By Sabina Rosa Guardado

El Paraíso glowed like molten rock at the foot of the volcano, waking the earth below.

My grandmother tells this story from the dinner table. She says it is an honor to tell it, so it must be told right. Now I share this story for her. Aquí está, tal como está destinado.

In 1945, El Paraíso sat like cooled lava at the foot of the Guazapa volcano in northern El Salvador. This town, full of bean and corn farmers, laid dormant for many years, crawling with the ghosts of Spanish conquest. Fathers knew only the rhythm of hooves on wet grass as their music. Mothers had forgotten the songs they sang in their youth. El Paraíso had but one fading symbol of life left in its hardened earth: the beloved church.

With every wet season, the ceiling inched closer to the pews. The packed floor sat damp underfoot, marked by Sunday’s footsteps. It appeared as though the humble building which had risen from the earth as a gift for the people now decided to slink back to its origin. The Father wouldn't have minded, if not for the sag in the cross-beams that prophesied a small disaster at mass. The rotting wood, marked by years of neglect, would not last more than a few days.

He walked to town, knowing the family suited to his cause. It was a low, hot hour – a time when he could expect little movement on the roads. The residents of El Paraíso treasured any idle moment, tempered by lives consumed with subsistence. But there was one house that remained astir with energy.

Inside this house on the edge of the cornfields lived seven sisters given the name Guardado. The Father found them in a frenzy, bickering harmlessly over who would slaughter that night’s chicken. His figure filled the doorframe, haloed by the afternoon glow. In a low, prophetic voice, he called the eldest to the doorway.

“Isabel, necesito la ayuda de tus hermanas.”

At these words, the wind brushed a silence into the room, tickling the ear of their mother across the wall, testing the strength of her sleep. He spoke plainly, though endearment shone in his eyes.

“La iglesia está cayendo, hermanas. ¿Puedes revivirlo? ¿Y traer algo de vida a esta tierra?”

“Por supuesto, Padre. Estamos aquí para el pueblo. Siempre.” Isabel’s chest blushed with purpose, playing her part as she was meant to.

Gloria, the youngest, watched the faces of her sisters carefully, waiting for some sign of action.

She tugged at her sister's skirt. “Rosa, ¿qué está pasando? ¿Qué dijo el Padre?” She wanted badly to understand – she could sense the importance of the Father’s words.

Isabel turned to her sisters, heart filling with a foreign confidence. She understood something deeper in the Father’s mission. She saw how the shoulders of her neighbors had begun to stiffen – how their eyes longed for more than dirt and corn. She had witnessed her hearty sisters grow from the rich, ashen soil of Guazapa. How now, after years of hardship, they moved wearily, chained to a land that was barely their own.

“Hermanas, esta iglesia es nuestra. Y este pueblo también. Tenemos que protegerlos.”

Even in their youth, the sisters carried discipline in their hearts. Amelia’s palms were calloused and cracked from tending to the family garden. Bessie walked with a limp from a machete accident while farming for banana leaves. Dilma’s spine ached from hours scrubbing family linens on small washboards in the frigid river. They served each other with absolute devotion, but even with the toil of one thousand lives, the sisters remained bound to the earth underneath them.

With the rise of the next sun, the sisters began their work. Isabel sewed her heart into dancing skirts ripped from bed sheets and stitched from rags. Rosa, caught in the middle of her sisters’ chaos, bickered endlessly with her young siblings over which songs would sound sweetest. They recited Lenca hymns and mestizo folk songs woven with history and power. Bessie and Sofia tightened their set of tambores and rinsed their flutes in the river. Dilma and Gloria snuck away with the golden parchment their father used to take score of his cornstalks and drew more signs and fliers than there were chickens in El Paraíso.

That night, word of the sisters’ plans spread quickly, rolling across corn stalks from one house to the next. The sisters felt the hum of the town from the soles of their sandals up to their hands joint in prayer around the dinner table. They bowed modestly, hoping for quick rest and good health. In the pitch black, they pretended to sleep just like their restless neighbors.

The next afternoon’s air hovered attentively over El Paraíso. The sisters approached the church slowly, drawn to action, ready to bind their people together for one precious moment. Wet wood rejected thin white paint as it peeled down the church’s facade. The middle sisters, well disciplined by faith, were almost afraid to gaze upon the building. It looked so big even as it sunk slowly into the soft dirt.

The second oldest, Amelia, whispered nervously over Isabel’s shoulder, “Hermana, me asusta.”

Her sister looked back at her with eyes of molten earth. They flickered with something deeper than life.

“Esta es nuestra determinación, no tengas miedo.”

As the sun began to sink, the townspeople flowed through the winding roads. They spilled out onto the church lawn, making space for their neighbors, hovering in a haze of curiosity. Gloria weaved through the crowd, collecting precious coins from wrinkled hands in the folds of her skirt.

The sisters’ stage of milk crates and curtains made from bedsheets radiated under the low sun. Hyperactive boys climbed high in the trees as witnesses to this moment that would mark the ground forever. Tens of bodies sat, thrumming with energy, below the church’s withered face. The earth vibrated with the volcanoes that rose up above the white cross. Amelia peeked from behind the curtain and watched as her neighbors’ eyes began to glow like Isabel’s.

When the air settled and the town’s whispers ceased, Bessie began to play a rhythm on the tambores. Each hit echoed off of her rough hands and slid into the chests of the onlookers.

Her sisters poured onto the stage, feet pounding out an ancient tempo. Their movements came from their blood – predestined at birth. They learned their lyrics in the womb, repeated by every parent to every child to be solidified in memory before memory was known. Their skirts rippled across the earth and stirred the heart of El Paraíso.

The beat of their land was embedded in the body, not the mind. The bass of the drums clenched the hearts of the people and compelled them to their feet. El Paraíso danced deep into the night, glowing like molten rock at the foot of the volcano, waking the earth below.

The town repaired the church with the charities collected that night. But it was the relief of the sisters’ music that healed something in El Paraíso. Its simmering spirit awoke after many idle years, humming with the solid earth beneath Guazapa.

The next year, the Father moved onto his next station in western El Salvador, helping clean the mass graves of a peasant slaughter. Decades later, many of the townspeople were assassinated in the civil war. The chaos left the church demolished. El Paraíso’s dirt is still stained red from those years, but Guazapa’s rumble continues to echo the beat of the sisters’ dance.

The sisters carried that night in their blood for generations, forever connected to the boiling earth of Guazapa. When the sun lays low, and the grass sits wet in the evening, they still see the faces of their lost neighbors shining back at them.

Guazapa glows in my grandmother’s eyes when she finishes the story. Every year, she remembers less from her distant land, but that evening rumble remains in the soles of her feet as strongly as the day she danced. ■