What You Wish For

by Janet Dawson

  They had been in San Blas two years, longer than they’d stayed in the last village. But she didn’t know how much longer they would be here. Times were hard. That meant moving on.

  Nazario’s words outside the church were true. Don Humberto paid his peasants barely enough to buy food from Tránsito’s store, where prices were high. Most of them had small gardens, like the one Flor had dug into the rocky soil of the hillside and nourished with water she carried from the nearby creek. Atenacio paid a portion of his wages back to the landowner, so they could live in this one-room house, the roof in need of constant mending. Efraín was barefoot, wearing a faded shirt and ragged shorts. Flor herself had only a few skirts and blouses and she kept Atenacio’s few clothing items cleaned and mended.

  The rest of the village looked as mean and makeshift as their clothes. Maybe Nazario was right. Things should be better, Flor thought. She wanted more for her son.

  Atenacio picked up Efraín and raised him high, laughing as his son squealed with glee. Then he set the boy on the ground. “I asked Nazario to share our meal.”

  Nazario shook his head. “You’re kind, but I won’t take your food. I’m expected at my mother’s house. I wanted to give you this.” He leaned his rifle against a tree and opened his knapsack, pulling out a pasteboard folder—a color photograph. On a Christmas visit to his family, Nazario had brought a camera and taken pictures, including this one, showing Flor, Atenacio and Efraín outside the church. “The boy has grown so much in four months.”

  “He’ll be two in September. Thank you. We will treasure this.” Flor and Atenacio admired the photograph. Then she carried it into the house and put it on the shelf next to her mother’s rosary.

  Outside, Atenacio drank from the tin dipper in the water jar. “We hear of fighting to the north. But it’s been quiet here.”

  “Humberto wants quiet,” Nazario said. “Nothing must interfere with his crop. He needs money for his finca, his son’s army commission, and his son-in-law’s political schemes. The army and the politicians will pay. We’ll march into San Salvador and kill them all.”

  “I don’t like to hear talk of killing.” Flor reached for Efraín.

  “You aren’t safe here,” Nazario said. “Humberto knows the rebels are coming. He’s hired men with guns.”

  “Like that brute Cruz,” Atenacio said.

  “I told my family to leave,” Nazario said. “I tell you the same. Leave soon, before the rains start next month. We control the north, and we’re moving south, into this part of Chalatenango. Soon we’ll control the whole department. Come north to Los Árboles. It’s a rebel town. There are jobs in the sawmill.”

  Atenacio frowned. “I’ll think about it.”

  “Don’t wait too long.” Nazario picked up his rifle and walked down the hill.

  Flor spooned beans into a bowl, took a pupusa from the grill, and handed the food to Atenacio. Then she served herself and sat cross-legged on the ground, feeding Efraín from her own bowl. “Should we go?”

  “I don’t know,” Atenacio said.

  * * *

  The men with guns came that afternoon, when the village was quiet and the people were taking siesta after their Sunday meal. Jeeps drove over the hill from the coffee processing plant and disgorged men in uniforms, men with hard faces who carried rifles and guns in holsters at their hips, sharp machetes tucked into their belts. The men dispersed through San Blas, rounding up campesinos, herding them to the plaza.

  Flor held Efraín and stood at Atenacio’s side in the plaza. The people around her looked frightened. The man Atenacio had called a brute, Cruz, had an ugly, scarred face, massive shoulders like a bull, and thick hands, fingers decorated with big gold rings. Father Bartolomeo tried to speak to Cruz but he swatted the priest away as though he were a troublesome insect. Cruz’s hand snaked out and seized Nazario’s mother, pulling her roughly to face him.

  “Where is the rebel?” Cruz barked. “I know you’re hiding him.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Señora Robles said.

  Cruz slapped her. She fell back against her daughter and son-in-law, mouth bleeding where Cruz’s rings had torn her flesh. “Puta. I know your son’s with the rebels. Where is he? Where’s your bastard? Tell me, or I’ll kill you and all the rest of these traitors.”

  “These people aren’t rebels,” Father Bartolomeo said. “They are simple campesinos.”

