Balsamera

This selection, a continuation of Pedro Juan’s search for an explanation for the racial and political strife in his country, is also from Catleya luna, chapter 8, pp. 169-172.

Balsamera/Forest of Balsam Firs

            Deep and fragrant forest of balsam firs . . . steep and prickly sloping down to the blue sea that sleeps, resting from such tumbling and rolling in sad coves and inlets, while the waves chase each other like children in the sand.  Deep balsam forest! The air is charged with a mystical fragrance, the heart abandons itself to joy!

            The eastern sky was opening like a beehive. Silence, with gloved hands, held the golden combs up to the light and honey spilled through, delicately staining the smooth face of the sea.

            But a dense shadow still draped from the top of the forest in striped curtains of foliage, drawn aside capriciously by thick, snaking vines that transformed the tropical hillside into the head of an octopus.

            The tall fir trees appeared like a long procession of ragged, sleepwalking phantoms, their skeletons barely swaying in the early morning breeze, their hair and nails roughly clipped, their torsos bound with scraps, the only trees in the world that dress like men.

            They were all crosses without arms, Christs with holy wounds in their sides, their blood taken to heal the wounds of others, good thieves who steal the wealth of the soil of Cuscatlán.  The wandering wings of lavender-feathered tropical angels flutter above them.

            The talapo has seen the treetops turning blue and knows that dawn is near.  His song is like the sweet, hollow sound of the marimba.  Soon the sun will light up the forest and myriads of birds will sing.  For now the mountain is a closed temple whose portals and columns, recesses and drapes are softly illuminated by blue and green stained glass windows, tall windows that awaken and brighten with a premonition of dawn between sleep and watchfulness.   

            In the center of a wall of gray, moss-covered stones a spring trickles like a wound from a lion's flank. Near the spring is a pile of rocks and a wooden cross in whose silent embrace is a name written in crooked letters: Higinio Naba, November 2, 1931.

            Higinio Naba, a dead Indian or, more accurately a murdered Indian.  Leaning on their rifles, the deer hunters, who have been up all night and have not killed the deer who comes to quench its thirst at the spring, gaze inquiringly at the small green cross and try to make out the barely legible name.

            "Who's buried here?" asked the patrón.

            "Higinio Naba was the old man who owned these woods.  They say he was a shaman, but some say he was a saint.  All the Indians around here obeyed him and they called him Hoisil."

            "Why?"

            "Who knows!  Old Genaya, the weaver, who was alive back then, says that hoisil means balsam, the sap of the fir tree.

            "That's strange.  And how did he die?"

            "A patrol, with machetes. Nobody knows what he did.  They said he turned himself into a deer.  That they shot him when he was drinking at the spring and when he tried to run away they cornered him against the wall and cut him up and that when he died he became a Christian.  I think he had some powerful enemies and they had him hunted down because they were afraid of him.

            The serpent who lives in the wind woke up and began to unwind.  Frightened shadows fled like field mice, scattering and hiding.  The sky lay like a small pink and blue carpet over the damp and yielding forest.  Then a ray of sun entered a clearing between trunks and branches, majestic, like a golden tree felled by the ax of day.  Irises and bellflowers sparkled and insects and butterflies fluttered in the light that was like fiery dust.

            Here the story divided in two.  The scene was the same but it was the hour of wandering souls.

            It was getting dark.  Hoisil was sitting on a stone beside his cross.  His straight gray hair fell in bangs over his clay-colored forehead, deeply furrowed by the plow of forbearance.  His smile was a yellow corncob that nourishes like a kindly father.  Nana Genaya, startled, stopped in her tracks, dropped her wood-ax and made the sign of the cross, praying in dialect.

            "Are you alive?" asked the frightened woman.

            "Yes, I'm alive, you're looking at me, Genaya, but what you're seeing is the soul of me.  They planted me here in the ground, just roots, now I'm the flower, do you know what I mean?  The flower doesn't die, even if you pick me now I would still be around. 

            He smiled weakly and almost fell over when he tried to stand up. A tremor of fear ran through the old woman's bones, but the mysterious shadow didn't come toward her but just watched her.  He looked at her and smiled.

            "So, why did they kill you?"

            "Because I insisted on following the law of the Lord.  They rewarded me, they didn't kill me; it was a reward the Lord sent me, my dear, for serving Him."

            "What service, Hoisil?"

            "His bread and wine; his flesh and blood."

            "What blood, my friend, what bread are you talking about?"

            "Ours, the blood and bread of our race.  The sap of the fir tree is our blood; the flesh of the deer is the bread of our body.  I was their leader, the secret leader, the magician.  They went against me, they came to me for permission to rise up and seek vengeance because they had become impatient, the harsh treatment had made them unwilling to endure any more.  I refused because I know the law of the race of Cuscatlán, it was entrusted to me and it is written: "The race of Cuscatlán will have the forbearance of the defenseless deer and they will give their blood as the fir tree of the mountains gives its sap."  But they were possessed and they betrayed me.  They were lying in wait for me here when I came to drink at the spring.  I knew it would happen and I accepted my fate.  I came to drink in the body of the nahual, the animal spirit, to teach a lesson.  They shot me and then they cut up my body with their machetes like they cut the trunk of the fir tree.  Let it be a lesson to the race that I was sacrificed for them.

