The Drive

by Teresa Bruce

  FEBRUARY 2ND, 1974

  Rich San Salvador dentist spoke English, wanted us to stay with them. They own coffee plantation. Gave us cream, beans and honey from the farm—good… Jen face burned bad

  I remember it like a bedtime story with Yolanda as the fairy godmother—there was fresh cream in our hot cocoa from the night’s milking, honey from her beehives, and beans from her vegetable garden. Every morning Ernesto examined my sister’s swollen mouth and gave her more medicine and ice packs for the pain. He wanted to practice his English, and my parents were a captive audience.

  I remember little of the grown-up conversations; I was too busy playing with the girls. Carolina and Fiorella were five and three years older than me; their baby sister, Lorena, was the same age as Jenny. They were the first children on our journey who could speak any English, and they reminded me of everything I was missing. I wanted my own room again, not a sleeping bag next to my little sister in a camper. We had races in their backyard pool—just like the ones I used to win at the Hillsboro swim center. They rode horses—just like the ones my parents had to sell to build the camper. They had a parrot that perched on my shoulder and a dog who didn’t have to get left behind. Best of all, Carolina and Fiorella went to school. I wanted to live with them forever; they knew how to French braid each other’s hair and how to balance books on their heads and walk at the same time.

  “We are practicing to be beauty queens,” we told Yolanda as we pranced around her patio in our bathing suits.

  The farm felt regal to me; each night we folded linen napkins as Yolanda set a table bigger than our entire camper. I flung myself into the routines of a stable family: Teresita, take another empanada; there are plenty more. Let me fix that sleeve for you; here’s a dress that you can borrow. Time to put on hats, girls, you’ll get sick from the sun.

  I sobbed when it was time to leave, comforted only by Yolanda’s hugs and Ernesto’s promise: “If you are ever in San Salvador, you are always welcome to stay with us again.”

  Thirty years later, Ernesto picks up the story as if Gary and I are stand-ins for my father and mother.

  “What a strange thing—life,” he says, shaking his head and holding the journal in his delicate hands like a hymnal. “You never know what returns around again.”

  I feel like our presence takes him back someplace kinder and safer in his life, and his initial reserve melts into a gentle melancholy. His eyes well with tears as he describes his wife; he accepts a sip of water from my glass to loosen the words stuck in his throat. Yolanda was killed in a car accident two years earlier, and he speaks about her as if she will walk back into the room any minute.

  “Her father is Italian and she can speak four languages, five if you count the way she talks with her hands.”

  His is present-tense love, and I can see her again, beckoning us inside for milk and cookies. Despite her privileged upbringing, Ernesto tells us, Yolanda loved the simple life of the farm on the coast. But ultimately she felt too vulnerable surrounded by the poverty of their neighbors and workers.

  “We had to sell the farm not too long after you visited—during the first years of the civil war,” he tells us. “Yolanda didn’t like having to drive there with an armed guard in our car.”

  It is hard to reconcile this frail old man with the wavering voice as the “rich dentist” my mother described. He has silvered past the glamour of hired drivers and high society, and I cannot picture the world he is describing—until he brings out two oversized scrapbooks and spreads them on the glass coffee table before us. One is filled with family photos, postcards, and mementos, and the other with newspaper columns he has written since the 1950s. His jaw relaxes as we turn the pages, and he fiddles with a delicate gold cross around his neck.

  My parents never discovered that the dentist who gave us shelter was also a correspondent and well-connected civic leader. There are photographs of Ernesto rubbing shoulders with politicians, shaking hands with academics, and presenting trophies on behalf of the San Salvador Lions Club. He skims over the photographs of himself and lingers on one of a young Yolanda taken on the occasion of her introduction to the Queen of England. His wife looks innocent and conscious of her beauty all at once, and nothing matters as much to Ernesto without her by his side.

  Hours pass, and Gary and I never move from the sofa; we have front-row seats to a movie that hasn’t been projected in decades. Ernesto’s English is faltering now, so he asks me to translate for Gary and gently corrects me when I misunderstand.

