The Weight of All Things

The Weight of All Things

Having required reading to do over break, along with having to write a paper is not something I look forward doing. When I finally picked up The Weight of All Things and started reading I was amazed. This book was excellent, and I read it in two days! I was transported to another world, and I felt like I was right behind Nicolas the whole time. The story was vivid, and clearly showed me how devastating it was to live in El Salvador in the 1980s. The people were stuck in the middle of differing political ideologies. The right saw to eradicate the communists (revolutionaries) while the left saw to destroy capitalism at any cost while taking what they wanted from the people. There was no escaping this civil war. The majority of the El Salvadoran people were poor and oppressed, yes, but they were simple folk. They enjoyed the little things in life, and wanted a full life. A full life for me means being with family-unconditional love, a home, and the means, however small they may be, to get by. This was what the people had before the revolution. In the midst of death and destruction many of the people lost their homes and their loved ones. The Weight of All Things tells a story about a young boy, Nicolas, who lost his simple but full life to death and destruction.

The story began in San Salvador in 1980 at the Metropolitan Cathedral for the funeral of Archbishop Oscar Romero. Nicolas was with his mother and right away, bombs went off and gunfire filled the Cathedral. His mother held him close, and thrusted her body over his and breathed quiet prayers in effort to protect them. “Do not fear. La Virgen is with us. Monsenor is with us too” (page 3). Inevitably, a bullet fatally hit her and she was gone forever. Nicolas felt the weight of her push against him and he felt her go limp-the weight of all things. Nicolas was convinced that his mother was merely wounded and that he lost her when the Green Cross volunteers took her body away. It was only later in the book, while trapped in the army garrison, when Nicolas realized his mother was dead. “The weight of the truth: the weight of all things crushed, and he sat up and propped his back against the tree and gasped to catch his breath. His mother was dead” (page 171). The massacre at the Metropolitan Cathedral wasn’t Nicolas’ first encounter with violence. He lost his teacher and many of his friends in a firefight at his school. Nicolas was lucky because he wasn’t present that day at school.

After the massacre at the cathedral, Nicolas returned back to El Retorno, his home village, where he got his first glimpse of what war can do to a community. El Retorno was in shambles, the church, the bakery, the homes of his friends all crushed in recent bombings. Everyone abandoned the village except for Emilio Sanchez-the mechanic. Instead of running, Emilio kept his dignity and helped repair what was lost. Nicolas