            Then the soul of Higinio Naba moved to one side and disappeared in the first shadows of the night.

            Nana Genaya stood there motionless for a long time, then picked up the bundle of firewood with her shaking hands and walked slowly down the path.  The new moon shone on the trunks and branches of the fir trees, turning them to silver, sad, ragged, mysterious fir trees, bunched together, covered with fragrant scars, the only trees in the world that dress like men.

            The forest of fir trees went on until it was lost in the distant hollow.

Cuscatlan

Introduction

When Salarrué left El Salvador in 1946 to assume the post of Cultural Attaché to the Salvadoran Embassy, he exchanged the piney woods, the fragrant flowers and the familiar birds of his beloved Cuscatlán for the crowded, fast-paced, brick-and-concrete world of New York City. It was an exhilarating as well as a conflictual time for him.  He worked on his painting, he fell in love with a beautiful socialite, he wrote a novel in English and a novel, short stories and poems in Spanish. Pedro Juan, the protagonist of the novel in Spanish, Catleya luna (Moon Orchid), is an artist who is working on a novel while falling in love with a woman who embodies his ideal of the perfect soul mate. The challenge he has set himself in his novel is to explain the root cause of the racial and political conflicts of his country.  As he ponders the unjust treatment of the indigenous population, he reconstructs their history.  His contemporaries call this their myths, but he insists it is their reality, their true history.  This history unfolds not in El Salvador but in Cuzcatlán.  The following is my translation of a selection from pages 138-140 of chapter 7 of the second edition of Catleya luna,(first edition 1970) published in 1980 by the Ministry of Culture.

***

. . . This exceptional land, this unique region, his Cuscatlán, . . . was like a magic island.  An island is so much more than the schoolchild's definition of "a body of land surrounded on all sides by water."  An island could be in the middle of a continent; it could be a high plateau, a barren upland [. . .] Cuscatlán was undeniably an island because first of all, his heart surrounded it with love, a love that was not patriotic, although it encompassed the beautiful civic spirit of that virile country known as El Salvador.  Secondly, it was like an adventitious root in the isthmus, different from the other countries, even geographically.  It was a tight cluster of fiery volcanoes on a narrow swath of land, crowded with valleys and lakes, pleated with mountains teeming with life, with hard work, with agriculture, wasting nothing; dotted with enchanting villages where the indigenous and the colonial Spanish produced a felicitous mix, creating the environment for a peaceful race, prone to dream yet hard-working, energetic and as courageous as any people anywhere.  If one were to fly over Cuscatlán one could easily see what an island this small piece of America is.  To the north of the island, the mountains of Honduras appear in monotonous repetition like the enormous waves of a sea frozen in place by a magic spell.  And then the gulf and its diminutive archipelago of small islands to the southeast and the vast Pacific that blows its salty breath like acrid foam from the boiling and crashing waves.  From on high, between swatches of clouds in a cobalt blue sky and swells from the living foamy depths, this happy land seemed to be dozing, wrapped in its white and blue flag.

*  *  *

            Cuscatlán came from a great distance.  Pedro Juan imagined its beginnings: its birth foretold, it was among the chosen, protected by powerful supernatural forces.  Illumination from the sacred dwelling places of the indigenous gods nourished the Destiny of these lands with its heat and light.  There is the uppermost heaven, Teoteocán, the dwelling place of Ometeuctli, the Lord of all duality; Ilhuicatl, the lower heaven; Tlalocán or Paradise, home of the true godparents of Cuscatlán, Tlaloc and Chalchuitlicueye (she of the green sash), the male and female water deities.  Then Mictlán, the kindom of shadow, extends beneath the volcanoes and plains.  There the 400 meridians, the Cenzón-Huitznahuas, the true "spirits of nature," so familiar to the clairvoyant native of this mysterious land, cultivate the vegetable and mineral life.  On the surface of this land of mountains, on the very soil, which is as sacred a dwelling place as the higher and lower realms, the gods walk and dance and fly.  There live Centeol, the god of corn; Ehecatl the god of the wind; Suchipili and Suchiquetzali, the male and female gods of song and dance and flowers, the Lords of Tropical Springtime.  Now and again the awesome Camaxtli makes an appearance.  Cuetcalzín and Cabracán, forgers of fearsome earthquakes, take shelter in the caves of blood and struggle (in the company of the tepescuintle, the raccoon, the tamagás snake, the tamazul and the ayutuste); there also dwell Cipit, who slyly tempts one to carnal love, and Siguanahuate who resides in the Zompantli or place of skulls and bones, and the goddess Suicoate, the serpent of fire who slides unseen along the spine of her victims or her chosen ones, driving them mad or enlightening them as the case may be.

