To the Ends of the Earth

In another climate, I don’t think the theater would have seemed so special, but in this sleepy tropical town in the western highlands of El Salvador—and there was nothing here for the luxury-minded or ruin-hunting tourist—the theater was magnificent and strange. Its style was banana republic Graeco-Roman; it was newly whitewashed, and classical in an agreeably vulgar way, with cherubs on its façade, and trumpeting angels, and masks of comedy and tragedy, a partial sorority of Muses: a pudgy Melpomene, a pouncing Thalia, Calliope with a lyre in her lap, and—her muscles showing through her tunic as fully developed as a gym teacher’s—Terpsichore. There were columns, too, and a Romanesque portico, and on a shield a fuming volcano as nicely proportioned as Izalco, the one just outside town, which was probably the model for this emblem. It was a beautiful turn-of-the-century theater and not entirely neglected; once, it had provided Santa Ana with concerts and operas, but culturally Santa Ana had contracted, and catering to this shrunken condition the theater had been reduced to showing movies. That week, the offering was New York, New York.

I liked Santa Ana immediately; its climate was mild, its people alert and responsive, and it was small enough so that a short walk took me to its outskirts, where the hills were deep green and glossy with coffee bushes. The hard-pressed Guatemalans I had found a divided people—and the Indians in the hinterland seemed hopelessly lost; but El Salvador, on the evidence in Santa Ana, was a country of half-breeds, energetic and full of talk, practicing a kind of Catholicism based on tactile liturgy. In the Cathedral, pious Salvadoreans pinched the feet of saints and rubbed at relics, and women with infants—always remembering to insert a coin in the slot and light a candle first—seized the loose end of Christ’s cincture and mopped the child’s head with its tassel.

Soccer in San Salvador

I HAD READ ABOUT LATIN AMERICAN SOCCER—THE CHAOS, the riots, the passionately partisan crowds, the way political frustrations were ventilated at the stadiums. I knew for a fact that if one wished to understand the British it helped to see a soccer game; then, the British did not seem so tight-lipped and proper. Indeed, a British soccer game was an occasion for a form of gang warfare for the younger spectators. The muscular ritual of sport was always a clear demonstration of the wilder impulses in national character. The Olympic Games are interesting largely because they are a kind of world war in pantomime. “Would you mind if I went to the game with you?” I asked Alfredo, a salesman I had met on the train from Santa Ana.

Alfredo looked worried. “It will be very crowded,” he said. “There may be trouble. It is better to go to the swimming pool tomorrow—for the girls.”

“Do you think I came to El Salvador to pick up girls at a public swimming pool?”

“Did you come to El Salvador to see the football game?”

“Yes,” I said.

Alfredo was late. He blamed the traffic. “There will be a million people at the stadium.” He had brought along some friends, two boys who, he boasted, were studying English.

“How are you doing?” I asked them in English.

“Please?” said one. The other laughed. The first one said in Spanish, “We are only on the second lesson.”

Because of the traffic, and the risk of car thieves at the stadium, Alfredo parked half a mile away, at a friend’s house. This house was worth some study; it was a number of cubicles nailed to trees, with the leafy branches descending into the rooms. Cloth was hung from sticks to provide walls, and a strong fence surrounded it. I asked the friend how long he had lived there. He said his family had lived in the house for many years. I did not ask what happened when it rained.

But poverty in a poor country had subtle gradations. We walked down a long hill toward the stadium, and crossing a bridge I looked into a gorge expecting to see a river and saw lean-tos and cooking fires and lanterns. Who lived there? I asked Alfredo.

“Poor people,” he said.

Others were walking to the stadium, too. We joined a large procession of quick-marching fans, and as we drew closer to the stadium they began yelling and shoving in anticipation. The procession swarmed over the foothills below the stadium, crashing through people’s gardens and thumping the fenders of stalled cars. Here the dust was deep and the trampling feet of the fans made it rise until it became a brown fog, like a sepia print of a mob scene, with the cones of headlights bobbing in it. The mob was running now, and Alfredo and his friends were obscured by the dust cloud. Every ten feet, boys rushed forward and shook tickets at me, screaming, “Suns! Suns! Suns!”