  “How did he manage to make it through the civil war, being so well-known and well published?” Gary asks.

  “He says he avoided politics and made friends on all sides of the struggle.”

  Ernesto changes the subject and starts talking about his children, but while I listen I thumb through the articles he wrote. They are all political. He is telling us a truth that has developed, delicately, over time. This is his slide-show version of history. There are photos of him with Schafik Jorge Handal, leader of the left-wing guerrilla group FMLN.

  “Handal es simplemente un amigo el míos de universidad,” Ernesto explains, a college friend who just happens to be running for president at the moment.

  “It’s good to have friends in such high places,” I try to joke, but Ernesto doesn’t smile.

  “Nada, y nadie, dura por siempre en El Salvador.” He is saying that nothing and no one last forever in El Salvador. Ernesto was clearly connected but not too conspicuous. He was politically active but not threatening. He owned land in a country where most do not, yet he was kind to strangers in need.

  He survived. Only to lose the one person who mattered most to him: Yolanda. Now Ernesto is biding his time, staying under the radar screen of public life and just passing the hours until he can be with his wife again. Gary and I have shown up on his doorstep and given him a reason to look back.

  “Yolanda was so good to us,” I tell him. “I can see why my mother asked her to put your address in her journal. She must have intended to keep in touch.”

  Ernesto struggles for words in English. “She was worried that something would happen to you and your sister. You were so thin, so fragile, and we didn’t really think that your mother and father would make it.”

  The address Yolanda wrote in my mother’s journal was never intended for correspondence, but for consolation—a way station on the long drive back if all else failed.

  Ernesto wishes us luck on our journey, but he never asks about my parents. He is no longer concerned with the future. He lives in a world without the woman who gave it meaning, comforted that, for a few hours, someone listened to his stories and remembered his beautiful wife. I don’t want to leave either one of them or face the San Salvador that now surrounds the dentist, where bougainvillea winds through razor wire on top of every cement wall. Men with semiautomatics guard the doors of children’s gift shops. Escorts for delivery trucks lazily point rifles out of open windows.

  It is growing dark, and as we stand to say our good-byes Ernesto brings out a small locked box filled with jewelry that belonged to Yolanda.

  “Please, Teresita, you must pick a piece and wear it on your travels,” he insists.

  My eyes land on a beaded bracelet, and I roll my fingers over its tiny spheres of jade fastened by a sturdy barrel clasp.

  “Shiny emerald green,” Ernesto mumbles. “Just like her eyes when she cried.”

  I think of his daughters and for a moment I hesitate, wondering if Carolina or Fiorella would resent me for wearing a bracelet that belonged to their mother. But Ernesto just wants to keep some part of Yolanda alive and spread a little of her grace in this walled and gated country. And in his gesture is all the sweetness of El Salvador.

  Chapter Eighteen

  BORDERS

  The Spanish word frontera makes the line between one country and another sound exotic, as though crossing it is adventurous or at the very least pioneering. But the truth is closer to the English word—border—at
best boring and more often boorish and brutal. I learned that lesson when my father drove through Honduras in a single day.

  “Daddy, what does ‘tránsito’ mean?”

  The entrada visa stamped into my passport at the border allowed us sixty days in country. But the part of Honduras dissected by the Pan-American Highway is only a pinch along its Pacific coastline.

  “Means we aren’t stopping,” he answered, sick of questions.

  In just a few more hours we came to the border of Nicaragua, my second passport stamp in one day.

  “Daddy, what does ‘prohibido efectuar trabajo’ mean?’”

  “Means I’m getting you a dictionary next chance I get.”

  THIRTY YEARS LATER, GARY AND I APPROACH THE SAME BOTTLENECK OF Central American border crossings along the highway. If we blaze through the coastal section of Honduras as fast as my parents did, we could be in Nicaragua by nightfall. But each line representing a tropical border on my father’s map is actually two chances for a shakedown: one for the privilege of leaving the country on one side of the line, another to advance into the next. Honduras is a fleshy slice of grapefruit, released only by scraping both sides of the membranes connecting a continent.