            In the sky Tonatiuh the Sun and Metzi the Moon and Tezcatlipoca of the smoking mirror scattering plagues and the many Chapulate who trail hunger in their wake.

            In the legendary and mysterious region of Tlapallán (Land of the Rainbow), when the Aztec dynasties fell, in the eleventh century, the great Topilzín Axil created and ruled over the domain of Cuzcatlán.  Topilzín Axil, a high priest and powerful king, returned from the third Tulán (which he and his faithful followers had abandoned after the death of King Huémac in the cave of Cincalco) to the primitive and semi-legendary Tulán del Güija.  The true Tulán of legend, improbable but not impossible birthplace of the Toltecas-Nahoas, existed in an early Orient that historians, unaware of the esoteric sources of knowledge, consider mythical, when in truth it was the original Toltec center of the ancient Atlantis.  The original Toltecs, later scattered throughout the world, were but the third sub-race of the fourth human race, the Atlantean race, from which the copper and bronze-skinned Native Americans descended as well as the Mongolian and other Oriental branches, people of high cheekbones, slanted eyes and straight hair. 

            When he left on his civilizing journey, Topalzín lived first among the Maya of Yucatán, not as a conquerer but as a Master or Avatar.  He is known by the name Kukulkán.  Among them he is the highest religious authority.  He founded the city of Mayapán in approximately 1000 AD, restored Chichén-Ttzá and then continued west, organizing and civilizing until he reached Cuscatlán.

            Later, in the thirteenth century, there was another exceptional king of Cuscatlán, Tutecotzimit, who had defeated the terrible Caumichín or flying fish, chief of the allied armies who was tortured and killed for trying to reinstate the sacrificial rites abolished by Kukulkán.

            Other famous kings of Cuscatlán were Tonaltut, Silguanzímit and Mactenasun.  The exact history of Cuscatlán remains hidden in a mist.  Far from being undesirable, this retains the mystery of that which one day, whether deciphered from a stellae of Cuscatlán or discerned on the back of a vase from Tazumal or flowing from the lips of a stone figure from Santa Lucía Cozumalhuapa, will be revealed to the astonishment and pleasure of our people.

My Reply to the Patriots

B.  Mi respuesta a los patriotas/My Reply to the Patriots

Introduction

Salarrué continued throughout his life to feel a deep attachment to the land now known as the Republic of El Salvador but once called Cuscatlán by its nahuatl-speaking inhabitants. Indeed, he believed that the pre-Colombian history and mythology of his country were more real than the presidents and politicians of the Republic. As an artist of independent inclinations and also a humane and compassionate individual, he was torn between the desire to support progressive social movements and the need to remain outside of the rules and restrictions of political parties. So, when called upon to take a side against the government of Maximiliano Hernández Martínez following the massacre of an estimated 30,000 citizens by government troops in 1932, he publicly declared his allegiance to the land rather than to any government in a courageous and controversial open letter, “Mi respuesta a los patriots”/My Reply to the Patriots, first published in the Repertorio Americano in 1932.

My Reply to the Patriots

            My friends have said to me, "You are so calm, you look at the world with half-closed eyes.  You live in a land of enchantment, in an unreal world whose shores never feel the pounding of waves from here below.  For that very reason you should speak out now, when our fatherland is going through uncertain times.  Focus your microscope and tell us what you see and how it looks to you, it will surely help us, do it for the sake of patriotism, for the love of our nation, plant your feet on the ground, even if just for this once."  And then they laugh.  I understand that they say this partly in jest, as friends, with the affection we crazy pacifists inspire, and partly in utter seriousness and that is why I have felt perplexed and then I have felt misunderstood, seen as lazy and worthless, living in an implausible world.  And I am indignant, for my honor as a man has been questioned and so, like the voice crying out in the desert, I write this reply to the nameless patriots.

            I have no patria or nation.  I do not know the meaning of the word.  You who think of yourselves as practical, how do you define patria?  I know that to you it means a collection of laws, an administrative machine, a patch on a gaudy-colored map.  You practical ones call that the patria.  I, the dreamer, have no patria, I have no nation, but I do have a homeland, made of earth, that I can touch.  I do not have El Salvador, fourteen segments on a piece of glossy paper; I have Cuscatlán, a region of the world and not a vague entity such as a nation.  I love Cuscatlán.  While you speak of the Constitution, I sing of the earth and of our race: the earth, that swells and bears fruit; the race of creative dreamers who without discussion or argument, work the soil, shape clay into vessels, weave blankets and build roads.  I am of this race; I am a builder, a creator, a shaper of forms and also one who understands.  Most of you play at patriotism, fighting about who is wrong or right, about whether or not something is constitutional, whether Pedro or Pablo will be president, whether this or that "ism" will make the nation prosper.  Prosperity for you means having everything except our mother earth. 

