El Polaco

As I look back on my disastrous experiences of romance in my younger days, it is hard to identify the relationship that was most toxic, toxic for me, not the man. But el polaco has to be up there amongst the front runners. El polaco was not Polish as the name (in Spanish) suggests. It was his nom de guerre in the FMLN, the one he had used while fighting in the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front in El Salvador during the many years of civil war. From the moment I set eyes on him, I desired him. The combination of his exoticness and virility, as well as his track record as a left-wing guerrilla fighter during the civil war, made him irresistible to me.

We met in Havana on a team working to set up a youth project that could actively embrace young people from Ireland, El Salvador and Cuba. This part of the project lasted two weeks and despite my insinuations and overtures, el Polaco and I parted only as colleagues, each of us going our own way. I felt that he was interested in me but was either too respectful of professional etiquette to make a move, or strongly aware that our project was coming to an end soon and there was little point in starting a romance that would go nowhere. I was disappointed, but I didn’t give up hope of seeing him again. 

Two months later, back in Ireland, hope was indeed revived when a member of the US delegation I was working with mentioned to me she had a good friend who travelled back and forth to El Salvador working with the FMLN. Incredible as it may seem, she seemed to think that her friend had mentioned el polaco because the name resonated with her. On the day she was returning home, I gave her a short note to pass on to her friend in case she should ever run across el polaco again. Although I was hopeful on that day, my hopes quickly faded as reasoning took root. I had no plans to travel to El Salvador in search of romance, or anything at all. The country had such a bad reputation in terms of a combination violence and corruption, as well as widespread poverty, that it would be madness to travel there. Besides, years before I’d had a taste of that particular combination in Nicaragua and it had not been to my liking. 

My plans took me back to Cuba in November. The idea was to live and work in the country for at least a year and then decide what I wanted to do at the end of that period. Soon after arriving, my contact on the US delegation emailed to say that an envelope had been handed to her from her El Salvadoran friend and it was from el polaco. I felt exhilarated from the sheer improbability of getting a reply to what seemed to me to be my message in a bottle thrown on to the ocean waves. Such great fortune had to mean something. This was surely a sign that this man and I were destined to be together. My fate was decided. After Cuba, I would move to El Salvador to be with el polaco.

Amilcar, that was his real name, came to Havana in the springtime so that we could spend a week together. This would only confirm our suitedness to each other, I believed. And it did. At the end of a week of passion he proposed to me and I accepted. We also undertook to have a holiday together in El Salvador later that year. It would be my first visit to the country, but instead of seeing each other at the end of the summer as I had hoped, we didn’t meet until early in the new year, much later than planned.

Although Amilcar asserted that my visit to El Salvador had been postponed because of his work commitments, I sensed that something else was going on. It was apparent from his emails that the passion and excitement from his spring trip to Havana had all but vanished to such an extent that I consulted friends on the wisdom of the trip. Interestingly, it was the men who urged me not to cancel my ticket to San Salvador because they believed that if I didn’t go, I would probably never find out what was really going on. I listened to what was said and decided that I would go; it was a decision I would come to regret from the day I arrived in El Salvador.

First, Amilcar arrived late at the airport to collect me in his car. By then one of my bags, the one with presents in it for Amilcar and his son, had been stolen; admittedly, it was a small one, but nevertheless it was gone. He seemed to be okay in the car, more like el polaco who I’d known in Havana. However, as we arrived at his house, he told me that he was going to a work’s New Year’s party that afternoon, but it was only for employees. That bit of news was very sobering, so I sat in his wreck of a house for four hours wondering what to do with myself. It was undoubtedly not a good beginning.

Second, as I sat on the edge of my bed, I noticed that the room I’d been assigned was filthy and alive with cockroaches. The bed had been slept in by someone else before me and the sheets were not clean. Thinking about this, I chose to assume that perhaps this was normal in El Salvador and that I shouldn’t judge people here by Western standards of cleanliness. After all, Amilcar had been a guerrilla fighter who’d spent years in the mountains and jungles, and he’d been interrogated and tortured by the authorities, so he and his sister had a lot to deal with and I doubted cleanliness was high on their list of priorities.  Anyway, this was my room, as Amilcar made clear to me, and that his room was where only he and his nine-year-old son slept.

