December 9, 2008
The day before Thanksgiving I went to visit Niña Fermina’s mom, Niña Evangelina. I like visiting her because she’s an assertive character and a prolific storyteller. If I want, I can just sit and listen. It’s also fun to see where Niña Fermina came from: they are obviously mother and daughter, but they represent two very different types of self-confident Salvadoran woman.
Niña Evangelina lives by herself about a 10-minute walk away. She is not the type to move in with a daughter or granddaughter and live out her days tranquilly. My sense is that that might end in a meltdown. Of course, like most old Salvadoran ladies (or old ladies in general, rather), she complains about her children moving away—to the States, San Salvador, and the other side of the village—and leaving her alone. But on the whole she seems content to putter around her garden and hold forth for a slow but steady stream of visitors.
Also keeping her company are multifarious posters of Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero and Radio Segundo Montes, the leftist radio station based in Morazán. During every visit her meandering narrative reliably comes around to stories of the brutality of Army and National Guard soldiers, and of the orejas (“ears,” or informants) that have come to keep tabs on her throughout the years. Some of them she knows, and relentlessly lambasts, like this: “that Don Cheyo, he’s all right, a nice man, but his son is a dirty little oreja who came around one day to harass me, but I told him what for.”
Many communities in Morazán, which was a rebel stronghold during the war, are still strongly leftist, but mine is not. The valley of Corinto went back and forth and saw a lot of action especially during the rebel offensives in the last few years of the war. Few people of the villages here, however, were involved in the forces of either side. Many of them fled to the relatively calmer towns of La Unión or to Honduras to stay out of the way (not Niñas Fermina or Evangelina, though, who have a brave streak). The dominant trend still seems to be to keep your head down; there are few vociferous partisans. Niña Evangelina is a notable exception.
Between her and her daughter I’ve heard a lot of good stories from the war. Between them they were harassed many times by soldiers accusing them of helping the guerillas, sometimes even threatening to kill them. They did feed and house rebels when they came by, but they offered the same hospitality to Army soldiers. But both speak more highly of the FMLN rebels, saying despite their ruthlessness towards soldiers and criminals they were more courteous and good-hearted to the people. They’ve told me all about the various bombs that fell in the village, the huge rebel encampment in the pasture right in front of my house during the offensive of 1989, and the feeling of listening to gunfire and mortars while trying to cook supper.
Forming a fascinating contrast to this perspective of two poor, rebel-sympathetic campesinas were some stories I heard on Thanksgiving from a rich, rightist couple from San Salvador. It may be the greatest and most humbling privilege I’ve ever had, the opportunity to interact openly with people from all levels of Salvadoran society, from heads of government agencies and members of the richest families to the most destitute, isolated country people.
I spent Thanksgiving with an American couple who work in the embassy, in the luxurious house that comes with their Foreign Service package. Protecting the house and its neighbors are two gates manned by armed guards, high walls topped with bales of razor wire, and a giant heavy metal automatic sliding door. Their Nissan SUV has a backup camera on the dashboard that totally mesmerized me. Due to the crime, El Salvador is classified as a “hardship post” for Foreign Service employees, a distinction which carries with it a 15% (I think) bonus from our gracious taxpayers. Thanks, Joe Sixpack! And thanks, MS-13!
We enjoyed an INCREDIBLE dinner complete with everything I never imagined I’d get to eat until Thanksgiving 2009 at the earliest: turkey, delicious stuffing, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, pumpkin pie…I could go on. Topped off with a Dominican cigar and a finger of homemade Croatian liquor from their last tour of duty in Zagreb. We three PCVs felt a little coarse in such a…plush environment, but were equal to the challenge presented by the food; two hours of resting and chatting was sufficient to recharge for our third and fourth full plates and more pie. We gave as good as we got in terms of culture shock, too, by wowing our hosts with stories of our daily lives in the campo. JB took the cake, I think, by telling them he bathes in a stream of dubious cleanliness (I wonder why he’s sick all the time…).
