Frontera

It had been a seven-hour journey from Santa Ana to the border. I had driven on rutted roads with gritted teeth , hoping the suspension on my car would bear up against the bumps. I was fully aware of the danger of being a single girl, a light skinned chelita at that, broken down at the roadside in El Salvador. But the government-crested border signs had appeared eventually, along with rows of parked mopeds glittering blue and green like insect specimens pinned into unnatural rows.

The guard in the immigration office was mainly moustache and scowl, and took ages to pore over the pages in my passport, scrutinising every stamp. My breath clouded the pane of glass between us. Moustache raised his eyebrow. ‘Ilegal,’ he smirked. ‘Your passport is problem.’ He jabbed his thick finger at it. ‘You no can pass here.’ I knew this to be untrue: I had a visa that allowed me to live and work in El Salvador for two years. But I also knew I had to play the game and let him flex his muscles. He told me he was going to check with my employer to verify the visa details and that I should wait. It was Sunday. This was going to take some time.

I shrugged my shoulders; it wouldn’t do to seem worried. I took myself outside into the glaring sun and sat down on a low wall to have a cigarette. A line of ants was making its way from a crack in the kerb to a plastic bag of mango pieces, pink with chilli, split open and oozing hotly onto the tarmac. A woman with a deadpan face flicked a palm branch forwards and back to swat at the flies that threatened to land on the peanuts she was selling. Her plastic sandals were scuffed from kicking her heels over and over. The stillness was stifling. I took my book from the car and tried to read sitting in the shade of a lorry, but my mind was too dull to make the words unravel.

I moved away from the lorry when it started to hiccup fumes and heave away, taking myself to sit in a plastic chair brashly red against the sandy ground. I stared at the ants and counted my heartbeats. After a while I was joined by a young man who skidded another chair over next to mine, sending little eddies of dust up around his legs. He asked me what my name was and what I was doing in Central America. I told him about my work and he smiled. He held my gaze with his glittering smile and all of a sudden there were more heartbeats to count. Pointing at my shadow he said to me, ‘Don’t you think it’s wonderful that the sunlight has travelled for millions of miles, only to have its journey broken by your body?’ At that he stood up and smiled again, wished me good luck and walked to the office. Colours seemed brighter.

Just then, Moustache came striding towards me with a resigned look on his face and my passport in my hand. He nodded. I gathered my things together and made to follow the guard’s disappearing back though the swinging door of the office.

‘Bam!’ The door swung back out again and Moustache was shouting and waving his gun. My man followed him, glittering again, but this time because the sun was slicing from a knife in his hand. I dropped and shuffled underneath a car, the dust whirling up from the ground as I did so. The guard fired two shots. One caused the dusty floor to spit; the other found its mark and the man slumped, dull and dead on no man’s land.