24

Death

death [noun]: 1. Cessation or end of life.
2. Destruction, annihilation, ruin.

Friday, November 21, 2014. The Kid has been biking over dusty streets since early in the morning. He left Las Pozas with his machete, but without his hand cannon. He felt sure of himself that morning. He rode his bicycle down Portillo Street to the municipality of San Lorenzo. As everyone here knows, unlike Atiquizaya, Ahuachapán, or Chalchuapa, San Lorenzo is a peaceful place. There hasn’t been a single homicide here this year.

It’s a tiny blotch of a place. A good little town.

The Kid is on a mission: to give his second daughter a surname. To legally recognize her and proclaim before the state of El Salvador: I, Miguel Ángel Tobar, am the father of Jennifer Liset Tobar, born three months ago.

In his bag, the Kid, now thirty years old, has his and Lorena’s ID cards. Lorena recently turned eighteen.

The Kid walks into the town hall, three blocks away from the police post in front of the small central plaza and the Catholic church. They tell him he needs to come back in the afternoon, because his daughter’s birth certificate, necessary to legally recognize her, hasn’t shown up in their system. They’ll be able to locate the document by that afternoon, they say, and then he’ll be able to officially recognize her as his daughter, Jennifer Liset.

Instead of going all the way home, the Kid goes part of the way back up the road and kills the time somewhere between San Lorenzo and Las Pozas. At around two in the afternoon, he cycles through the region of El Portillo, heading back to the town hall in San Lorenzo. Many people come to visit this town, following the main road that runs parallel to the San Lorenzo River. The fresh water flowing in the middle of this hostile heat allows cashew and the regional flower, loroco, to flourish. The river is beautiful, and the area around San Lorenzo is peaceful. That combination is necessary for tourism to flourish in this country. It’s not enough for a place to be pretty. There are plenty of lovely mountains that only serve as giant cemeteries. The river attracts swimmers; local women sell food and rent outhouses where the swimmers can refresh and relieve themselves. One of the women who charges for the use of her bathroom is Esperanza. Esperanza knows the Kid. They’re around the same age. She’s known him since before he betrayed the Mara Salvatrucha 13.

Cockroach, the barman of Las Pozas, says that back in 2009 Esperanza’s husband used to drink in his bar. He’d drink and kiss and touch a young girl called Wendy, who would let herself be kissed and touched in exchange for sips of Cuatro Ases. Wendy was a regular in the bar. She was already an alcoholic by age sixteen. Sometimes, with a deadly hangover, she’d beg and beg Cockroach to give her a quarter liter of Cuatro Ases, just to make it through the hangover. When asked about this, Cockroach proudly replies: “I gave it to her so she’d stop hurting.” Cockroach also relates the way the drunks of Las Pozas would fuck Wendy and then keep on feeding her liquor. More and more liquor, more and more drunks penetrating her. Day in, day out. One night, full of angry suspicion, Esperanza came to look for her husband at the bar. It was late, and the doors were locked. Esperanza yelled abuse and threats. Cockroach, her husband, and Wendy listened to her raving, but didn’t open the door.

Days later, Cockroach recalls, Esperanza came by and complained to him: “My husband was here with that little slut, wasn’t he?”

“Sure, he was here, but why would I’ve told you that, so you could come and cause problems in my bar?” He advised Esperanza to keep her husband on a tighter leash at home, and not air out their problems at his bar. He had enough to handle with the Eighteens of El Saral coming by to drink and then the MS yelling, threatening him, and going out to patrol the streets armed with machetes and guns.

Esperanza swore she’d kill Wendy, the barman remembers, and then she left.

Wendy, in her teenage ignorance, and surrounded by men for whom the concept of rape is pretty hazy, was also going out with a member of the Barrio 18. After spending several crazed weeks at the bar, Wendy wound up murdered by machete, at the hands of an MS-13. She was Lorena’s cousin, and the Kid was witness to that carnage.

As with so many similar cases in this country, the murder was never solved. Wendy might have been killed on Esperanza’s orders, as the Kid tried to claim, or simply because she said too much while sleeping with someone from Barrio 18.

Ever since the Kid returned to Las Pozas in 2014, Esperanza called the police every time she saw him pass by the river in El Portillo. And she boasted of calling the police on the Kid to as many residents of San Lorenzo as would listen.

Biking back to the town hall, the Kid takes dirt paths to avoid the main street. He bumps into Esperanza and demands she give him the two dollars he needs to pay for the birth certificate that, by now, past two in the afternoon, must be ready. Esperanza forks them over reluctantly. She’ll later tell this part of the story over and over.

The Kid enters the town hall. He approaches the main counter. They tell him to wait a few minutes, that everything is ready for him to legally name his baby daughter. He spreads out on a bench, clasps his hands behind his head, and relaxes. A city employee whom he recognizes comes in. They shoot the breeze for a few minutes.

The Kid seemed relaxed, the same employee would later say.

The mood changes, however, when a boy from the outskirts of San Lorenzo gets off a rickshaw in front of the town hall, dropped off by two men who speed away toward El Portillo. The young man swaggers in, flicking his head and eyes all around. The Kid tenses. He prepares to get up. They exchange a few aggressive words. “Huh,” says the Kid, “what the fuck, bitch?” “Oh yeah? What’s up, Kid?” The young man heads back outside. The city employee tells the Kid: “I think you better leave. I think there’s gonna be a shootout.” The Kid rushes to the desk, signs some papers, and takes Jennifer Liset Tobar’s birth certificate. All the employees leave the room. The Kid races away, pedaling back up the path toward El Portillo.

A street sweeper, Chele Campolón, is at work. The Kid greets him in a hurry. “Hey, hey,” he says, speeding away on his bike. A moto-taxi growls down the street. Shots ring out. A woman cries out hysterically: “They’re killing each other, they’re killing each other!” Curiosity getting the best of him, Chele Campolón runs toward the gunshots. Two men riding a moto-taxi speed past him. Chele Campolón sees a bicycle on the ground.

A body lies sprawled on its back.

On a November day, during the month of the dead, under the shade of a mango tree and next to a budding mulato—God’s tree, the tree that dies in order to give life, the Xipe Totec—lies the body of Miguel Ángel Tobar, the Hollywood Kid.

His eyes are open. His head is tilted back. If he were alive, he’d be staring at a budding mulato tree.

A few weeks before his murder, Miguel Ángel is pictured with Lorena, holding Jennifer Liset, in the backyard of the Las Pozas house. Miguel Ángel has Marbelly in his arms.