The Journey
Translated by Stephanie Lawyer
Ángel is a gentle and perceptive boy. When he was five years old, terror and uncertainty became a given in his life: a climate of violence and poverty separated him from his mother and, years later, forced him to flee from his home country. The boy recalls with a mix of nostalgia and innocence how—in order to save himself—he had to risk his life again and again on his journey from El Salvador to the United States.
I’ll never forget the first time I puked. It was the day I left El Salvador. I was ten at the time and lived with my grandmother. My mother had just come back from the United States. Things had become brutal in my country. The Mara Salvatrucha had threatened to kill my brothers unless they joined their criminal gang. In those days, you could hear the bullets rain down on our corrugated iron roof every night.
I hadn’t seen my mother since I was five. But I recognized the scent of spearmint on her and the dimples in her cheeks when she smiled—the same dimples I’d seen in the photograph that my grandmother took out every time we prayed together.
“If it’s the last thing I do, I’ll get you out of this thugs' shithole,” my mother pronounced with tears in her eyes.
My luggage consisted of a backpack, a bottle of water, underpants, and a T-shirt. My mother wouldn’t let me bring my soccer ball, but she agreed instead to the wooden cross on a chain my grandfather had given to me before he died. As I hung the crucifix around my neck, I remembered that my dad used to say, “The only enemy you need to bring down is the one inside your head.”
We left at dawn. There were about twenty of us. I was the youngest. They took us in a dump truck to Guatemala. We had nothing to eat at all on the trip. Later they put us on what seemed to be a ship and told us we would be sailing across to Mexico. The rolling water made everything move about. My guts grumbled like the sounds toads make in spring. A man they called El Coyote took out some bags of sardines and hot dogs.
“C’mon, you guys! Get it down, now you got it!” he said, mocking us. He had the word Devil tattooed on his neck. I’d just taken a bite when—holy shit!—the rotten smell pierced all the way to my stomach. I puked up what I’d eaten along with a ton of tears and snot. El Coyote burst into laughter.
“Listen close, kid. This isn’t the place for sissies or crybabies. If you want to live, suck it up like a man.” And, pointing to a dead dog floating belly up, he growled. I puked again.
The journey over the desert and then along railway tracks was like being shown what hell was like. No one spoke. We just walked and walked. My mother prayed each night, especially when she heard the wolves howling. When a pain in my left leg became almost unbearable, I bit down hard on the crucifix. As El Coyote had said, this was no place for crybabies.
We were in the middle of nowhere when our water ran out. My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. The sun beat down relentlessly on my head. It became difficult to breathe. Then we found a well with some green liquid that smelled of horse shit. The water was covered in flies. I squeezed my eyes shut and held my breath as I took a few gulps.
“When will we get there, Mom?” I asked one night after we’d been walking for a month.
“Very soon, Ángel. Be strong,” my mother replied.
And then we saw a white light. A van was coming to pick us up. I decided to stop and pee when I heard, “It’s the border patrol! Run!”
I just stood there not knowing what to do. We had just crossed the border. El Coyote grabbed me by the hair, shouting, “Come over here, you little sonofabitch!”
I didn’t even have time to pull up my pants—I just sprinkled pee everywhere. I was running so hard, my legs buckled under me. When we got to the vehicle, the man threw me in, and I fell flat on the hard surface. The rest of the group fell on top of me, and we had no time to pick ourselves up before the van took off.
Ever since then, I’ve never eaten hot dogs or sardines again.