            Dull-witted, lazy, cruel and thieving capitalists confront no less cruel, petty and rapacious communists.  While these two sides snarl at each other over every issue, we the dreamers ask for nothing because we have everything.  They fight over the peels and leave us the fruit.  "The bread is mine, all mine," some cry, "let me sell the bread."  While others say, "No, we are hungry and the bread is ours, because the land is ours."  Meanwhile, we the dreamers grow the wheat that beautifies the countryside; we delight in the music of the cornfield that smiles with the breeze; singing, we gather the corncobs for the pigs to chew.  The owner of the coffee plantation is a pedant who talks about the market, about the rise and fall of prices.  He counts his money leaning over a table, he sniffs at the sacks of coffee, but he has never lain in the fields and felt the mystery of moonlit nights; he does not notice the beauty of the blood-red beans as they slip through the fingers of the women who sing as they pick; he does not appreciate the fragrance of the coffee blossom or know its legend.  The owner of the sugar plantation has never heard the comforting whisper of the cane fields or walked between the rows of graceful plants.  They all shout about one thing: money.  Some want to earn 500% and others want higher wages.  The communist wears a red badge and would guillotine the wrongdoers, insists that justice is the sharing of good bread and good wine, but has never known how to share with those who have everything, who in fact have nothing.  The Indian of the plow and the sickle, who creates our agrarian landscape under a blazing sun, is content that he can, with his rough and soiled hands, hands of God, feed an entire nation, a nation that devotes itself to a madness called politics, a madness that is not only fruitless but harmful.  This Indian lives the earth and is the earth and never talks about patriotism.  Nor does he fear the foreigner who, short of taking his life, can take nothing from him that is truly his.

            I who, according to you, live in some other world, am closer than you to the heart of the earth, my roots go deep and my desire to flower reaches up to the sky.  If one day the land of Cuscatlán were to rise up and call to her children, I would be one of the first she would embrace, not the politicians and ideologues of this thing called the patria: El Salvador, with its symbols, its shields, its flags and imaginary boundaries.  No, I am not a patriot nor do I wish to be one.  I hold a patriotic banana in higher esteem than I do a patriotic man, so don't talk to me about being honorable.  And I do not work for the paper Patria, I work for Life: for living, for the land, for my home, as Espino would say.  In my home, complete with dreams, I live a real life, a life that is savored, like sacred wine.  I neither plow nor plant nor harvest; I officiate before the altar and give thanks in the name of the dreamers gathering invisible fruit plucked from the tree of life and the vine of tradition. 

            What is this thing called patria that I do not see?  You ask me to come down to your level and I do not know where to plant my feet; everywhere I look I find quicksand.  If I were to invite you to my homeland, you would find ample room to run and sweat, you could plunge your hands in fresh clay and fill your lungs with clean air.  In that patria of yours I breathe only hate, cowardice, misunderstanding.

            What I wouldn't give to bring you to this land of mine!  Those few who were here with me have gone; I find myself practically alone.  Alone with the pensive Indian and the dreaming woman.  Miranda Ruano, who wrote Voces del Terruño (Voices from the Homeland), a book no one reads any more, is gone; Ambrogi speaks of nothing but Quiñónez; the Andinos write about "Politics;" Bustamante works for the court; Castellanos Rivas is now a private secretary; Guerra Trigueros no longer hears the stars falling in the eternal fountain; Julio Ávila has gone into business; Llerena doesn't speak out; Gómez Campos owns a store; Paco Bamboa is getting a Ph.D.; Salvador Cañas is busy "preparing" his students; Masferrer no longer sings; Gavidia has a radio talk show; Chacón sells insurance; Rochac talks about finances; Villacorta complains about the treasury; Vicente Rosales associates only with a select few; Miguel Angel Espino's fountain has dried up.  In short, I find myself alone in the land of reality, except for Mejía Vides, who wants to go off and paint by the water (like Gauguin in Tahiti) and Cáceres, who dreams and complains in the offices of Atlacatl.

            Yes, what I wouldn't do to bring you to this country of mine, that is not illusory, like yours, but hill after hill and rolling meadows where roosters crow at daybreak; where there is no statute pertaining to this or that, but rather the pleasant shade of a tree; where there is no clause or sub-paragraph number four, but rather a spring to quench your thirst; where the rain, the moon and the wind are the rule of law.

            Poetic, yes, it's true; but poetic regarding the dust of the earth and not prosaic and insipid regarding outdated concepts and antiquated doctrines.  Poetic under the blue sky and not petty buried beneath an "ism."

            As you requested, I have come down to earth and planted my feet on solid ground, but on my earth, not yours, which is neither solid nor earth, but dark smoke.  I have done it because you insisted, because you finally managed to distract me from my "impractical blue rapture" and you even managed to insult me for a moment.  Hear this once and for all: I have no nation and recognize no one's nation.  My land is greater than this slice of absurdity you offer.  Much greater.  Not even the planet;

 not even the cosmos . . .

