A life of radical deed entwines with two lives of observation and inquiry. Blood doesn’t wash out and old crimes endure to provoke consequences far down the road.

Juan Cano’s mother took him from El Salvador to Los Angeles as an infant. He became an outstanding student and athlete, bound for Stanford upon graduation from high school. But the spring of 1985 brings cataclysmic upheaval that sets Juan on a path back to his war-ravaged homeland.

Ten years of peril ebb into a lazy sojourn in Antigua Guatemala, where Juan meets filmmaker and UC Berkeley professor April Tashima. There, in the seemingly peaceful colonial-era capital, he is reunited with an old friend from the Salvadoran hills, archeologist Joe Guinness.

Juan ends his time in the shadow of three volcanoes with an act having to do with his years as a revolutionary, and with a wantonly smashed musical instrument. It is planned in a way that will allow April to film it.

The stories of individual women and men form the weft of history. In April and the Gardener, separate destinies are braided into cables from which hang bridges between worlds.