  Cruz pulled the machete from his belt. “This village is a nest of rebels and Communists. We should have cleaned you out long ago. Give up the rebel.” He drew the machete along Señora Robles’s throat and a thin line of blood appeared.

  “He’s gone,” Atenacio said. “He only comes to see his mother, like a good son.”

  Cruz raised the machete and struck. Blood splashed over Flor. Atenacio fell lifeless to the dust. Nazario’s mother screamed. Cruz cut her throat and silenced her forever, then he shot the priest.

  La Matanza. The slaughter. A dam had burst. A river of blood surged over the village. Flor held Efraín tight and ran like the other campesinos, screaming with fright as the men with guns attacked like ravening beasts. They shot at everything that moved. Men, women and children fell under the volley.

  Flor was halfway up the hillside when she stumbled and fell. She hit the ground hard, trying to protect Efraín. At first she thought Atenacio’s blood stained Efraín’s chin, but it was a cut. Jagged bits of glass glittered on the path where they lay. She used her blouse to stanch the boy’s blood and scrambled to her feet, running up the hill to hide behind a rough pile of logs that separated her house from that of Prudencia.

  Efraín cried with pain. Flor put her hand over her son’s mouth. He must not make any noise and give them away. She stared in horror at the nightmare below in the plaza. Bodies lay crumpled outside the church. The men with guns clubbed those who hadn’t died from the bullets. The men with guns took women and girls, some as old as Prudencia, some barely older than Efraín, tore off their dresses and held their legs apart. Right there in the plaza they raped them over and over. Then they cut the throats of their victims. Finally the men with guns rounded up the people they had not yet killed and shut them inside the church, along with the bodies. They poured gasoline on the walls and roof and set the building on fire. Flames licked the building. The people inside screamed.

  Efraín whimpered. Get away, she must get away. Flor slipped from behind the log pile and ran toward her house. Rough hands caught her and seized Efraín. Two men with guns, faces like demons. Flor cried with anguish as Efraín wailed.

  “Here’s a fine one,” the man who held Efraín said.

  “This is a fine one, too.” The other man pushed Flor against the house. He squeezed her breasts, pulled up her skirt, and unzipped his trousers. She didn’t care what happened to her. All she cared about was her son, struggling as the other man carried him down the hill.

  An iron cooking pot thunked against the man’s head. Prudencia was behind him, a grim smile on her face as she swung the pot, striking again and again. He fell sideways, his head bloody. Prudencia dropped the pot. “He’s dead. The pig.”

  Flor looked down to the plaza, frantic, searching for Efraín. She saw three children in a Jeep—a little girl, a baby, and her son. She took a step forward, but Prudencia pulled her back. “No. They will kill you and still take the boy. You must live, so you can find him again.”

  “I can’t leave him,” Flor cried. Prudencia wouldn’t let go of her arm. The Jeep with the children drove away.

  Prudencia spat on the man’s body. “They’ll come looking for this piece of shit. We must be far away when they do.”

  * * *

  The wind keened through the trees at the top of the ridge. Flor and Prudencia stopped at a rushing creek, washing away dirt and blood. They walked along the narrow dirt track that followed the creek. Eventually this path joined a wider gravel road that wound north, over the mountains to Los Árboles, the rebel town. But they didn’t take the road, afrai
d the men with guns would find them. Back toward San Blas, black smoke rose, the afternoon sun a red sore glowing through the pall. The men with guns had burned the church and the people locked inside it. Now they were burning the rest of the village.

  As the sun lowered behind the mountains, they found a cave in some rocks, the entrance hidden from view by bushes and a fallen tree. Flor pulled branches from the bushes and spread them on the rock-strewn earth. Then she and Prudencia lay down on the makeshift bed and huddled together for warmth, blanketed only by gloom. Prudencia fell asleep. Flor stared out at the night. Tears rolled down her face until she was sure she had no more. She felt the dull moan of hunger, but that was dwarfed by the shrieking pain in her heart. She had nothing left, not even the photograph of Atenacio and Efraín, only their images burned on her brain. She might as well be dead. Sleep came, fitful and fragmented. She woke several times during the night as she heard sounds in the distance, growling engines, tires crunching on gravel, the ominous rattle of gunfire.