Christmas Eve

The wounded evening fell behind the hill, its blue wing hanging limp and its golden beak half open.  The nest of night was empty, except for a sprinkling of stars and the shiny egg of the moon.  Feathers fluttered a mournful evensong.

            Tall, silver guarumo trees watched each other like ghosts in the darkness.  The thick breeze, cold and dank, moved the branches in the clear spaces of the sky.  The damp air left the shapes of things glistening and wet and the smells of the earth rose up to the sky.  Crickets scraped their legs together, polishing the silence. 

            A fistful of light came from the door of the run-down shack. The hunched-over shadows of the inhabitants slithered onto the porch.  The dog settled himself in the doorway.

            Little by little, the moon filled the night with beautiful light.  The houses of the village could be seen from the porch.  Here and there a candle appeared on the street.  In the old bell tower, the moon settled in and chimed merrily and now and then, bright fireworks pierced the stretched tent of the sky, whistling and crackling.

            The mother wrapped her shawl around her and went out, her two children following behind.  Tina was eleven, thin and round-bellied.  Nacho was around five: chubby, whiney, disheveled and runny-nosed.  His shirt hung just shy of his belly-button.  His mother pulled him along, tripping and with his mouth open and wiping his nose.  They walked down to the main road and headed toward town.

            They walked and walked, without a word, making their way down the dusty road that had skin like a snake, with patches of light and shadow.  Bulls walked through the fields, pushing through the solitude with their bellowing.  As they passed by "La Canoga," opposite Mr. Tito's place, the light from the open door fell on them, blinding them, and they heard the laughter of a guitar.  They walked by in single file.  They walked and walked.  It was Christmas Eve, so there would be midnight mass; and word had gone around that Father Peraza was going to give presents to the children after the sermon.  Tina and Nacho had never owned a toy.  They played dolls with tree branches dressed in corn husks; they played store in a hollowed-out log; they used corncobs to play cops and robbers and gourds for ball games.  They walked and walked. Their skinny dog followed them, a sorry-looking creature coughing and dragging her tail.  They could hear the drum and the horn that accompanied the town's festivities.  They turned a corner and there was the town; from the church steeple the clock like an eye with two lashes frowned at them and watched them until they turned toward the plaza.

            There were things for sale; it smelled of smoke and liquor and firecrackers.  The doorway to the atrium was festooned with palm branches and chains of colored paper.  The horn and the drum accompanied the festivities. 

*

            Miss Lola stopped them on the steps.

            "Did you come for the gifts, Ulalia?"

            "Well, yes . . . ."

            "Hurry up, then, if you want to get something for the children.  The priest is almost finished."

            The mother pulled her train along, looking for the priest; she walked down the side aisle and pressed into the crowd of parents and children waiting for presents.  The noise was deafening.  People were laughing and shoving.

            Ulalia pushed her way through.  Finally, she found herself before the black-robed belly of the priest.  She heard trumpets, she heard bells and music boxes.

            "And who are you?  You're not from here, are you?"

            "No, Father, I'm from the valley."

            "Hum . . . Your kids haven't come to catechism classes, have they?

            "No, Sir, we live so far away . . . . "

            "Hum . . . !  None for you, none for you.  Did you hear?  None for you.  Next, who's next?

*

            A light was shining from the top of the hill.  Ulalia walked home.  With her hoarse, tired voice, she said, "Come on, Nacho, hurry up!"

            Tina pulled him along.  Nachito said, "What about the toys, Mama?"  His shirt fell just shy of his belly button.  He was sniffling.  In the distance, the river tumbled through the ravine.  The black arms of the trees waved their fists at the sky.

            "Come on, Nachito, hurry up!"

            "What about the toys, Mama?"

            As they passed by Mr. Tito's place the light from the open door fell on them and they heard the laughter of a guitar.

Honor

Honor

            The wind had shifted to the north during the night.  Juanita was clean; the water was cold; vultures and smells drifted above.  She crossed the open field.  Her skirt hugged her legs.  Her hair was like black spiders on her face.  Juana was happy, rosy-cheeked and squinting into the wind.  The trees ran beside her.  In the meadow the wind gusted around her.  Juanita filled her cup with joy and covered it with a shout; then she ran and ran, twirling in her own laughter.  The dog ran barking beside her, chasing the dry leaves that flew like birds.

            The spring was deep in a ravine, shaded by palms and philodendrons.  Further down, hidden by stands of huiscoyoles and iscanales, blue pools slept, pools like pieces of sky, long and fragrant.  Shadows had fallen on the rock walls and limestone pebbles rolled in the thin, fragile stream.

            Juanita sat down to rest.  She was breathing hard and deep to calm her heaving breasts; her taut blouse barely contained them.  The spring watched her intently, while the dog greedily lapped the water, her four paws planted in the virgin sand.  Downriver, branches bathed in the cool water.  Beside her, the rocky ground was green and damp. 