  “So, Miss Information, what does ‘tramitaro’ mean?” Gary asks.

  We are in line on the El Salvadoran side of the Honduran border, and six young men calling themselves tramitaros are huddled on the running boards of the Ford. Clinging to its side-view mirrors, they reach through the open window to hang onto the dashboard.

  “Clearly something in the vein of traumatic.”

  I don’t remember tramitaros competing for tips to shepherd my father through borders. If these pushy entrepreneurs existed back then, the sight of a Frankenstein camper on the verge of disintegration driven by a man with a Fidel Castro beard and fierce blue eyes must have scared them off. Apparently they see Gary and me as much easier targets.

  They are all shouting that they speak perfect English, but only one boy, who can’t be older than sixteen, bothers to actually make the claim in English instead of Spanish. So I hand him a few dollars as a down payment and he shoos the rest of them off the bumper.

  The truth is, I’ll take any help I can get. Each frontera from El Salvador south is more bruising than the last. There is nothing exotic or adventurous about the process. Money changers descend like vultures, scratching and clawing each other for access to our wallets. There are so many of them that I’m already feeling claustrophobic, and my stomach lurches when I see drug-sniffing dogs. I think of the gun under the carpet. These are countries unlikely to forgive Americans any trespass. In their eyes we’ve propped up dictators and trained terrorists, instigating decades of the kind of instability that collapses economies.

  I tumble through a wash-and-spin cycle of queues, stamps, and signatures like a sweaty rag doll. Everything is upside down and inside out, and I am too exhausted to fight. So instead of waiting for confrontations I quietly make offerings not yet demanded. I pay not to be robbed when Gary parks the truck under distant, shady trees, and then I pay inspectors so they do not inspect the camper. I pay for lunch breaks to be over on time and copy machines to not be out of paper. It is both proactive and paranoid, but to me it seems a small price to keep matches away from Gary’s fuse. Until I open my mother’s journal and find a solution more clever by half. In the land of five-dollar graft, nobody can make change.

  FEB 4, 1974

  Went through Honduras border. Started showing $500 travelers check. No problems.

  By this point in the first journey, my parents had mastered the art of the con game. They sent me inside the customs offices with the check they knew could not be cashed, banking on my adorable, imperfect Spanish and big blue eyes, quick to fill with tears. My father refused to leave his vehicle; that $500 traveler’s check had to last until Panama, where $1,000 from my aunt would be waiting if we made it that far.

  Gary and I are not as desperate, and we declare a moratorium on self-righteous vows and rants. I tell Gary we are too lucky to begrudge these petty payoffs. He agrees to call them tips instead, tiptoeing around another no-bribe showdown. The tramitaros working so hard to convince me of their English skills might otherwise be beholden to vicious Honduran gangs. The girls selling overpriced bottled water are better off than those forced into prostitution or attempting to make it to the United States on their own. I am stunned by the cruelty of chance—we happened to be born on one side of an arbitrary line and these people were not.

  Each crossing tops the previous in pure despair; women and children staggering under the weight of everything they’re trying to carry to a new country, dogs fighting over rotting roadkill, downtrodden men hiding in pockets of shade from the blistering heat. It feels utterly indulgent, traveling in search of the abandoned camper that was my home, when in the opposite direction people are risking everything to leave theirs.

  Gary doesn’t even take out his camera; these are places of transition and people in the process of losing. It is too much to take anything, even a photograph.

  FEBRUARY 5TH, 1974

  Thru border again—Ugh—lots of time.

  Those who drive through Honduras in a hurry are not seen as tourists but as instigators of trouble. Northern Nicaragua is a day trip from absolutely nowhere. To enter here requires explanation, and when I hand over our documents I feel as distrusted as a missionary, as suspect as a smuggler, and as unwanted as an immigrant. And that’s before I try to pass off a color copy of our truck’s title.

  “Este título es una falsificación. Usted debe conducir un vehículo robado,” declares the man behind the glass partition. He is waving the photocopy through an ultraviolet scanner and thinks the truck is stolen.

