (aunque ninguno de los dos lo sabía. Solo Tito).

Mi Brother, Tito Martínez, al mando de la nave de edición de sonido. Un trabajo super profesional, sin presiones, con observaciones precisas, bebiendo Specialty Coffee de su finca en Comasagua, y muchas carcajadas y jodedera  a lo largo de todo el proceso! Mil Gracias Titux!!!

LA PRESENTACIÓN DE 7 MINUTOS DEL AUDIO BOOK: EL CABALLO DE SOYA LIBRO 1

(Son 8 CD´S  que contienen 10 horas de narración del Libro 1, hecha por el autor)

EL CABALLO DE SOYA EN PANAMA

Estuve hoy por la mañana en las oficinas de la Revista SELECTA, que luego de 17 años se ha ubicado como la mejor revista de la vida social,cultural y empresarial de Panamá.

 

Anabella Nahem, su fundadora y directora, es mi amiga desde tiempos juveniles y he atestiguado su trajinar incansable hasta colocarla donde está.

 

Quiso que me entrevistaran sobre el proyecto de mi Trilogía “El Caballo de Soya” para la edición de Febrero de SELECTA. Fue un rato muy ameno con su periodista Judy Requena con quien nos reímos mucho por lo estrambótico de la trama. Pero luego, Anabella y yo nos tiramos casi tres horas conversando de un sinfín de temas; sin faltar las remembranzas de nuestra dilatada amistad.

Gracias, Anabella, por tu tiempo y tu apoyo! Sigues siendo la bella mujer de temple, gracia y campechanía de siempre!

 

En mi mano derecha sostengo la edición de Enero de SELECTA, la prestigiosa revista panameña, que luego de 17 años se ha convertido en la más importante de Panamá. En la edición de Febrero, vamos a salir con todo y Caballo de Soya (pero no en la portada, porque no cabemos! Jajaja!).

Pasé un rato super agradable con Anabella Nahem, la fundadora y directora de esta revista, con quien somos grandes amigos desde hace varias décadas. Gran honor que me hacen. ¡Mil gracias!

LIBRO 1 de EL CABALLO DE SOYA

Portada, Lomo, y contraportada del Libro 1, de la Trilogía, EL CABALLO DE SOYA

PRIMEROS COMENTARIOS

1– MARIA LIGIA GAVIDIA

(Salvadoreña, Maestría en Spanish Literature from the University of Florida)

Payín, recibí el libro y desde que lo empecé a leer no paré hasta terminar. Y espero la segunda entrega de tu mágica novela. Estoy segura será todo un éxito. Una narrativa fantástica con detalles históricos y filosóficos que reflejan un mundo muy conocido de muchos de tus lectores. Me gusta mucho como organizas el flujo de la narración y el empleo de los cronotopos para presentar a los personajes es muy bueno…

…Además me gustó mucho como comienzas con la cosmogonía que es lo que abre el espacio para lo fantástico del libro. Excelente tu reconstrucción de la vida en la finca en esos años pre guerra.

…Y me gusta también como enlazas la historia de la guerra civil española, me encantó al punto que me fuí a leer sobre los requetés

De nuevo mis más sinceras felicitaciones.

María Ligia

2– ARIANNA MUNGUÍA GAZZOLO

(Salvadoreña. Último semestre en Political Science, con énfasis en Latino América. Princeton University)

Estimado Payín,

Habiendo terminado el libro 1 de El Caballo de Soya en dos días (señal definitiva de que es un ‘page turner’) – y no en uno ya que necesitaba dormir, debo decir que me ha encantado el libro.

Siendo todo escritor un lector a la vez, I’m sure you can relate when I say que NECESITO leer los otros dos libros.

For my mental and emotional health…no aguanto por saber qué pasa con Pilar, Chepe, Sagrario y Claus, los nefastos Fortunatos (senior y junior), Wicho Lobos, Mariana…todos siendo personajes por los cuales me he llegado a interesar, sintiendo sus pasiones, aventuras, y ocurrencias como mías propias.

