3

The children ask if I know karate. With index fingers, the little girl pulls at the sides of her own eyes and speaks an invented language of ching-chong sounds. The little boy kicks and chops at the air. Their mother cuts fruit and does her best to ignore them.

I buy green mangoes. The vendor’s stand is set up in front of her house, off the main street. She drops the slices into a plastic bag and asks which condiments I want: salt? Hot sauce? Ground-up pumpkin seeds?

“Everything,” I say.

Her smile shines with a gold-framed front tooth.

The date, January 13, 2001, will later prove ripe with meaning for amateur numerologists. This new century isn’t yet two weeks old, and already it looks like it might turn out to be even crueler than the last for this little country.

From inside the house, a ranchera plays over a crackling radio: a guitar’s single bass note, then the jangling of other strings, some vibrato vocals riffing over the top. Tired of speaking their fake Chinese, the children head inside.

I wear the denim skirt that Niña Tere made for me from an old pair of blue jeans. From the change pocket, I fish out a couple of coins and lay them flat upon the rough plank of a counter. The vendor nods her gratitude.

She takes the full mango bag by two corners and spins it end over end. Soon she has a twisted thread of plastic in each hand. As she goes to tie them in a knot, the earth moves below us.

At first I’m unfazed, and guess that a bus is passing. But the sensation intensifies. The street we stand upon bounces like a thin surfboard through chop.

Mangoes roll off the splintery counter. High-pitched screams sound from all sides. People emerge from other houses along the street. The shaking grows stronger still. My mind takes a second to recognize the Spanish word for earthquake.

Something hits me in the calf and my knee almost buckles. Another object flies past my ear and smashes against the ground. Red roofing tiles are falling from the buildings on either side. The walls sway and dance.

The vendor’s two children materialize at each of my hips and hug my thin legs as though they are trees. Their snot and tears moisten the skin above my waistband. I put my hands up over their heads to protect them from the flying tiles. The three of us crouch together in the center of the road. They cry out for their mother. I try to hush them. There comes a series of breaking sounds: the splintering of beams, the grinding together of clay shards, the heavy thuds of ancient mud and straw blocks against each other. One tile catches me in the shoulder; another bounces off the forearm I hold across these two little skulls. Eyes closed, I picture a ravine opening up out of this very street and swallowing us. Another desperate second passes, and I’m ready to surrender: to throw my hands in the air, or lie flat in the path of the falling walls, tell these two kids to find somebody stronger to protect them. And at that moment, the shaking stops.

I look up. In the space where the children’s house stood a moment before, there is now a brownish dust cloud.

The sound of wails and cries gives way to shouted prayers—desperate pleas to the Virgin and the Señor. The fruit vendor demands divine explanation: “Why, Lord? Why us? What have we done to deserve this?” Her face points upward, her mouth tweaked in a scowl, fists tightened together against her chin. The kids abandon me and gather around her—stroking her hair, hugging her waist—as she asks, “Haven’t we suffered enough?” I cough out loud and cover my mouth. The remains of this family’s home are stuck in my throat.

On the main street, every second or third house has turned to dust. They float in place like wispy architectural ghosts. Buildings I presumed to be brick or poured concrete turn out to be made of bamboo and earth—covered over with a thin cement finish.

I stand upon the rutted asphalt of the main road. My house is in a smaller village outside of town, a twenty-minute walk south. The aqueduct I’ve been working on for the past year is an hour-long hike to the north. My lover lives a hundred miles to the west, without a telephone, inside a tiny adobe hut. My father is five thousand miles away.

The Peace Corps issued me a mostly worthless pager, which now buzzes and vibrates in the pocket of my jeans skirt. I take it out and see the word STANDFAST spelled out in pixels—whatever that means.

People scream out names. Some of the calls are answered. Others grow more distressed. I stand in the center of the road, wondering which way to go—wondering, even now, if this is a beginning or an end.

Rubber flip-flops on my feet, I start south, downhill, toward Cara Sucia.

*   *   *

Twenty minutes later, I’m in front of Niña Tere’s still-erect home. The house beside hers has partly collapsed and leans over, cockeyed, like a kneeling giant. Everyone stands outside. Shirtless men hold babies and inspect walls. A group of evangelicals gather by Don Israel’s to sing hymns. In a courtyard across the street, a grandmother uses a blanket to cover the body of a teenage boy, his chest and neck discolored by blood and dust. I knew him; he was called Felix, and his grandmother used to scream at him for being lazy and watching too much television. The whole village could hear them argue.

“I’m all right!” Niña Tere emerges from the entrance to her house, her dog oddly silent at her side. “They say El Terrero suffered the worst. Every house down.”

El Terrero is a smaller village farther south, tucked into the valley alongside of us.

“The pueblo is bad, too,” I say.

“That slab of bedrock,”—she stomps her foot on the ground—“the one that prevents us from finding any groundwater, it did us some good this time.”

“And Nora?” My voice quivers as I ask after her daughter.

“In bed.” She points back to the house with her thumb. “She stayed home sick today, thank God.”

I nod. Outside, the evangelicals beg forgiveness in song.

“And the aqueduct?” Niña Tere asks, as if it’s my own child.

“I’m heading there now.”

“Be careful.”

*   *   *

In my own little house, a favorite coffee mug has fallen off my desk and shattered upon the floor. A crack creeps its way between the seams of cinder blocks on the inside wall.

