I’m back in El Salvador for the first time in thirty years, and I don’t recognize a thing. There are smooth highways from the airport up to San Salvador, the capital, and even at this late hour, along the stretch of dunes dividing the road from the Pacific Ocean, there are cheerful stands at which customers have parked to buy coconuts and típico foods. But I remember a pitted two-lane road, a merciless sun that picked out every detail on the taut skin of corpses, a hole in the sandy ground, the glaring news that four women from the United States, three of them nuns, had just been unearthed from that shallow pit.
“Is there a monument or a sign marking where the four Americanas were killed during the war?” I ask the driver of the hotel van.
“Yes, up in the university, the UCA, where they died.”
“No, those were the six Jesuit priests, years later, in San Salvador. I mean the nuns, in 1980, here.”
“Oh,” he replies. “I don’t remember.”
