IT JUST OCCURRED TO HER


"The little white house in La Unión."

"What?" Martin looked puzzled.

"El Salvador. The beautiful house without security grilles. Don't tell me you don't remember."

"Wait, Carmen, you lost me here. You were talking about how it's strange there are so few passengers at this hour."

"Yes, and when the train came out of the tunnel, I saw a banged-up white car that was missing the grille and it reminded me of that house."

Martin knew what his girlfriend was talking about. Their first ever walk together was still vivid in his memory. The cute house with light blue doors and elaborated metal fence had caught their attention because it was the only building in the neighborhood without security grilles in front of the ground floor windows. Carmen had absent-mindedly eyed the beautiful roof carvings, and he had to pull her away from the path of an approaching motorcycle. And then he hadn't let go right away. Or maybe she hadn't.

"That's where it all started," said Carmen longingly.

"Wrong," he said, his mind immersed in sweet memories, and regretted saying it a moment later.

"What is wrong?"

Martin suppressed a sigh. No chance of changing the subject now. "It started when you got off the bus."

Carmen shook her head, bewildered. "Now you've lost me."

"Two days earlier. When you arrived from San Salvador."

"That's when I arrived all right, but I still have no idea what you're talking about."

"I walked behind you all the way to your hostel."

Now she was a bit disquieted. Carmen was used to Martin's cock-and-bull stories, mostly amusing, sometimes irritating, but this didn't sound like one of those.

"You were at the bus station when my bus arrived, and then you followed me all the way to my hostel?" she asked cautiously.

"Yes."

"Why?" she forced herself to say, afraid of the answer, afraid of what she would find out about the man she thought she knew inside out, but there was no stopping now.

"You were out of your mind walking around in a neighborhood like that."

"So why didn't you walk next to me?" Very not witty, she realized the next moment.

"Get real. How would you have reacted if a guy you'd never seen before had just suggested out of the blue to accompany you to wherever you may be going?"

"I know. Don't confuse me. I meant to ask why you followed me in the first place."

"Because I couldn't let anything happen to you." Martin's voice had completely changed. He sounded like a teenager whose date wanted to know what he felt about her.

Carmen watched him intensely. "You don't mean..."

"I saw you get off the San Salvador bus. Then I realized you were headed God knows where all alone. It was crazy."

Carmen was at loss for words, fascinated by the display of honest emotions she got to see much less frequently than she would have liked, Martin being too typical a man in that respect.

Martin went on: "I had no idea what I would have done if a group of thugs had attacked you. I just knew I couldn't leave you alone like that."

He turned away to look out the window. Had he tears in his eyes? Carmen wasn't sure.

She had learned only much later how foolish she had been. At that time, she had thought nothing of walking around in an unknown town at the hour when it was getting dark fast. She liked walking, as well as running. Several years after high school, Carmen still had several school records in middle-distance running to her name.

"I wish you had been there the next morning." She tried to sound like she hadn't noticed Martin's embarrassment. "There was that weird beggar who began walking next to me, talking in Spanish. His speech was so unclear I couldn't understand what he was saying. I finally just ran off."

She sighed and touched his upper arm. "I guess that's why I freaked out when you told me you had followed me from the bus station. I'm sorry."

Martin turned to look at her. "I'm sorry I didn't follow you into the hostel and stay with you all night and the next day," he said with utter tenderness in his voice.

Carmen rolled her eyes and smiled. She recognized he had turned back to his unserious self. But it had been fun to see him strip his soul naked for a minute.

There was one thing she still didn't quite get, though. "You saw me safely to the hostel and then just left and came back only the next afternoon?"

"I was running very late." Martin explained. "It was horrible. I was a complete mess for the rest of the day."

Carmen smiled. "You weren't a mess the next day when you walked into the hostel lobby in those funny-looking sandals."

"Get out of here. Don't tell me you remember what I wore."

"Don't tell me you remember what I didn't wear," she replied, grinning deviously.

Martin shook his head, confused. "Remember what you didn't wear? How can one remember what someone did not wear?"

Carmen laughed. "I love you when you get that puzzled look on your face!"

Martin sighed resignedly. "There have been times you didn't wear anything. I remember that."

"I can believe it." Carmen bent forward and kissed him gently.

They fell silent for a few seconds. Martin barely heard Carmen's next words "I was so naive."

She had traveled all the way to Central America just to see the place where her mother had been born. Carmen couldn't explain why she had thought she owed it to Mother after her tragic death. And she didn't even know that El Salvador had the highest murder rate in the world. Although when that came up between her and Martin, he reminded her there were countries where people got slaughtered like cattle and no one even kept any crime statistics. El Salvador was nowhere near the worst place in the world to be, Martin insisted. At the time Carmen arrived, he had lived there almost a year and never been in personal danger.

That had reassured Carmen, although during their time in El Salvador they got to see some scary things, including a man on the sidewalk who had been shot dead.

Martin swallowed a smutty remark about naiveté when he noticed the look on her face. He guessed what she was thinking.

"There are places in El Salvador that are very safe. The government is seriously very keen to attract tourists."

"I know. You told me. But where I went was not one of those safe places, was it?"

"No, it wasn't. But it went well."

Carmen laughed. "You can say that again."

There were no more apartment blocks outside the window. Looking at the trees flashing past, Carmen reminisced on Martin's fascinating stories about Central America. Things like how Honduras and El Salvador were in fact so different from each other. She smiled. Smart as he may be, she could still run faster than him.

"How did we end up talking about the old times all of a sudden?" Martin asked after a while.

"Weren't you listening? The car without a grille reminded me of it."

"What?"

"The little white house in La Unión."



(C) Olavi Jaggo
First published: 2021-09-11
This version: 2022-11-13




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