  “No, es solamente una copia,” I bluster, trying to explain that I thought the original might get stolen along the way. I dig it out of its hiding place under Wipeout’s bench, but the damage is done. I may as well be dangling bribe bait.

  “¡Su placa de la licencia es falsificación también!” Another Nicaraguan border guard decides our license plate is fake as well.

  Washington, DC, “Taxation Without Representation” license-plate tags are preprinted and smooth to the touch; there are no raised letters or machine-stamped numbers. I can see how this would be suspicious even were they not manufactured in the city that orchestrated the Contra War. The entire office parades out to the camper to inspect the Ford F-350’s license plate.

  “¿Donde está el verdadero placa?” Another official demands to know where I’ve hidden the real plate.

  I try to convince him I’m not lying this time—that all new license plates are made like ours. It doesn’t work. Our license number and VIN are called in to Interpol. The border police chief declares the truck stolen until proven otherwise.

  It is licensed to Gary and I am no longer an innocent, blue-eyed decoy. He is the one who must wait for five hours on a hard wooden bench in the merciless Nicaraguan sun. He is the one who would go to jail if they ever find the gun I insisted on. How I ever imagined that owning it would give me some sense of security or control seems mockingly ridiculous now.

  I watch from under the camper’s awning as men with machine guns pace back and forth, inches from Gary’s intentionally expressionless face. They are imagining the accolades, picturing the reward if this gringo can be taken into custody. There is no wind to evaporate the sweat seeping through his clothes. I am not allowed to go inside the camper to get any water for him. I can see by the way he pinches the bridge of his nose that the eyeball-squeezing headache left over from his dengue fever has returned. I notice that he’s lost weight; his long cargo shorts seem dangerously close to slipping from his hips.

  He could easily reach into his pocket and pull out his wallet. Even twenty dollars each would probably be enough to bribe the men with guns. But I am watching what has become his new normal, and all I can hope is that he doesn’t press his luck. If he goes too far we could lose the only means we have of drivi
ng away, the roof over our equally hard heads. Gary locks eyes with them instead and waits. He is calling their bluff, waving an invisible $500 traveler’s check in the air. At last the phone rings and I can hear the police chief talking to someone, presumably Interpol. Gary is still staring down the guards when our passports are reluctantly stamped.

  ON MY FATHER’S CRISPLY CREASED MAP, IT LOOKS LIKE A QUICK SIXTY miles from the Nicaraguan border to León, the birthplace of the country’s most famous poet: Rubén Darío. But a mile away from the crossing the road turns to gravel. It is so dry and dusty that semitrucks and long-distance buses stir up a complete white-out in their wake. When the air clears, small cars are in ditches and dogs are dead.

  It is a miserable four hours before we shudder to a stop at a six-dollar-a-night trucker’s motel on the outskirts of León. It is far too hot to sleep inside the Avion, so we drag the sagging motel bed directly under the room’s central ceiling fan and push the windows open through their metal bars. In a few hours it should be cool enough to sleep; there is plenty of time to explore the city first.

  We’ve just started to walk when the skies open and it pours. Within minutes, streets flood and water slops over the transoms of living rooms. Rain pelts horizontally and we cannot see our feet or where the sidewalk ends underneath them. And then, just as suddenly, the deluge stops and the streets glow in a silvery light that forgives everything it took to get here.

  Therefore to be sincere is to be strong.

  Bare as it is, what glimmer hath the star;

  The water tells the fountain’s soul in song

  And voice of crystal flowing out afar

  —RUBÉN DARÍO

  I am suddenly ravenous, and we sit down at a sidewalk café table overlooking rain-slicked stone lions guarding the León cathedral.

  “Están mirando sobre el poeta Darío. Él duerme adentro.”

  A voice over my shoulder says the lions are watching over the famous poet laid to rest inside the cathedral. It belongs to a boy about as old as I was my first time here. He is barefoot, his zipper isn’t quite closed, and he doesn’t tell us his name. His hair is neatly combed and his face scrubbed clean. A full belly peeks out from under the one button fastened on his short-sleeved shirt.