El Salvador smells in far, A very old and cruel war, Mature fruit and happy songs that tell sad stories. I seemed like a land of good people, I seemed especially beyond the topics behind these statements. My Savior, before, It was nothing more than a mythical Oliver Stone movie that tells my trade, Journalism; A great soccer player, Magico Gonzalez, Able to dribble with the same defenses and goalkeepers of discos; and an archbishop, Monsignor Romero, who killed a shot in the heart when he offered the nth homily asking the military to stop killing guerrillas and peasants.
Little more knew about this land because the Savior is a small corner of the map through which the roads do not cross. The Savior goes for effort, Not because it's step. Facked between Guatemala and Honduras, The country seems to suffer from that strange conviction that is forced retirement. And the effort of telling a hard and complicated history about abortions and a women's prison took me there.
The country seems to suffer from that strange conviction that is forced retirement
I arrived on a Sunday morning with the gray sky. In the taxi charlé with Antonio, A kind driver, While observing that the cover of the national newspaper he wore dedicated half a page to Barcelona and Real Madrid. In a corner, down, talked about the maras, the 13 Dead gang members in clashes with the army. "Salvador bleeds again", I meditated with sorrow.
On the long way to the capital, The roads are quite good, I was struck by the lack of population and the amount of field without working that we were going through. Dry and leafy seemed to announce the certain poverty of this land. In the countryside, In your work, It is where countries are better deciphered. Cities can fool with money bubbles, The field is too big to lie.
Already at the entrance of the capital, San Salvador, Webbies listed and a street trade without truce. The city seems sunk between mountains. It was like a reunion with an America that did not travel from 2009, in Panama. The Mexico of the center and the north that I have seen seemed different, even on its poorest side. It is urban, asphalt, It is not this America that resembles always fleeing the field. No one seems like the city, It is as if all those people had fallen a concrete cube on top but their lives were governed by the designs of the earth, Water and sun. Many seem lost, wrapped by that city that is not its natural habitat. A lot of sensations saw them pass to the other side of the window. I liked back.
The war was developed outside and here there were people covering it and taking Daiquiris in the pool
I stayed at the Intercontinental Hotel, Lady of all international journalists in the times of the Civil War. "From the second floor up it was like an immense writing. The war was developed outside and here there were people covering it and taking Daiquiris in the pool ”, Edgar told me, a photographer and former guerrilla with whom I was lucky to work. The talks with him are the most real thing that I take from the country.
That same morning I went with Antonio to take a walk. We stop in the center, Next to the cathedral and the museum. In the crypt of the temple is Monsignor Romero's mausoleum, which will be beatified next month. There were Venezuela flags, New emblem of the American left after passing back of Havana or the passage forward of Caracas. The image overwhelmed by the character's historical load.
Outside, In the square, There was an impromptu mattress sales store and a lot of sitting people under the shadow of an immense tree. In the corners were the illegal stalls, As I saw in many streets, that the City Council has failed to withdraw. It is a fight between image, Modernity and misery. I guess the dignity of a city is not that its streets are neat, is that their neighbors are not hungry. The city was degrading as the mountain slope descended. He was poor for pieces: above the rich and below everything was deteriorating.
The dignity of a city is not that its streets are neat
Not far to see the rosary church. I had read that outside symbolizes hell and inside symbolizes heaven. Its facade is concrete and has an abandoned appearance. Within, as if man could afford to interpret the sacred, you access a temple without columns, open, in which stained glass is projected everywhere. It is beautiful.
When I arrived, a mass was celebrated and when a man was leaving at the door, he asked me if I had seen the via crucis. He said it with an innocent gesture that immediately made me think that I should go to contemplate him. Then he told me that I was in the background, Where do I suppose paradise, And I cross the church with stealth so as not to disturb believers in their prayers and praises. And there I saw a miracle, as was all that place, in which with cement, Iron and pumice stone The architect and sculptor Rubén Martínez recreated the life of Jesus Christ with so much talent and imagination that I thought I never saw something so different to talk about something so old.
The architect had to resort to the Vatican to allow him to carry out his project, back in the late decade of the 60, before a Salvadoran church that did not want to authorize a work that could not understand. There they died too 21 People, In the times of war, In a massacre that left the marks of the bullets on the facade and a commemorative plaque that the Dominicans placed.
The bullet marks are left on the facade
Another woman told me that there was a book that had everything with a tender smile and a girl opened a little store that took out the specimen that effectively told everything. And the pastor said goodbye to his faithful and she, young, He told me very short, Not to bother him, that at dawn and at sunset is when the lights paint it all. And I smiled and felt very lucky to be able to be there and I thought, Although I couldn't, Go back later.
Then, After the Church, We climb the top of the San Salvador volcano. On the hillside are the best restaurants in the city to which people with plenty go to spend Sunday. We arrive late and the top parking was already closed by excesses. The fog in any case was hardly seen and in the descent a group of dancers asked for money while Bailba in the asphalt. They were my first hours in El Salvador and somehow it seemed to me that they had spent too many years since the last time I met this America. Antonio smiled and told me “I hope our land tries well, Salvadorans like foreigners to feel good ”. And me, as they, I never stopped smiling as I stayed there.
