Camino Real, San Salvador

 

El San Salvador. Circa 1988 WPP notes

The Camino Real Hotel.

Saturday night. Two blocks from El Salvador’s Camino Real Hotel in the capital. Mariachi musicians in tight yellow pants and jackets cinched at the waist - guitars,violins and curvaceous bass fiddle. On the Boulevard los Heroes soliciting work.

In the hotel entrance the attendant bows and clicks open the door of the shining Mercedes. A dark skinned Indian maid carries a small child in a ruffled white shirt to the limousine. The elegantly dressed couple slide in and the door clicks shut and they drive off into the night. 

The affluent elite is cloistered from the war. They live in high-walled mansions with full-time, heavily armed body guards. There are said to be fourteen families that run El Salvador and this is the pattern throughout the Americas. If you have money and influence it is unlikely you’ll be drafted into the army. 

That afternoon at the seaside town of La Liberdad we find a restaurant with a few tables outside overlooking the ocean. It’s a relief to leave the oppressiveness of the capital. The air by the sea is cooler and there are families in small groups, lying on the gray sand. 

As we order a drink, three musicians approach and smiling broadly stand in a semi-circle around us and begin playing. The guitar is scratched and worn but the melody is sweet and he sings from his chest in a loud baritone.  His teeth glint with the gold in his mouth and his dark eyes shine. The bass fiddle thumps and the musician pulls and plucks at the thick amber strings and the fiddle man sways with the music.

The sea is brown like weak milk coffee and as warm. It slaps on the coarse gray sand and the volcanic rocks at the base of a cliff. I can smell raw sewage and the brine of the sea and lobster that now rests on my plate.  And white gulls are floating overhead and the palm trees bend and there are green nylon nets drying in the sun. Three black pelicans stand in a shallow pool in the rocks and a dog runs through the waves as they crash on the rocks and there’s a boy climbing high on the cliff face.

We leave the restaurant and find a taxi back to the capital. It’s a half hour drive. It’s dusk and we climb the steep road inland from the coast. We pass a straining bus belching stinking blue diesel pulling up the hill. It’s dry as dead bones and black leafless branches twisted and skeletal. Birds float like ashes in the sky.

As the sun goes down the Pacific Ocean stretches in a purple sheet behind us. We pass a man sprawled unconscious on the roadside in the gravel. He has no shirt.  There’s a bird for sale in a cage close by. 

And now the sky is turning green like a wound and smells of rain. And the clouds sag and seep across the mountains and one leaden drops explodes on the windscreen, a mercury hole in the dust and then a torrent and suddenly it’s dark. 

Approaching the capital in the steaming night, blazing blue lights ignite the darkness - razor wire rolling in silver coils along the high concrete wall. A soldier in tight camouflage-pants with black silver-studded holster holding his machete, black leather leggings. An M16. He’s standing at the entrance gate.