            Juanita took out a mirror the size of a coin and looked at herself carefully.  She arranged her curls; she wiped her forehead with her apron; and, as she like to do when she was alone, she kissed herself on the lips, glancing around to be sure no one was looking.  Tucking the mirror inside her blouse, she got up from the rock and began gathering the round seeds of the tempisque tree to play cinquito.

            The dog began to bark.  A man on horseback appeared.  The sun was behind him and his horse's gait broke the glass of the spring into a thousand pieces.  When Juanita saw him, she felt her heart in her throat.  There was no time to run away; without knowing why, she waited for him, clenching a leaf in her fist like a knife.  The horseman, young and handsome, cantered up to her, radiant with his advantage.  He ignored the barking and took her at a gallop, like the north wind that was blowing.  There was feeble resistance with trembling nos and frail pushing away; then cries of pain, then . . . the spring stared straight ahead, unblinking.  With her arm over her eyes, Juana lay in the shadows.

*

            Tacho, Juana's brother, was nine years old.  He was dark-skinned, with a head like a huizayote squash.  One day he saw that his grandpa was furious.  Juana had said something to him, who knows what, and papa had given her a good beating.

            "Stupid fool!" he had heard him say.  "You've gone and lost your honor, the only thing you brought into this world!  If I'd known you were going to lose your honor at the spring that day, I'd never have let you go, stupid fool!"

            Tacho cried, because he loved Juana as if she were his mother.  Innocently, without telling anyone, he went to the spring and searched everywhere for Juana's honor.  He had no idea what his sister's honor might look like, but judging from his grandpa's anger, it was probably something that would be easy to recognize. Tacho pictured her honor round and smooth, maybe shiny, maybe like a coin, or a cross.  He kept his eyes peeled on the sand, upstream and down, but he saw only stones and weeds, weeds and rocks and he couldn't find her honor.  He looked in the water, in the bushes, in the hollows of trees, he even searched in the sand around the spring, but nothing!

            "From the beating papa gave her, I guess Juana's honor must be something big and important," he thought.

            Finally, under some chaparral, among the leaves dappled with sun and shade, he saw a strange, shiny object.  Tacho felt happiness rising in his body like bubbles that tickled him.

            "I found it!" he yelled.  He picked up the shiny object and looked at it with surprise.

            "Wow!" he said, I didn't know an honor looked like this . . .

            He ran with all the strength of his happiness.  When he got home, his grandpa was sitting on a hollowed-out log, lost in his thoughts.  The furrow between his brows was dark and deep.

            "Papa!" shouted Tacho, panting.  "I went to the spring and I found Juana's honor, now don't beat her anymore, here . . . ."

            And he put a thin dagger with a mother-of-pearl handle in his grandpa's hand.

            The Indian took the dagger, waved Tacho away and sat staring at the sharp blade, with vengeance in his eyes.

            "Yes, you have," he murmured.

            Night fell.

I.This Country of Mine

This Country of Mine

A.  Tales of Clay (Cuentos de barro)

     Luis Salvador Efraím Salazar Arrué spent his early childhood in Sonsonate and Santa Tecla, rural

towns with a strong indigenous presence.  He attended local primary and secondary schools and

loved nothing more than wandering in the hills and farmlands, observing nature, talking with the

farmers and laborers and Indians, daydreaming in the shade of a mango tree, listening to the

warbling of the pucayo and the clarinero and making up stories to entertain his friends

In 1916 he was awarded a scholarship by the Salvadoran government that enabled him to study

English at Rock Hill College in Maryland and art at the Corcoran Institute in Washington, DC.

During a visit to New York he was browsing in Brentano’s Book Store and came across a copy of

Arturo Ambrogi’s  Cuentos del Trópico.  It was first been published in 1915 and although Ambrogi

was Salvadoran, the young Salvador had not read his collection of lyrical sketches and regional

vignettes of rural El Salvador.  Ambrogi’s descriptions of the landscape are painterly and his

characters’ speech is colloquial and colorful.  Although Salvador loved the cosmopolitan excitement

of New York and Washington and his English was improving quickly, he felt nostalgic for the warm

sun and bright colors of El Salvador.  He later described finding Ambrogi’s book as a kind of

epiphany.  He read it again and again and even committed to memory the titles of the selections; it

was poetry to his homesick ears. Ambrogi’s style of costumbrismo was popular throughout Latin

America so it was not the book’s uniqueness that impressed Salvador but rather its familiarity. 

Surrounded by the culture of an international metropolis, reading and savoring Cuentos del trópico

felt like rediscovering his homeland.

          
    El Salvador is a diminutive country, so small that when Gabriela Mistral visited for the first time in 1927, she playfully called it “el pulgarcito,” the smallest finger of the hand of Central America.  During that visit she toured the country in the company of a group of writers, who treated her with the deference and respect they showed all visitors whom they regarded as distinguished figures in the world of letters.  They showed her their volcanoes and rivers and introduced her to their writers and artists.  One of the writers she met in 1927 was Salvador Salazar Arrué, who had started signing his work “Salarrué.” 

