Venice masks

Sunday 18 March 2018

Day-to-day - Carmen González Huguet

“Yet we want to return to the place we love.
And if God lets us live, we’ll return to eat
corn-on-the-cob fresh from the field,
if we are given the chance…”
Salvadoran refugee, April 1986

And of course,
despite the bloodshed,
life went on
tying its laces.

Having to live, by any means.

To keep pushing forward
despite the missing.
To feed the family
without a father,
to rebuild the house,
to grind the corn
to barely eat,
to keep pushing forward
despite the heavy
load of our dead.

Having to make do
to get by.

To borrow things
to fill baskets
to start selling.

Because food
and clothes
were lacking at home.

Having to work any which way –
washing cars, selling knives,
packing crates, checking tickets,
learning skills, laying bricks,
building houses with sweat
and no training
and much resolve.

Or else
robbing cars,
looting stores,
jumping buses,
mugging passengers,
stealing and selling
fire-damaged things,
when there was no alternative.

And the smuggled goods,
the smuggling
that no one considered wrong –

the streets brimming with so many items,
everything was for sale:
foreign cigarettes, three cents a pack,
watches, glasses, picture frames, wallets,
cassette tapes, belts, shoes, trousers,
mounds of material
and cheap clothing,
store food and fresh food,
medicine and make-up,
earrings, necklaces, stockings,
imported fruit.

In the centre
everywhere turned marketplace
under the crush
of those who fell with nothing.

With nothing
those who knocked
at the archbishop’s door.

With nothing those in the shelters
of Calle Real and San José de la Montaña.

With nothing the refugees in Honduras
and those who resettled
in Tenancingo, in Guarjila,
in so many new places.
With nothing because they left or lost everything fleeing.

With nothing the deported returned,

caught out by the border patrol
clutching their one change of clothes.

With nothing they made it
to the border,
running untold risks
to reach the land
that pays in dollars.
With nothing more
than the dream
to earn enough
to send some back
to those who stayed
enduring the small country.

Which is why, for all of us,
the everyday small things –
bread, water, light, air,
joy despite the death –
turned out to be so vital.

Which is why, for all of us,
the fact of being alive
took on new meaning.

Fear, distress, scarcity,
seeing death so close,
touching death,
propelled us towards life
with the hunger
of a shipwreck survivor reaching land.

With the anger of
survivors who grasp little
but who sense the war –
with its dead, missing,
malnourished,
its lost little things –
stripped us of something irrevocable,
we’re not sure what
but it grieves us too.

Something good, something beautiful
tangled up in unpleasant days
that won’t be coming back.

Something we believed in,
something we loved.

Perhaps the simple life
of someone who finally woke
between bullets and tears
shattered
to see their own reflection.

To see ourselves
in the wide-angle lens
of so many reporters,
or reflected in the TV screens
of those who became the news,
has given us forever
faces shot through with horror
even when we smile.

Carmen Gonzalez Huguet (born 1958) El Salvador
Translated by Jessica Rainey
Source: The Offing

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