To the people of Central America who resisted and fought and died.
And especially the women.

Bones are our last and best witness explains the forensic
pathologist, uncovering one hundred and eighty children's
bodies under the floor of one shack in El Mozote, their clothes
still hanging on their frail skeletons, red toy trains and
pink plastic dolls still hiding in their pockets. They lie

one
on top
of another

each one's head pierced by a bullet from behind. The flesh
gone, the bones remain, tortured and painfully
dead. When I die, the doctor requests, use my organs, put the rest
in a simple coffin. I want to be a skeleton
as soon as possible. The children of El Salvador had no choice of coffins nor
of what to do with their hearts and hands, their livers and eyes.

Rufina Reyes knows death intimately. It penetrates her one afternoon
through her pupils and her mouth, through the soles of her feet
as she kneels by a tree,
not moving,
not speaking, just listening
and watching.
Rufina squatts in the shade, silently terrified as the hours pass: one,
two, three, four counting every minute by the sound of
gunshots, heard clearly through the palms of her hands covering her ears.
Counting the hours by the screams of her children: mama,
mama Rufina, help us.

Eighteen years later,
when Rufina sinks her shoes in the reddish mud of the village and
lifts cotton shirts and faded dresses, worn thin
under the earth, a toy truck
falls out of her son's pocket. ĄHijos de puta!
Is all she can say, sons of
whores exclaims this old-fashioned young woman, swearing
on the lives of the soldiers, and asks:
why whas I spared? why am I the only one alive? And answers:
To tell the story, that's why.

Rufina doesn't cry anymore. No one does in El Mozote. Crying

is a mere bodily function.

And the dead

demand

memory.

- Beatriz Badikian

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