From those lands, from that clay, from that silence,
I have come forth to walk, to sing throughout the world.
--Pablo Neruda

In that town the hills are old and bald: bare of trees, of birds, of clouds. The olingo monkey no longer screeches on Burnt Monkey Hill; its cry only exists as the referent of a far-away happy memory that one hears in the conversations of the old folk. The agile and timid deer fled the hills of that town I come from. One day the armadillo couldn't find a place to make her burrow and she left too; I still don't know where she went. The misunderstood serpent crept off in search of other brakes where she could slither in peace without fear of being roasted in the roaring flames of the hills, free of the fear of the sharpened machete, free of the unjust curse of that remote and mythical paradise.

I walked the streets and passages of El Progreso. Pavement has tamed only the streets of the commercial center of the town. The rest of the streets of the town and the barrios are moonscape streets of dust. My footsteps covered those streets by day and by night. I wandered those streets in search of life, in search of death.

One time I was walking along the train line past the barrio San Martín, following the route that leads to the banana camps. On one of the banks of the Ulúa River which had been converted into a huge trash dump there was a house of cardboard and tin. The dogs and the buzzards rummaged through the mountains of trash in search of carrion. Inside, the house reeked of fermented humidity and scorched firewood. Two women -- thin, older than their years, with tangled hair and dried-up, fallen breasts -- watched the boiling pot that contained their last ration of frijoles. To one side of the women, a rough cot holding a boy and a girl with the implacable stamp of malnutrition tearing at their lives. Such is life in the shadow of the Bridge of Democracy, under daily siege by the forces of poverty, marginalization, injustice.

There's a plaza on the main commercial street of El Progreso, facing the Las Mercedes Catholic Church. Bathed in the heat, shoeshine boys shine shoes, people mill around the shops and stalls that have stolen the sidewalks from the pedestrians. Farther along a group of street kids sniff glue to forget their hunger and their abandonment. The stoplights, the buses, the bicycles and the taxis plot together to shatter your nerves and sow disorder. A drunk pisses in open view while in the center of the plaza an enormous boa hisses and tells the fortunes of a crowd of the unemployed and the curious, while a preacher gesticulates and shouts curses announcing the end of the world.

When it rains in El Progreso it's a fierce rain that feels like the harbinger of the universal flood; then the sun appears suddenly and its light evaporates everything it touches and a palpable humidity rises from every nook and cranny and penetrates everywhere, stamping everything with its capricious and profligate seal. The chirping of parakeets announces the impending exit of the day. The sun becomes a farmer and lights a blaze in the clouds and the whole sky burns orange and streaks the clouds with a spectrum of furrows. And after burning and plowing the sky, the sun sows a milpa of stars for the moon to harvest come daybreak.Every night on one of the downtown street-corners of El Progreso, Doña Marta sells grilled beef and orange juice and baleadas (a Honduran specialty that consists of re-fried beans and grated cheese rolled into a flour tortilla). That was our corner. There we ate, we drank orange juice, we laughed, and we invented friendship, love, and complicity.

You can leave El Progreso but El Progreso never leaves you. From afar I remember places in El Progreso: the Cine Italia, the discos, the pool-halls, the cantinas, the video-game parlors, nights at the theatre. From a distance I remember the children of El Progreso, their smiles, their affection. I remember the beautiful young women of Progreso as they walk along the downtown streets. They walk and in their movements you hear the murmur of Carib drums and Mayan tenderness. Decked out in minimalist apparel they walk down the streets winking at the heat and the senses, heading for the maquila, the high school, their illusions.

The people of El Progreso: neither better nor worse than any other group of people. People for every taste with their virtues and defects to suit the circumstances. People easily loved and easily hated. People prodigal with love and with tenderness, with joy and with suffering, with opportunism and with dependency, with truth and with lies. Specific people with names that I remember: Suyapa, Jorge, Claudia, María, Joche, Lauren, Jefrin, Chito, Jenny, Lucila. Common and familiar names, some of them as intimate and essential as the word bread or the word coffee, tortilla, orange or yucca. Names that belong to persons and that at this distance bring on an ache inside. Names of clay and hope like the word friendship, like the word Central América, like the word Honduras, like the word El Progreso.

Carlos M Castro