And the players watched, too. The game had stopped. The Mexican players kicked the turf, the Salvadorean team shouted at the Suns.
Please return the ball. It was the announcer. He was hoarse. If the ball is not returned, the game will not continue.
This brought a greater shower of objects from the upper seats -cups, cushions, more bottles. The bottles broke with a splashing sound on the concrete seats. The Suns lower down began throwing things back at their persecutors, and it was impossible to say where the ball had gone.
The ball was not returned. The announcer repeated his threat.
The players sat down on the field and did limbering-up exercises until, ten minutes after the ball had disappeared from the field, a new ball was thrown in. The spectators cheered but, just as quickly, fell silent. Mexico had scored another goal.
Soon, a bad kick landed the ball into the Shades. This ball was fought for and not thrown back, and one could see the ball progressing through the section. The ball was seldom visible, but one could tell from the free-for-alls - now here, now there - where it was. The Balconies poured water on the Shades, but the ball was not surrendered. And now it was the Suns' turn to see the slightly better-off Salvadoreans in the Shades section behaving like a swine. The announcer made his threat: the game would not resume until the ball was thrown back. The threat was ignored, and after a long time the ref walked onto the field with a new ball.
In all, five balls were lost this way. The fourth landed not far from where I sat, and I could see that real punches were being thrown, real blood spurting from Salvadorean noses, and the broken bottles and the struggle for the ball made it a contest all its own, more savage than the one on the field, played out with the kind of mindless ferocity you read about in books on gory medieval sports. The announcer's warning was merely ritual threat; the police did not intervene - they stayed on the field and let the spectators settle their own scores. The players grew bored: they ran in place, they did push-ups. When play resumed and Mexico gained possession of the ball it deftly moved down the field and invariably made a goal. But this play, these goals - they were no more than interludes in a much bloodier sport which, towards midnight (and the game was still not over!), was varied by Suns throwing firecrackers at each other and onto the field.
The last time play was abandoned and fights broke out among the Suns - the ball bobbing from one ragged Sun to another - balloons were released from the upper seats. But they were not balloons. They were white, blimpy and had a nipple on the end; first one, then dozens. This caused great laughter, and they were batted from section to section. They were of course contraceptives, and they caused Alfredo no end of embarrassment. 'That is very bad,' he said, gasping in shame. He had apologized for the interruptions; for the fights; the delayed play. Now this - dozens of airborne rubbers. The game was a shambles; it ended in confusion, fights, litter. But it shed light on the recreations of Salvadoreans, and as for the other thing - the inflated contraceptives - I later discovered that the Agency for International Development's largest Central American family planning programme is in El Salvador. I doubt whether the birth-rate has been affected, but children's birthday parties in rural El Salvador must be a great deal of fun, what with the free balloons.
Mexico won the game, six to one. Alfredo said that El Salvador's goal was the best one of the game, a header from thirty yards. So he managed to rescue a shred of pride. But people had been leaving all through the second half, and the rest hardly seemed to notice or to care that the game had ended. Just before we left the stadium I looked up at the ant-hill. It was a hill once again; there were no people on it, and depopulated, it seemed very small.
Outside, on the stadium slopes, the scene was like one of those lurid murals of Hell you see in Latin American churches. The colour was infernal, yellow dust sifted and whirled among crater-like pits, small cars with demonic headlights moved slowly from hole to hole like mechanical devils. And where, on the mural, you see the sins printed and dramatized, the gold lettering saying Lust, Anger, Avarice, Drunkenness, Gluttony, Theft, Pride, Jealousy, Usury, Gambling, and so on, here after midnight were groups of boys lewdly snatching at girls, and knots of people fighting, counting the money they had won, staggering and swigging from bottles, shrieking obscenities against Mexico, thumping the hoods of cars or duelling with the branches they had yanked from trees and the radio aerials they had twisted from cars. They trampled the dust and howled. The car horns were like harsh moos of pain - and one car was being overturned by a gang of shirtless, sweating youths. Many people were running to get free of the mob, holding handkerchiefs over their faces. But there were tens of thousands of people here, and animals, too, maimed dogs snarling and cowering as in a classic vision of Hell. And it was hot: dark grimy air that was hard to breathe, and freighted with the stinks of sweat; it was so thick it muted the light. It tasted of stale fire and ashes. The mob did not disperse; it was too angry to go home, too insulted by defeat to ignore its hurt. It was loud and it moved as if thwarted and pushed; it danced madly in what seemed a deep hole.
Alfredo knew a short cut to the road. He led the way through the parking lot and a ravaged grove of trees behind some huts. I saw people lying on the ground, but whether they were wounded or sleeping or dead I could not tell.
I asked him about the mob.
'What did I tell you?' he said. 'You are sorry you came, right?'
'No,' I said, and I meant it. Now I was satisfied. Travel is pointless without certain risks. I had spent the whole evening scrutinizing what I saw, trying to memorize details, and I knew I would never go to another soccer game in Latin America.
That soccer game was not the only event in San Salvador that evening. At the Cathedral, as the fans were rioting in the National Stadium, the Archbishop of El Salvador was receiving an honorary doctorate from the President of Georgetown University. The Archbishop had deliberately made it into a public ceremony, to challenge the government and give a Jesuitical oration. There were 10,000 people at the Cathedral and I was told that this crowd was equally frightening in its discontent.
And ten years before, there had been 'The Football War' - also known as 'The 100 Hour War'. This was between El Salvador ano Honduras - first the soccer teams and the rioting spectators, then the national armies. It had grown out of El Salvador's chronic shortage of land. Salvadoreans slipped over the border into Honduras to farm, to squat, to work on the banana plantations. They worked hard, but when the Hondurans got wind of it they tried to restrict entry on the Salvadorean border; they persecuted squatters, then repatriated them. And, as in all such squabbles, there were atrocity stories: rapes, murders, torturings. But there were no large-scale hostilities until the crucial soccer matches were played in preparation for the 1970 World Cup. In June 1969, there was violence after the El Salvador-Honduras match in Tegucigalpa, and this was repeated a week later in San Salvador. Within days, the El Salvador army began its armed attack on Honduras - its cue had come from the soccer match: the fans' belligerence was to be taken seriously. Although the war lasted only a little more than four days, at the end of it 2,000 soldiers and civilians - mainly Hondurans - lay dead.
A year ago, an election was held in El Salvador. The election was rigged. There was violence, and there were mob scenes of the sort I had seen at the soccer game, but this time enacted on the streets of the capital. Students were shot and people imprisoned. And so El Salvador found itself with yet another military dictatorship. This was a particularly brutal one. Politics is a hideous subject, but I will say this: people tell you that dictatorships are sometimes necessary to good order, and that this sort of highly-centralized government is stable and dependable. But this is seldom so. It is nearly always bureaucratic and crooked, unstable, fickle, and barbarous; and it excites those same qualities in those it governs.