The rubble-rouser

After the 7.6-magnitude earthquake struck, after hundreds were already suspected dead, Nora went out searching for everyone she loves. She walked up and down the streets, knocking on doors. "Are you OK? Do you need help?" she asked. She found her sisters and her brother: alive. She found her best friends and my husband's best friends and their families: all, miraculously, alive. She found her gardener, ancient Tiburcio, who was -- by fluke -- in the town of Santa Tecla and not out among the coffee trees, and she found Nicha, the maid whom she has known for 60 years. Nora herself was found and embraced, blessed and questioned: "What now? Are you all right? What did you lose?"

And through the chaos of it all, through the powerful tremors that ensued, through paths that he must have made for himself by chopping down grasses and tree limbs with a machete because the roads were newly smothered, inverted, came Tito, the "campesino" who keeps watch over Nora's coffee farm; he came with news. All the homes on Nora's farm were down, he reported -- the huts in which the coffee workers live year-round, the three-room structure in which they make tortillas for the farm, the old brick house that Nora spent last year lovingly restoring so that she could live most of her remaining days in the shade, among the trees. Elsewhere, 40 coffee pickers were lost in one landslide. Entire slopes of coffee trees had been ripped from their roots; farm roads would be impassable for months. But there was, Tito said, a miracle to report on, too: He had found Nicha's grandson alive, found him in the only room of all those farm shacks that had been left standing after the quake, found him sitting there, spared, deep in shock.

Here, in Pennsylvania, where the earth seems more peaceful with itself, we play the roulette wheel of what ifs silently, with ourselves. What if the baptism had run a quarter-hour longer? What if Nora's city home were six blocks west? What if Nora hadn't already finished her coffee-bean harvest and had been out -- as she had been out the week before -- on the steeply angled hills when the earth roared? And what if Nicha's grandson had chosen the wrong room to sit in? And what if Tiburcio hadn't come to the city on a whim? And what if Nora didn't care, the way Nora surely cares, about the 14 campesino families that lost their houses on her farm?

"I am taking out a loan," Nora tells Bill when he gets through to her by phone a few days after the quake. "I am taking out a loan because the first thing that must get done is building all my workers their new homes." Already she has had corrugated metal siding taken to the homeless shelter and banged up, haphazardly, to the wooden joists so that the infirm old won't have to sleep out in the streets. Already she has talked to the nuns at the orphanage, asking what needs to be done -- and how fast. Already she has begun to organize delivery of food to the campesinos in the hills who were trapped by the abrupt collapse of all the roads. Already she is looking beyond all she has lost -- crystal, china, a home she loved, the memorabilia that tied her to the past -- to ask, What can I do here? What must get done?

"That land," one friend writes to me a few days later, when my fever is in full bloom, "isn't fit to live on; it's always crashing." And of course that's true: El Salvador is an unstable place; the land has a mean mind of its own. For as long as there are people there, there will be earthquakes and volcanoes. For as long as there is a building up, there will be a brutal wrecking down.

And yet, for as long as there are people in El Salvador, there will be those like my husband's mother, Nora, living on the skirt of danger, but not succumbing to it. All this week I have been ill, fighting fever and back spasms, fighting the bullet pain of migraines, fighting nausea that has left me dehydrated on the floor. All this week, there's been disorder in my blood. When I close my eyes, I see the mudslide coming. I sit in silence and hear the earth roar. I hold my hands out empty and imagine them digging buried people free. In my fevered dreams, it is this way. When I'm awake, it's this way, too. I cannot liberate myself, we must not liberate ourselves, from that earthquake far away. From a land that speaks and from a people that speaks back. From a Nora and a Tito who dare to reach out and hold on.

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