            When Salarrué met Gabriela in 1927, he had already made a name for himself in literary circles in El Salvador.  His poems and stories appeared in the country’s newspapers and magazines and his first novel, El Cristo negro/The Black Christ, had been published in 1926.  But it was Gabriela was introduced him to an international audience.  An accomplished poet herself, in 1945 Mistral would become the first and to date the only Latin American woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, but she was already widely known and respected in Latin America as an educator, an ambassador of culture and good will and a defender of children, women and indigenous peoples.  Salarrué showed her some of his stories whose characters were the rural and indigenous inhabitants of El Salvador, of that small parcel of land called Cuscatlán by the Pipil people, for whom it was the land of the jewel.   She loved the stories and subsequently sent a few of them to Costa Rica to Joaquín García Monge, the founder and editor of the weekly literary publication Repertorio Americano.  The Repertorio was read throughout Latin America and because of its open-door editorial policy, it welcomed the work of established as well as new writers.  Two of Salarrué’s stories, accompanied by Gabriela’s praise, were published in the Repertorio in 1931. This endorsement encouraged Salarrué to publish a collection of 34 stories, Cuentos de Barro/Tales of Clay in 1934.  “La Honra” (Honor) and “Noche Buena” (Christmas Eve) are from this collection.

Island in the Sky

Island in the Sky

Selected Prose and Poetry

of

Salvador Salazar Arrué

(Salarrué)

Translations from the Spanish by Janet N. Gold 

Introduction

            His roots went deep in the volcanic soil of Cuscatlán and his soul had wings that took him to the far reaches of imagination.  From the meeting and mingling of these two ways of being and perceiving comes his originality. 

            His name was Salvador Salazar Arrué, but when, as a young man of 18 or 19, he began to fashion his artistic persona, he joined the three names into one and began to sign his work as Salarrué.  He was born in 1899 in Sonsonate, a small town in rural El Salvador in a region with a strong indigenous presence.  His mother was of Spanish and Indian blood, his father the son of a Basque immigrant.  His childhood was unremarkable, except that he seldom saw his father and he and his brother were raised in a household of women.  They were poor though not indigent but it was Salarrué's good fortune to have some wealthy and politically influential relatives who helped him get a scholarship from the Salvadoran government that allowed him to study art at the Corcoran Academy in Washington, D.C. from 1917-1919. Upon returning to El Salvador he worked as a writer and illustrator for various literary journals and married Zelie Lardé, a Salvadoran primitivist painter, in 1923.  Their home was an enchanted world where creative expression was encouraged and all three of their daughters were talented artists, writers and performers.  Salarrué spent most of his years in El Salvador, except for the period from 1917-1919 when he was studying in Washington, D.C. and from 1946-1957 when he served as cultural attaché to the Salvadoran Embassy and lived in New York City.  He saw himself primarily as a writer, artist and student of esoteric philosophies and declined any jobs that he felt were incompatible with his vocation, the result being that he and his family lived an extremely frugal life and often were barely able to make ends meet.        

            An acknowledged master of the Latin American short story, Salarrué is best known for Cuentos de barro  (1933; Stories of Clay), in which he recreates with realism and compassion the rural Salvadoran world he knew and loved.  These stories figure significantly in the development of costumbrismo in Central America and have been praised for their skillful portrayal of the indigenous population of El Salvador.  Yet while these stories certainly are part of the both beloved and maligned tradition of costumbrismo literature so popular in Latin America at the turn of the century, they do not, as is often the case with this genre, paint an innocent picture of rural simplicity, but rather face clearly the psychological, spiritual and material complexities and contradictions of their characters. 

            One of Salarrué's early works, O' Yarkandal (1929), is among his most delightful and unique literary creations.  It is a collection of stories that defy classification, but that resemble legends, fairy tales, creation myths and archetypal dream scenes.  They reflect his interest in multiple spheres of consciousness and demonstrate his penchant for fantasy.   He himself illustrated the book with paintings that reproduce visually a "remote empire" where one encounters cities of winged men, islands adrift in unknown seas, strange perfumes and gardens perennially in bloom, whose the first man and woman were born from the egg of a bird known as Alm-a (soul). O' Yarkandal is a book of pure creation and experimentation for which Salarrué invented even a language, bilsac.  His sensual delight in language, whether the idiosyncratic speech of rural Salvadorans or the invented speech of the inhabitants of his imagination, is one of the characteristics of his prose that make it identifiable and memorable.

            Salarrué's enjoyment of language combines in a unique way with his sense of humor in Cuentos de cipotes (Kids' Stories), stories that are not for children, he explains in the prologue, but by children, more specifically, by the child in him. They are small, silly stories, at once ingenuous, wise and candid, that speak like kids, full of mispronunciations, malapropisms, riddles, rhymes and invented language. The first edition (1961) was illustrated by his wife, Zelie Lardé, while the second edition (1971) was illustrated by his daughter Maya.

