In the final sunsets of March, when the sun points toward its first equinox, there return to my mind, like a chorus of ithomiini butterflies, the magical reminiscences of a childhood that left without warning and will only be reborn in the infinite fantasy of my daughter Kathya and those who are yet to come.
Intertwined with my memories, eternal and robust, rises the image of my paternal grandfather, Papa-Alfredo. A man from San Gerardo at heart, an inveterate early riser and lover of conversation, he was the first of five siblings: Alfredo, Marta, Toño, Concha, and Blanca; the last three born mute. Of Toño, he always praised his skill with carpentry tools and his strength when it came to work; of his sisters, however, I can barely remember any vague comment.
Despite his humble lineage and scarce academic training, he always showed an unusual interest in science. In the afternoons, after work had finished, I remember him lying in his hammock, wrestling with Baldor's Algebra, unraveling the inextricable secrets of the rule of three or equations with one and two unknowns. It was that same fascination with science that would lead him to become a Licensed Pharmacist, as he himself would comment with pride. Paradoxically, he was also always disdainful of the paraphernalia and luxury that drives others mad, and an enemy of violence and alcohol: "As long as I don't taste a drop of liquor, I'm sure I won't steal or kill, because liquor transforms man into beast," he used to repeat; I assume he was paraphrasing some writer of old that he had read.
Life had reached its peak for him when, together with Francisca (Mama-Paca), he procreated twelve children: Alfredo, Juan Antonio (my father), Delfina, Argelia, María Félix, Norma Delmy, Luis Hermógenes, Belisa, Teresa, Andrés, Roberto, and Patricia. Several of them professionals and others on their way to becoming so—an almost utopian feat for a family from San Gerardo in those days. As a result of his honest work as a merchant, farmer, and cattle rancher, he owned the Jovel Pharmacy and La Chácara, La Joya, and El Llenadero, small properties for pastoral rather than agricultural use, in the vicinity of the town, which together didn't reach 70 manzanas in extension. However, at the beginning of the 1980s, when socio-economic divergences foretold no other way out for El Salvador than a bloody war that would last the next ten years—and which would of course remain indelible in the memory of those who lived through it—he was forced to migrate with his brood, first to Costa Rica and from there to Nicaragua.
The future looked uncertain, but it didn't matter—Francisca, his lifelong companion, would be by his side to climb the steep path together. Unfortunately, not for long. On August 2, 1982, a fratricidal uterine cancer would cut short the life of his beloved companion. And he, in those same March sunsets I evoked at the beginning, used to wander with his memories in the fields adjacent to the road leading to the Los Lechecuagos district in León. Once he told my mother that during his evening walks—even though I always thought him an atheist—he asked God to give her back to him, even if only for a few moments. "I always lived in love with her, and she satisfied with me," he used to say.
Only time, the generosity of the Nicaraguans, and the emotional closeness with his children would lighten the weight of his burden. He would smile again, enjoy awakening with the dawn and lying down with the twilight, and he would even fall in love again! Never again with any woman, but with that, his new homeland that had given him shelter—his generous Nicaragua!
And he learned about cotton and coffee harvests, and was a store clerk and craftsman of fine-mesh casting nets. Until, to the delight of his peasant soul, and thanks to his firstborn—by then a surgeon at some hospital in Saint Louis, Missouri—he returned to the beloved countryside. He acquired a small farm of about 45 manzanas in the Cabo de Hornos district, the driest place in Nicaragua after Ciudad Darío. And there he dealt with cattle, and Taiwan grass, and star grass, and jaragua grass; and learned to eat quesillos with tiste and to say "idiay," "chunche," "chochada," and many other words that emerged from the rich colloquial heritage.
And since no evil lasts a hundred years nor is there a body that can resist it, on April 4, 1990—in Geneva, Switzerland—the Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional and the Salvadoran government of Alfredo Cristiani would put an end to ten years of anxiety and pain. Atlacatl, Bracamontes, and D'Abuisson ceased to be words that inspired terror to become nothing more than shameful memories. Oscar Arnulfo Romero, Sumpúl, and Mozote, however, would remain in memory like painful scars impossible to erase. In short, the Torogoces of Morazán abandoned Guazapa to go sing to peace.
In September 1992, Papa-Alfredo returned to his homeland. He hung his hammock between the same two posts of the house's corridor, reopened the Jovel Pharmacy, and went back to working with cows at La Chácara. But nothing would ever be the same again. A mixture of joy and oppressive sadness would invade him: joy for the reunion with the scene of a magical past, and oppressive sadness because an important part of his life had remained in Nicaragua.
And as is life's rule, time, accurate and inexorable, cuts down and slows the faculties of every man. But he now, in the twilight of his journey, is still there, his decorum and nobility intact and his tenderness and benevolence multiplied, being by nature what others only dream of becoming.
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