Friday, Sep 5, 2008
The matriarch of a coffee farm sets out to rebuild her home and town after the devastating earthquake in El Salvador.
Jan 24, 2001 | On the morning of Jan. 13, in Santa Tecla, El Salvador, the earth parted its jagged jaws and roared. My mother-in-law was parking her jeep in her carport when it happened. She was returning from a baptism and looking ahead to the afternoon when she heard the bellow and felt the pavement beneath her move. What had been solid became liquid ooze. What had been level rose like molten concrete waves, so that she went up and down but not forward as she ran toward an open space where only sky was at risk of crashing down. Nora, my mother-in-law, is 68, a divorcée with a bad leg. She wore her best church dress as she ran along the ground that had gone vertical in an instant.
Down the street, meanwhile, in a neighborhood of Santa Tecla called Las Colinas, mansions were tumbling from the sky, plunging from their mountain berths in a storm of dust and drama. Whatever was in their path fell prey -- the clustered houses that sat on the mountain's lower face, the children spinning tops in the narrow streets, the idle conversations between neighbors. Before there was time to look up and run, a swath of suburbia was swallowed whole, entombed in a mudslide that stopped six blocks short of Nora's front door. Those who were saved were saved because of luck -- because of an errand that had taken them away from home, because of a traffic jam that had delayed their return, because of a plate of hot tortillas they were delivering to a neighbor. Because of a baptism that had ended on time, not minutes later, when the cathedral would be lying in a smolder.
Central America is a noisy land -- opinionated, self-serving, notoriously dissatisfied with its own design. At least six times, between 1545 and 1798, earthquakes shook El Salvador's capitals to the ground, like so many dogs shaking their coats to remove the wet. Volcanoes blew, turning hillsides into rivers of red lava. Lakes disappeared and new mountains warped up in their place. Revolutions coincided with eruptions of every geophysical confabulation. In the mid-1960s, the earth knocked against itself in the middle of the night, and my husband, 8 years old at the time, yanked his youngest brother from the crib and ran them both to safety on roiling ground. In 1986, a few months after I had returned from my first visit to El Salvador, a massive earthquake toppled the country's capital, leaving countless dead and countless more without homes. It precipitated the rise of the "cardboard for walls and bottle caps for nails" communities that still thrive, all these years later, on the highway's median strips.
It is impossible to stop the land from speaking, impossible to ordain it with a conscience, impossible to teach it: This is a family, this is a child, this is a people's history. It is impossible to understand the stories my husband tells me now about La Gloria, the expanse of land that was a coffee farm before developers turned it into Las Colinas, the latest death trap. "Now that was a farm, Beth," Bill, my husband, tells me while I lie in bed, a fever brimming. "That was one gorgeous place, thick with trees. We'd take our horses up there, and we'd go exploring in the catacomb of natural caves that had wormed in through the earth over time. We always suspected that the caves had been carved by water, by long dried-up underground springs. We'd take our horses deep inside, but we never reached the tunnels' ends."
Now those caves are gone, rumbled to nothing, and so are the houses that sat upon them, and so are the people who called those houses home. Buried 10 feet deep under the quake-induced mudslide are little girls and little boys, multiple generations of single families, newlyweds and widows, lovers and gardeners and maids, none of them properly eulogized, none of them ready to die. All across El Salvador the morning of Jan. 13, the land tucked up and slammed down, engulfing tourists at a waterfall, swiping coffee pickers off slopes, snuffing out secondary roads, snapping the beautiful things into pieces. Every historic, heartening structure gone in one instant: the chapel in the orphanage, the shelter for the elderly infirm, storefronts and offices, the church in which my in-laws were married, where my husband was confirmed. "You walk by the church now," Nora reports when we can get through on the phone, "and you see its altar, its Sacred Heart statue; you see these from the street because, my God, there are no walls."
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