Dead Weight
This article first appeared in Honduras Weekly on 28/08/14.
There is here a darkness. Lying like a shadow on this land.
At night sometimes we used to tell ghost stories, sitting around when the power was out with a candle flickering on the table before us. But the darkest story, the story that really made us tremble, was the story of this place. Because it was true. Because there is a darkness here. An evil. For by what other word should it be known than evil when mothers lose their sons to killing or to death, when fathers leave their children to go far away. When people fear to walk the streets of their quiet country towns after night has fallen.
Where young men with nothing else at least have guns. Where everybody knows somebody who has been killed, and somebody that has done the killing. Where the traffic passes dead bodies on the rutted street. Somebody’s son, or lover or father. Where the police take silent money to keep quiet. Where the cleanest shops and cafes are used to clean the money made. Where everyone must pay the money to the young men who walk the streets, or they too will be killed. Where children grow up with no father, no mother, raised by grandmother’s in small shacks filled with the sons and daughters of their own faithless, absent sons. Where there are no fathers for the children.
They are gone, absent, killed, dead, or running, in hiding, or looking for work North, over the Rio Grande. Though you must save money to go North, for a coyote who will guide you there is expensive. And it is a dangerous road. Women are raped. If the Zetas or the Mexican police catch you, they will kill you, or make you work for them. Mexico pressures the United States for the rights of its emigrants there, but those who cross its borders from the South are killed, beaten, spat on. And when you do get there you will be illegal, an underling, an underclass, and the roads do not really glitter gold. But all the kids talk of the Estados Unidos. Their father went there. They will go and find him. Be like him. Though now probably he has another wife there, and the money no longer comes home and there are no phone-calls any more. And the young men with nothing else still walk the streets, sniffing glue, and killing the young men of other gangs. Born with nothing, given nothing ever, all they know is violence and casualness of death. The pointlessness of life. And all the kids want to learn English. To get out of here.
Yes. There is an evil here. A darkness. By what other word should it be known. To describe the violence in the air. In people’s lives. And you see that darkness everywhere around. In the dust of the dirt road benath your feet as you walk to the school where you teach. In the starved, mangy dog rooting in the trash that lines the road. In the crude painting of a woman on the crumbling wall of a beauty saloon, a woman with her eyes scratched out. In the eyes too of an old woman, burnt and disfigured in some forgotten fire, sweeping her yard and nodding at you as you walk by. Yes, even she is evil. For the violence of this place is in everybody who lives here. It is in the earth beneath our feet. In the humid air. It is in the wrinkled old eyes of the laughing old women, caring for their grandchildren, for no one else will, who invite you into their humble home to eat with you. They too are evil, for the shadow of this place lies on all of us. Quiet old men with crippled hands.
The evil is entrenched in this society, a society called the most violent, most murderous in the world. And that violence is all around. Even in the eyes of laughing children, for their fathers have left them to seek another life, for they know the threats of armed men who come knocking to their doors, they no the truths of sisters raped and uncles killed for nothing. Of kids hiding, on the run, because their family has been threatened. And on the day that is marked for them to celebrate their education they walk with the candles in their hand, in a grand procession down the street, though their father is dead, their sister is pregnant and only fourteen, though their brother may be dead next year, because he did not pay, because his bicycle was stolen from him by a member of the other gang and he is thus a traitor. And yet they laugh, as all children do, and the evil is in them too. It is in the dead black butterflies that line the road, the plastic bottles and bags strewn upon the ground, the acrid smoke of burning trash, the hard eyes of the conductor on the bus, he has seen men killed, he has been threatened too himself.
It is in the sprawling slums you see below as the bus rolls past Chamelecón, one of the most dangerous barrios in the most dangerous cities in the world, though we don’t go there. In the raw sewage running down the street and the rusted tin roofing of the shacks in which the people live. In the dirty diseased dogs. In the shining mall in the center of the city. In the broad avenues of the wealthy, where they live in their grand mansions, and the exclusive schools they send their kids too, with armed men at the gates. And the teachers there tell stories of children kidnapped, fingers cut off, to make their parents pay.
Yes. There is a darkness and an evil here. It is all about us and we are not apart. Two men were killed on the street outside last month. Although they know us here and we are safe and the house in which we live is clean, and the tiled floor has been swept and the steel door locked, we are too a part of it, though we sit here safe by the light of the flickering candle. For by hiding from it, here and in the sanctuary of the school where the children laugh, we are a part of it. You cannot hide from it, for the evil is under our skin. And it blackens our soul.
Original article: http://www.hondurasweekly.com/culture/item/20809-dead-weight
TomasLynch/Blackfish_Media_Cooperative