I put on long pants and hiking boots, throw a water bottle and a sweater into a backpack that’s still half-full, and set out on foot to check the damages. I have to turn my head as I pass Felix and his grandmother’s house, but I can hear her crying and saying what a good boy he was, how much she loved him.

*   *   *

Back in town, people begin to grind away against the tragedy. Cars are commandeered to take the injured to the capital. Bodies are placed under bedsheets. The literal dust had settled, but that now seems a cruel insult to the metaphor.

I walk toward the ANTEL public telephone office and see a crowd spill out its doors. Hysterical parents shout numbers for their sons and daughters in the States. Phones ring and ring. The clerk tries his best to calm everybody down. There’s little chance of getting a line to the Peace Corps office, to my father’s house, or to whatever phone is closest to Ben; it will be a long while.

I walk uphill and to the north, up the network of tiny roads and trails that I’ve come to know well over the past year. Fields of corn and corn stubble give way to coffee forests. The landscape turns from brown to green and grows more vertical. Here the homes—modest one-story affairs made from wood and corrugated metal—have survived intact.

In an hour, I reach the house that served as our bodega. We paid the owners to look after our pipes and cement back when we worked in this area. One of their outbuildings—a kitchen, perhaps—has collapsed. No bodies lie in their courtyard. Nobody cries or prays. I don’t stop to say hello.

I start down the trail toward the river. The rush of water and the calls of birds fill my ears. Soon, a silver line of galvanized pipe shines from afar. Another, similar line appears from out of the dark foliage. Its angle is, as I’d feared, off-kilter from the first.

At the trail’s next switchback, I see the brown scars on the hillsides where earth and rocks have rolled free. To descend farther is clearly dangerous. But I don’t feel scared. In a way that soon after will strike me as silly, disrespectful, and self-absorbed, I feel I have nothing more to lose.

The pipeline is totaled. Boulders—a big round variety familiar to me only from Roadrunner and Coyote cartoons—have knocked the galvanized stretch all over the valley and into the river. The mouths of disconnected pipes gape at me as if begging for mercy.

I walk upstream. The spring box has come undone at the seams. I think back to my college courses on concrete. It makes sense: The weakest bond would be to the surrounding rock. Water rushes out from the cracks at the sides. I open the top hatch. It’s nearly empty.

I close that worthless spring box, like it’s a chapter of my life, and walk back toward town, now very worried about Ben.

*   *   *

In the ANTEL office, all lines are still tied up as far-flung families try to reach one another. Salvadorans in the States call for news of their loved ones. Local families send word of their suffering and survival to relatives.

After several tries, I get through to the Peace Corps office and tell Astrid I’m okay. I ask about Ben; he’s not yet checked in. I give Astrid my ANTEL number and beg her to relay it to Ben if he calls.

In the meantime, I ask the clerk to place a collect call to my father’s house in Honolulu. It takes a while to get a line out, but once we do, my father manages to accept the charges despite the language barrier.

Straight away, he asks if I’m okay, where I am, how the quake felt. I didn’t expect him even to know about it. Apparently, El Salvador has become international news. This makes me even more fearful for Ben, but my father has other concerns.

“Is the aqueduct okay?” he asks. “Have you heard anything?”

“It’s ruined.” I exhale so hard that my breath sounds through the earpiece. “Crushed by landslides and boulders.”

“Oh my,” he says. “At least it happened while nobody was working up there, right?”

“True.” That was a stroke of luck. Had the quake hit a few short weeks ago, workers would’ve died. I might’ve been among them.

“I’m so glad you’re all right, Malia. That’s all that matters. The aqueduct is manini. You’ll fix it, by and by.”

“Honestly, Dad, what worries me now is Ben. I haven’t heard if he’s okay or not.”

“Ben?”

“You remember. You met him. My boyfriend.” An adolescent note rings in the final word. My father and I have never really figured out how to talk about my love life.

“Oh yeah,” he says. “The redhead.”

“Right. He lives in a little mud hut.” As I describe it, my mind’s eye pictures those blurry house-size clouds from a few hours earlier.

My father goes silent.

“It’s good to hear your voice, Dad. I should free up this line.”

“Okay, Malia. Thanks for calling. And don’t worry about the aqueduct. Take care of yourself.”

I spend the next few minutes on the steps of the telephone office, waiting to hear from Ben, fearing the worst, all our good times replaying through my mind like a highlight reel. In those hours, it becomes clear that I’m witnessing the end of what might be the best year of my life: working on this aqueduct, surfing with Ben in La Libertad. It’s been a golden age of sorts. I wait to hear just how over it is.

A sheet of corrugated-metal roofing rings out against the street. I turn to see the house it came from, a few doors down the hill. Next comes a shriek so high-pitched that I wonder if it’s human, not the cry of some giant bird or jungle cat. More shrieks. Two men pry a crying woman up off the ground, but she slips their grip. Standing on my toes, I watch her throw herself atop somebody else, a body. The two men get a better grip and finally force her out to the curb.

As I watch that woman sit there sobbing, her face buried in her hands, one thing becomes abundantly clear: I can’t just sit here by the phone and wait for news.

Back inside the ANTEL office, I ask the clerk to dial the pager service. He passes me to the operator; I give her the message I need sent to Ben: “Don’t move. I’m coming to find you.”