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