La Sensuntepeqana
by Karina Gamez Issue Two: Nonfiction
Photo by Sindy Sussengut
A place you once inhabited. A place with complicated feelings, occurrences. You undergo transformation when you’re there. No. Transformation is not the right word; it’s slower, a process of something (a substance, a system, a sensation) moving slowly into you, installing itself deep inside. Infiltration. You are infiltrated with a scent you wish you could describe.
You can’t.
You can.
Soil.
Fresh damp soil.
You need more than that—the scent necessitates an action, the scent is an action.
You were supposed to be born there, in that soil, in ese valle, ese cantón where both of your parents were born, but for some reason never met in. There, in that rural congested municipality in northern El Salvador, poor, and extremely humid, with its town square and its very narrow roads, and its sand-colored pavilion, and the singularly colossal church, and the bakeries, and the queserías, and the hordes of street vendors selling cassettes, SIM cards, shoes, fruit. Envision concentric circles with that town square at the center, then move outward: the appearance of urbanity dissipating, with the principal road leading you north, towards that verdant terrain where every few meters, at the very border of the road, you encounter the decades, blurring. Bodies moving up, bodies moving down. A woman in apron treading down a slope, two boys pistiando near a motorbike, a couple kissing, fighting, the sound of bombardment, a birthday party, a baptism, a military checkpoint, a rooster howling, school children, springing; then a marriage, a funeral procession, annonas for sale, graves for sale, and a cluster of adobe shacks with aluminum roofs and barbed fences, the tarp—and there, yes, there, that is where it happens, in the beating pulse of Sensuntepeque, you smell it, viscerally.
The smell that your body (a Salvadoran body, porous, penetrable, born and raised on the outside) remembers as home. It is what sends you there again, and again, to endure the maximum extent of a memory retained and felt long before you were ever thought of or conceived: the scent is an action. The scent of sinking your nose, thoroughly, into fresh damp soil. ✦
Karina Gamez is an emerging Salvadoran-American writer based in Bay Area, California. She is a recent graduate from New York University with a degree in politics, history, and creative writing, with a regional specialization on El Salvador. Her literary and translation work has appeared in NYU’s Confluence and the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA).