Third, the other person in the household, a 19-year-old nephew, rarely emerged from his room during the day. At night I heard muffled sounds coming from the front of the house and once or twice I glimpsed a silhouette moving in the light outside my bedroom door. Amilcar had stressed that I was to be sure to lock my room at all times, even if I left it just to use the toilet, and especially to lock up my room when I was in it. This nephew was a cocaine addict who would steal and sell anything in the house that was not locked down. “Why do you think I keep the fridge in my bedroom?” Amilcar asked. “The cooker stays here in the hallway because it is too heavy for him to move and besides, it is old and decrepit, not worth a lot. Just look around my house. It's empty, isn’t it? That’s because of him. He has stolen everything here and sold it all for drug money.”

When I woke up on the first morning, I found a dozen cockroaches flattened on my sheets. It was a nocturnal massacre that I’d not been aware of because I’d taken sleeping tablets to lull myself into a state of unconsciousness at night. The whole situation was vile, although  the cockroaches were perhaps the least vile aspect of it. Reluctantly, I’d admitted to myself that Amilcar did not want me to be there. Not even when we spent five days touring the tiny country, did he warm to me. Meantime, I was not warming at all to El Salvador. Incredible beauty spots of volcanoes, forests and rivers were littered with rubbish hanging in the trees, cast by the roadside and floating in the rivers. Once we even saw a dead person by the roadside; admittedly the emergency services were there, but it was shock to my system. On that trip, more criminals tried to enter the car, but were miraculously unsuccessful, so my belongings remained mine alone, not someone else’s.

One afternoon, I coaxed Amilcar into allowing me to wander around the city centre alone. He was unhappy about it, stressing that I would be an easy target for thieves and drug addicts. But I just wanted to get away from him and to do something independently, basically to be on my own. Reluctantly, he dropped me off at the end of a busy downtown street with lots of shops. Within 10 minutes a man in a tidy suit initiated conversation with me. He was about fifty years old and was carrying a small briefcase; he asked very politely where I was from. When I replied, Ireland, he looked astonished and wondered what I was doing so far from my home country. Visiting friends, was the ambiguous reply. “Your friends should take better care of you because this city it too dangerous for any woman, but especially a foreign woman to be on her own.” So, Amilcar was right, I mumbled to myself as I hurried toward the place I’d agreed to meet him.   

My departure date couldn’t come quickly enough, either for me or Amilcar. I asked him to leave me at the airport well in advance in case of any setbacks, but I didn’t expect him to leave me there six hours early. Still, it was wonderful to be away from him and on my way out of this Godawful country. Once the relief began to flood through me and my bags had been handed over to the airline officials, I could relax and reflect on my experience of that very long week in El Salvador. The first question I asked myself was what had changed for Amilcar? It was a question which I’d put to him several times when we were together, but never got an answer. Indeed, he seemed both puzzled and irritated that I’d dare ask him such a question. So, I got nowhere.

Amilcar had been markedly cool from Day 1 onwards, making it clear to me that I was little more than annoyance to him and that’s how he treated me throughout the visit. Evidently something had changed in the interval between his trip to Havana and my trip to San Salvador. The name Carolina cropped up in conversation a couple of times with him and when I inquired, he roughly brushed my question to one side claiming that she was an ex-girlfriend. When he told me that he’d been tortured, I was aware of the devastating effect that can have on a person, perhaps leading to PTSD, so perhaps mental illness and mood instability could explain his current frame of mind. Then I recalled that a few years previously my psychotherapist had advised me to choose my partners in life wisely. She indicated that judging by my past relationships I’d tended to choose men who, to say the least, do not fully value me… just like my father. By the time my flight landed in Havana I was overflowing with gratitude for that insight. Amilcar was a classic mistake I’d almost made. I didn’t know why he had behaved so harshly toward me, but I was glad he had. Such appalling behaviour made me suffer, but I’d have suffered a lot more if we’d married as we had pledged in a moment of passion in Havana.

Adios para siempre polaco!