            Salarrué also wrote stories and novels that some critics have called cosmopolitan, but that might be described as urban-esoteric. Drawing on his experiences during his residence in New York and Washington, D.C., he created tales in sophisticated urban settings that form the background for esoteric adventures in a world of international travel, art galleries and elegant mansions on Riverside Drive.

            It would be impossible to describe or deeply comprehend the work of Salarrué without reference to theosophy, an eclectic system of belief popularized in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that strives for a synthesis, through both reason and intuition, of the essential truths of religions, science and philosophy, with an ethics of universal brotherhood and social responsibility. Among the esoteric principles of theosophy are the belief in astral spheres within which one moves by desire and will, reincarnation, and the essential unity of all life. Salarrué, like many other writers, educators and politicians of Latin America during the time, was drawn to this vision of an evolving universe guided by the dynamic interplay of the seemingly contradictory and opposing forces of masculine and feminine, yin and yang, light and dark, good and evil. He remained faithful throughout his life to his quest for an ever more profound comprehension of the nature of the universe. This spiritual quest permeates his entire oeuvre, both his writing and his painting, at times explicitly, at times as an implicit world view.

            Salarrué was a bohemian, an eccentric, an artist and a lifelong student of the ancient wisdom, a man of letters who sometimes went to cocktail parties with ambassadors and sometimes was so poor he traded his paintings for art supplies. He was a writer with his feet firmly planted in his homeland and his head in the clouds.  Yet for all his eccentricity, he was an active and influential figure in Salvadoran and Central American art and literature.

            Salarrué died at his home in Planes de Renderos, on the outskirts of San Salvador, on November 22, 1975.  His wife had died the previous year.  His daughters Olga and Aída were living with their families in New Jersey and Mexico City, respectively.  His daughter Maya, who never married, continued to live alone in the family home until her death in 1995.  She resented the intrusions on her privacy of scholars and journalists who sought to interview her or gain access to her father's unpublished manuscripts, which remained locked in his upstairs study until 1993, when she allowed Salvadoran artist Ricardo Aguilar to remove her father's papers and personal effects.  

            In November of 2001 I met Ricardo and he invited me to examine the Salarrué papers.  Among the first editions, photographs,  unpublished manuscripts, correspondence and personal effects, I unearthed an extraordinary collection of over 150 letters written to Salarrrué by Leonora Nichols, a woman from New York with whom he had a love affair for many years.  My subsequent research, centered on the correspondence, revealed a man of mystery and complexity who was a careful observer of human speech and behavior yet who lived in an inner world of dreams, imagination and transcendence.  Reminded of a description I had once heard of him as "one who goes through life with his eyes open but dreaming," I became intrigued with the challenge of penetrating his mystery by studying his creative expression and learning more about his life.  

            During much of his lifetime, Salarrué was a much loved and respected writer and artist in El Salvador whose work was known throughout Central and South America.  Early critical commentary tended to focus on his telluric and socially realistic stories, while his urbane, esoteric and fantastic writings received less attention. In his later years, when the intellectual and artistic climate of his country favored explicit political engagement, those texts imbued with his unique spiritual mysticism came to be seen by some as escapist and even irrelevant, although others  praised him not only for his mastery of the short story, but also for his humanity.  Salvadoran writer Manlio Argueta described him, in his poem entitled "Salarrué," as a "Teacher of tenderness/in a country of war".  Perhaps it is a sign that his country is trying to put the years of war behind it that his presence can once again be felt in El Salvador. It is as if his spirit has returned to plant the seeds of spirituality and creativity in his native land.  In 1999 the Ministry of Culture published a three-volume edition of his complete narrative with an excellent study by Salvadoran scholar Ricardo Roque Baldovinos that offers a fresh perspective on both his regionalist as well as his more experimental writing. And the Salarrué Family Foundation deposited his papers with the Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen (Museum of the Word and Image) in San Salvador in 2003, thus guaranteeing that future scholars will have access to this wealth of cultural documents.

            With the exception of a bilingual edition of Cuentos de barro (Tales of Clay) by Nelson López Rojas, published by Editorial Universidad Don Bosco in 2011, very little of his work has been translated into English, probably because of the difficulties presented by his use of colloquial and vernacular speech. Notwithstanding this challenge, I have translated selections from his short stories, poems, fragments from novels, essays and a selection from an unpublished autobiographical narrative.  I have arranged them in the following broad thematic clusters that I believe reflect his passions and talents more authentically than would a chronological ordering. 

I.  This Country of Mine

           

II.  The Child in Me

           

III.  Lord of Enchantment

IV.  The Woman in Me

IV.  The Soul of Stones

           

V.  The Man and His Words

             

I hope you enjoy these glimpses into the world of one of Central America’s most beloved and original writers.