Besides Rhett (http://myworldinelsalvador.blogspot.com/), JB and me, the couple had also invited a Salvadoran coworker from the embassy and her husband. They were extremely friendly people, with great English. They insisted I call them any time I spend the night in San Salvador, rather than staying at a hostel. Or hotel, rather; “hostel” is probably not in their vocabulary. He is now a pilot for TACA, but during the war flew planes and helicopters for the Salvadoran Air Force. The day Colonel Domingo Monterrossa was killed in a helicopter in Morazán by a booby-trapped piece of FMLN booty, he was also flying in Morazán, but in a plane. His father was a founding member of the ARENA party, a colleague of Roberto D’Aubuisson, and was targeted by the FMLN and eventually killed in his house in San Salvador. For her part, her parents’ grand house in a neighborhood overlooking the city was once taken over by rebels while she was there. She said the fighters were teenagers and expressed disgust at her memory of their glee and imperiousness upon seizing such a prize.
Their war stories went on and on, and were much different to listen to than those I’d heard the day before from Niña Evangelina and over the previous months from Niña Fermina. To the pilot and his wife, the rebels were a bunch of dangerously misled, rabble-rousing upstarts who didn’t understand the first thing about the way the world worked, while the Armed Forces were valiantly trying to restore order to the country in the face of the rebels’ threat to take it to hell in a handbasket. To my campesina friends, the soldiers were a bunch of thugs and the rebels a bunch of good-hearted folks who understood them better, but both sides were making life pretty unpleasant.
The other notable difference is the social status (or literal rank) of the people they interacted with. The pilot at Thanksgiving knew Colonel Monterrossa, and could feasibly have been flying his helicopter the day he died. He also knew the Cuban-American CIA agent, Gustavo Villoldo, who supposedly buried Che Guevara, and later came to El Salvador to help put down the insurrection. This guy kept his giant-killing streak alive by capturing one of the most notorious female rebel comandantes, Zoila Solís. The pilot later visited her in the hospital for some reason, an episode she reproduced in the memoir she wrote in the ‘90s, badmouthing him. She now serves in the legislature for the FMLN party (http://www.asamblea.gob.sv/diputados/zquijada.htm). My American host, who’s only been in El Salvador for 4 months, listened to all of this wide-eyed. He asked, “and have you talked to her since the war?” The pilot responded, with the utmost aplomb, “I’ve run into her a few times, but I really have no interest in talking to her.”
Imagine if the Civil War had ended in a truce, and all the Union and Confederate generals lived in Washington, many of them serving together in Congress. Here in El Salvador we’re at about where they might have been in 1881. Tensions remain.
Intermission. The day after Thanksgiving our host gave us a tour of the embassy. It’s a huge compound with a pool, ballfields, and several large buildings. We palled around with the Ambassador in his office, having our picture taken with him for no reason that he explained to us. In the Commissary I bought one Sierra Nevada Pale Ale for a special occasion and a jar of Smucker’s peanut butter. Ah, the most rich spice of scarcity! End Intermission.
Moving on to my second recent visit with Niña Evangelina, indulge me by first pausing to consider a reading from Morinaga Roshi, a Zen master who died in 1995.
Consider this: Suppose that a person is in a very sincere and tranquil mood, with no anxieties, in a clear, healthy psychological frame of mind. (When one’s mind is distorted and hung up, that is another story!) Suppose that person is a housewife in the kitchen in the evening, and she hears the familiar sound of her husband’s footsteps as he comes home. Wiping her hands on her apron, she goes with the face of a wife, the voice of a wife, the body and movements of a wife—a wife greeting her husband.
Then, just as she reaches to take his coat, a voice from behind calls, “Mama!” She turns around and responds, “What is it?” And just in that instant this person no longer has the face of a wife, but of a mother. She looks back with the face of a mother, the voice of a mother, the gestures of a mother. Then, if a friend from the neighborhood comes to call, she receives her guest not with the face of a wife or of a mother, but with the face of a next-door neighbor.