Please let me know si eso es una posibilidad!

A huge fan,

Arianna

 

3– JAVIER PRADO

(Salvadoreño. Licenciado en Economía de la Catholic University of America; Master en Liberal Arts de la Miami University

¡Ya se acabó El Caballo 1!  Ready for the second part!!

Me ha gustado muchísimo la vuelta histórica mundial que has dado… sí, es una buena lección de historia para ver que el lio viene de hace rato… me permito sugerirte que a la explicación de las deidades mejor dibujes un diagrama para hacerlo más fácil y sirve de referencia, por lo demás, está buenísimo…¿Cuándo sacas el dos??

Javier

 

EL CABALLO DE SOYA –LIBRO 1

(Así comienza esta Trilogía)

 

PROEMIO

 Lo que a continuación voy a narrar es un recuento de las grabaciones, apuntes, libros, documentos y claves cósmicas heredados de mi abuelo,  Chepe Soya, un campesino que se apareció un 21 de diciembre de 1960 en el portón de una pequeña hacienda, en el Oriente de El Salvador.

Lo encontraron jugando sobre un petate, con una semilla “Ojo de Venado” colgando de su muñeca, amarrada con un listón rojo. Entonces, ni él ni nadie sabían que sobre sus hombros venía cargando una misión que pronto se convertiría en una extraña odisea y que le llevaría a emigrar hacia el Norte primero, y luego de vuelta hacia el Sur, en la búsqueda inexorable de su estelar destino.

Me llevó tres años el escuchar, leer y analizar todo el material que me heredó y finalmente lo pude organizar en 3 libros, ejecutados en Sinfonías y Movimientos, que facilitarán su lectura. Pienso que habrá muchos que se entusiasmarán lo sufi ciente para leer los tres, y seguir a mi abuelo a lo largo de toda su saga.

El camino que dibujan estos viejos documentos está marcado desde el amanecer de las épocas precolombinas de Meso América, y serpentea a lo largo de siglos y años, a través de algunos de los escenarios más dramáticos que ha tenido el mundo, desde El Salvador, y España, pasando por Estados Unidos y Colombia, para fi nalizar nuevamente en lo profundo de la tierra salvadoreña.

En su odisea, mi abuelo se verá obligado a dejar El Salvador y seguir la “Ruta de la Muerte” a través de México, hasta llegar a la frontera con E.U. Ahí, en ese desierto de Arizona –tan cruel y fatídico para cientos de miles de migrantes ilegales– se sumerge en una mágica dimensión que le lleva a conocer con claridad chamánica la conspiración de una raza de hombres, sin boca y sin rostro, que desde el remoto y antiquísimo Inframundo pretenden destruir la raza humana, y junto a ella a los animales que le sirven de compañía y para sobrevivir. Estos seres malignos y vengativos son los Hombres de Palo. Los Hombres de la Segunda Creación, los que fueron desterrados y destruidos por los dioses pre-Colombinos.

Este poder tenebroso logra ocultarse tras la más insospechada de las máscaras, y el desenlace de su confabulación se va a dar en la más extraña de todas las batallas y en la más mítica de las regiones. Muchos de los acontecimientos, situaciones y personajes mencionados en estos libros, se encuentran en la historia escrita por los hombres mismos.

Otros más, pertenecen a esa dimensión fantástica dentro de la cual mi abuelo tuvo que enfrentar la maquinación y el embate de esa fuerza, tan antigua como maligna.

Cualquier parecido entre ambas dimensiones será puramente coincidencia, y si surgiere algún reclamo: podrían ir en su búsqueda para que él responda y aclare. Es bueno hacer la salvedad, eso sí, que mi abuelo tiene varios siglos ya, de vivir en un universo paralelo.

SEBASTIÁN DE SOYA

 El día 13 del mes Quinto del año 2044″