  The women crawled from the cave as soon as the sun appeared. Flor’s throat was parched. They found a spot where the creek was deep and clear, cupped their hands and drank, thankful for the water. But hunger gnawed their bellies. Prudencia scrabbled in the plants growing near the creek and pulled out some roots, declaring them safe to eat. The roots were hard and bitter, but filled their stomachs.

  They resumed their journey, leaving the creek and climbing a footpath higher into the mountains. Wind rustled leaves in the trees. Then Flor smelled sulfur. They found a hot spring feeding into another creek, barely a trickle, careening down a rocky hillside. They splashed warm water on their aching feet, found colder water farther downstream and drank again. They followed this creek as it tumbled through valleys and ravines. Finally they came to the edge of a bluff where the creek cascaded over the edge in a waterfall. They looked down into a mountain valley, buildings clustered on either side of the creek.

  A gravel road, half-hidden by trees, wound down the slope in a series of switchbacks, widening on the valley floor. Los Árboles, high in the mountains where timber was plentiful, had a sawmill, a long low building with a corrugated tin roof, in a yard surrounded by logs and boards. A big truck was parked in the yard outside the mill. As Flor watched, three men began loading lumber into the truck bed. In the plaza a church tower rose, surrounded by buildings.

  “Is it safe?” Prudencia clung to Flor for support.

  “Is anywhere safe?” Flor asked. This rebel town was a target for the army. But today she saw no sign of the men with guns, like those who had destroyed her life.

  They made their way down the bluff. At the first house they came to, a woman at an open fire fried pupusas for the midday meal. When Flor and Prudencia left the shelter of the trees and appeared in the yard, the woman gasped. Flor leaned against a tree, weariness enveloping her as she described what had happened. The woman gave them the pupusas and sent her daughter to the sawmill to fetch her father. When the men from the mill arrived, Flor told the story again. Each time she thought of San Blas, or forced the words from her mouth, it hurt. This pain would never go away.

  Nazario Robles appeared later that afternoon, fury in his red-rimmed eyes. With him were Beatriz, a woman who wore a uniform and carried a rifle, and an American named Merle Sefton, tall, with blond curls visible under her cap. She turned on a tape recorder, listening intently as Flor and Prudencia told how the village of San Blas died.

  “We saw the smoke yesterday,” Nazario said. “This morning we went to San Blas. I feared everyone was dead. Then I heard you were here.” He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out the photograph he’d given her the day before. “We found this in your house.”

  Flor looked at the photograph that Nazario had given her the day before, the one that he’d taken of her, Atenacio and Efraín. She took the picture and clutched it to her heart. In Spanish, the American woman asked permission to take photographs. Flor nodded and looked down as the camera flashed. Someone handed her a handkerchief and she wiped her eyes.

  “We must write down everything that happened,” Nazario said to the American woman, “the names of the people who died. With the pictures you took this morning and these eyewitness accounts, you will write a powerful story.”

  Prudencia shivered. A woman standing nearby took off her shawl and draped it over the old woman’s shoulders. A bell tolled the hour. “My husband, Leonardo Muñoz, a man of sixty-one years. He was a good man. We were married forty years. My son Pedro, thirty-nine years. His wife, Edita, thirty-six. Their children, my grandchildren. Five of them.” Prudencia stopped. Her lips quivered. Then she went on. “Félix, twelve. Vilma, ten. Servando, seven. Narcisa, four. And the baby, a year old. His name was Tomás.”

  “Lucita Robles, my mother,” Nazario said. “Forty-seven. My sister Victorina López and her husband, Perfecto, both twenty-six. My nephew Santos, six, and my niece Cresencia, seven.”

  “Atenacio Guzmán.” Flor looked at the photograph. She blinked, trying to blot out the picture of her husband’s death. “A good, kind man, twenty-five.”

  “Efraín?” Nazario asked.

  Tears rolled down Flor’s cheeks. “They took Efraín and two other children, a baby and a little girl. Where do they take the children? Where can I find my boy?”