Perhaps as you read this, you imagine me in one form, as a monk. But tomorrow morning I will visit the grave of my parents. Standing before that grave, I am nothing more than a child. One appears before one’s parents as a child, before one’s child as a parent, before one’s husband as a wife, before one’s wife as a husband. At work, the face and form one takes on depend upon the position they occupy. This is our true form.
There is no clump called “I” moving from this spot to that spot, instant by instant. Rather, through particular encounters with particular people, within each encounter, within each transition, something called “I” makes its appearance. Thus it is that what seems to be an object outside yourself is, in reality, your complement, that which gives this instant of your life its glow.
-Soko Morinaga Roshi, From Novice to Master: An Ongoing Lesson in the Extent of My Own Stupidity, p. 126 (emphasis added)
This is a familiar concept in both Buddhism and postmodern academia. The philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes in a similar way of the individual’s interaction with the world: “perception always involves, at its most intimate level, the experience of an active interplay, or coupling, between the perceiving body and that which it perceives.” Anthropologists since the 1960s or so have occupied themselves just as much with studying the nature of intersubjectivity as the cultures of their subjects. In physics, there is the Heisenberg principle. I just mean to say, Morinaga Roshi’s quote is no uncommon wisdom, it is just uncommonly well put. That line, “But tomorrow morning I will visit the grave of my parents. Standing before that grave, I am nothing more than a child,” carries such simple, deep power. With those two sentences, the Roshi gets across in a very personal way a truth that can otherwise seem rarefied.
Where am I going with this? Sometimes I just like to wander around in ideas, but at the moment I’m trying to work towards explaining a very distinct moment during my second recent visit to Niña Evangelina’s.
I’ve spent a lot of time with Niña Fermina. I eat and chat with her nearly every night. Her way of talking, her opinions, her sense of humor, the easy certainty with which she approaches life. To me she is a consummate matriarch, defining the way things go on around her without overtly exerting her will. She lives with a daughter and three grandchildren. She is also a superbly balanced individual, non-confrontational, tolerant, but very self-assured. At one point she was ill, and scores of people were showing up to her bedside, and she kept talking to me about her funeral, all of which increased my vision of her as an old, respected matriarch.
I’ve spent less time with her mother, but it’s easy to tell that they share many traits: the self-assuredness, lack of discomfiture in any situation, a certain way of talking. But Niña Evangelina right off the bat comes off as confrontational, rigid, and strongly opinionated. She’s often complained to me about not having any friends in the community, and it’s not hard to imagine why (although it’s precisely the things that may alienate her neighbors that tickle me about visiting her). One projects that Fermina consciously rejected her mother’s rigidity in her adolescence.
It struck me for months that I’d never seen mother and daughter in the same place at the same time. I began to think they didn’t speak to each other. But yesterday I was sitting at Niña Evangelina’s talking about orejas when Niña Fermina showed up.
She sat down in the doorway, on the cool concrete floor, and in that moment I saw her as I never had before: the woman I’d always seen as a matriarch she had the face of a daughter, the body and movements of a daughter. She didn’t even have to say anything, I could see it so clearly. I saw deference, rebellion, respect, remnants of rage and acceptance, a little awe, the tentativeness of one who sees much of another in herself, and the comfort with all of this that comes from many years with it. It was incredible. I immediately thought of Morinaga’s quote.
Another woman of Niña Fermina’s generation showed up, and they spent much of the rest of the visit talking with each other and ignoring Niña Evangelina, much in the way of children ignoring an embarrassing parent. It was a little sad, but it was also clear that Niña Evangelina is resigned to it and hardly cares a whit.
Walking back to our houses, Niña Fermina talked to me about her childhood, about how strict her mother was, how she burned her hands on the comal to desensitize them for making tortillas, and punished her for every little thing. It’s no wonder she so distinctly had the face and body and movements of a child when she sat down in her mother’s doorway; it’s been a long, fraught relationship.
