El modesto misterio

Author: Saul Hernandez

Photo: Eniac Martinez

Cantalicio Barahona Vargas was born in San Antonio de Cortes in the north of Honduras near Guatemala. Part of his life was spent in San Pedro Sula with his first wife and four daughters. La ciudad de los zorzales, a song composed and sung by the Honduran Polache, emphasizes the poverty, violence, and crime its citizens have to live with; the same city where the maquiladoras are part of the landscape but it ‘is not there, inert and definitive’ as writer Christina Rivera Garza stated in her blog: landscapes can shift and change. Cantalicio worked as a welder and driver, and judging the photo he also worked at a public security corporation. Later, when work had dried up like an arid and desert terrain, Cantalicio realized that immigration was a strategy for employment and improvement to his quality of life; therefore, he traveled to the United States.

For seven years, he lived intermittently between the United States and his native Honduras. In both places he had family. Del otro lado, his nephew Victor Manuel Escobar Pineda lived with his wife and five children. More than once, despite the terrible conditions on the road, Cantalicio crossed the south of Mexico without major setbacks. Cantalicio was a quiet man, and neither his family nor friends thought this would happen to him. On August 22, 2010, at the age of 55, his life took another turn: he was killed along with 71 other immigrants. Among them was Cantalicio’s nephew, Victor Manuel, 36 years old, who worked –supposedly illegally– somewhere in Houston, Texas.

A person close to Cantalicio said, in one of our telephone conversations, that he did not believe this project would come to anything. Perhaps this is true since he isn’t wrong: this text, brief and concise, will not bring Cantalicio back to life. It will only serve to expose and repeat, perhaps above all, the words that with such dignity and courage, Luz María Dávila said when her children along with other students were massacred in the war–a drug war– that Felipe Calderón began without asking anyone. Words that were echoed in the writing of Cristina Rivera Garza: “You are not my friend, this/is the hand I do not give you […]/Mr. President/[…] I give you/my back//my thirst, I give you my unknown shivers, my remorseful tenderness, my resplendent birds, my deaths.”

When Cantalicio returned to San Pedro Sula, his mother Rumualda Barahona, said through tears, bent with sadness, and with the heaviness of her 86 years in each word: “my son, you are home.” And perhaps, in tears and the silent behind them, Rumualda only demanded – or demands, better said – one thing: justice or at least, a glimpse of it.