  Beatriz frowned. “We’ve heard of this. The army kills almost everyone, but takes the children. No one knows where.”

  “This wasn’t the army,” Nazario said. “This was Humberto’s hired thugs.”

  “They knew you had been to the village yesterday,” Prudencia said. “Cruz singled out your mother. But Lucita was brave to the end. She would not tell them anything. The leader beat her, and Atenacio tried to help her.”

  Nazario swore. “I’ve caused their deaths—my family, the people in the village.”

  “Stop it,” Beatriz told him. “You’ve visited the village before.”

  “How did they know I had been there?” Nazario asked. “Did someone tell Humberto?”

  “Tránsito Vigil, I think,” Prudencia said. “He thought he was better than the campesinos, because he was a storekeeper.”

  “Humberto is a dead man,” Nazario said. “Some day I will kill him.”

  “Perhaps you will,” Prudencia said. “But now we must make the list of names. So no one forgets. Tránsito Vigil, his wife Aurelia, their daughter Marisella.”

  “Father Bartolomeo, the priest from Texistepeque,” Flor said. “Ofelia and Juan Izalco.”

  When they finished, the list of the dead of San Blas numbered one hundred and seven people. They weren’t sure of all the names, ­because several families had just arrived in the village a few days ­before the attack. As far as they knew, only five people had survived—Flor, Prudencia and the three missing children.

  Nazario told her later that the American journalist took many more pictures at San Blas and wrote a story that appeared in American newspapers. He showed her a copy. Flor couldn’t read the English words, but she recognized the photograph of her own tearstained face.

  Flor and Prudencia stayed in Los Árboles until the tide of war turned and the town was no longer safe. They crossed the border into Honduras, to a camp for displaced Salvadorans.

  But no one knew what happened to the three children taken from San Blas. Weeks passed, then months, and finally a year. There was no word, no information. Flor’s hopes of finding her son seeped away, like water from a creek parched by the sun. The years went by like the bell that had tolled as she and Prudencia recited the names of the dead.

  4

  To lose a child, Lindsey thought, that was the worst.

  She looked at the words she’d transcribed, struggling to maintain her researcher’s detachment. It was one thing to read old documents and letters about events of a century ago, but this was different. The civil war ravaging El Salvador in the 1980s and 1990s had been widely reported, a litany of horrors inflicted on the population, revealing the human capacity for evil, and
the determination and spirit that allowed people to survive.

  Flor’s story of the destruction of San Blas and the son who had been snatched from her arms was harrowing. Lindsey thought about her own daughter, remembering Nina as a toddler, recalled holding that plump and trusting little burden.

  Yesterday, as Flor held the photograph rescued from the ruins of San Blas, her face held a faraway look that crossed time and geo­graphy.

  “I survived,” Flor said. “As Prudencia told me to do. She died a year later, still in that camp. Don Humberto died in his bed, or so I heard. Nazario helped me come to the United States. We stay in touch. Letters first, then e-mail. He put his guns away, married, had children. He is part of the government now, in Chalatenango department. Who would have thought it, to hear him talk back then? He has been a good friend to me, searching for information on Efraín and other children who disappeared during the civil war. There is an organization working to locate them. Some have been found.”

  “Why have you decided to tell me this now?” Lindsey asked.

  “I need your help.” Flor smiled, face full of joy and hope. “For so many years this picture was all I had left of Atenacio and Efraín. But now, a miracle! My prayers are answered. Efraín is alive. Here, in Berkeley. I’ve seen him. He looks just like his father. He has a scar on his chin, from the cut he got that day.”

  Kids always have scrapes and scratches. How could Flor be certain that the boy she’d seen was Efraín? “Where did you see him?” Lindsey asked.

  “At the Berkeley Farmers Market, three weeks ago. Please help me. You write books and know many things. I must find out what name Efraín has now, where he lives and who he lives with, so I can get my son back.” Flor sensed Lindsey’s hesitation. “He is my son. I know this. His face is burned into my memory. It doesn’t matter how long ago it was. To me it was like yesterday. I think of him every day. Come to the market with me on Saturday. If he’s there, you can see for yourself.”