VICTOR JARRA SPEAKS:

VICTOR JARRA SPEAKS:     

I remember how doves circled the stadium walls

counterclockwise against the light.

Endless flight, white against clouds.

No, I was not aware. Yes. The sun at noon.

I remember the sound of dry husks breaking.

The body of a guitar, so like a woman we can never possess.

Walking the fields. The odor of bruised rosemary.

They have broken her. A fist slammed into a side of beef.

Splintered rain. And then, more rain. A pipe against flesh. Dull.

You ask how many angels on a pinhead? Las Trovistas.

Duerme, duerme negrito, Papa va en el campo....

No, I did not dream, ever. The doves, they... The midnight knock.

Me voy en el campo de los sueños. Me voy en el paiz del muerte.

A revolution. The simplest of weapons:

A voice, a guitar, a message makes a martyr.

My voice took flight, sought refuge in the past,

it flew into the future, it escaped these prison walls.

Ordinary things. I remember. Angelito, mi hijo.

The purity of doves settling on bright rivers of blood on stone.

Under torture, the rational mind confesses to circumstantial evidence.

When the Junta took my hands, they... Yes. The light. They flew, they...

Sometimes I could see my own face reflected in cesspools

in chrome, or in the dark secret layer beneath their polished boots.

So I could remember who I once was. Yes, September, 1973. Etched in stone.

Military time. Dancing the cueca. Pinochet and poor Allende.

Interrogation. The way they approached it like a call to prayer.

As if something holy and profound. And then, the cruel smile.

No. The answers weren’t enough. They are never enough.

That kind of silence before the thin scream that escapes the lips...

There are degrees of victimhood. It isn’t hard to humiliate or to be humiliated.

Benediction, yes. Tell me one thing that one man will not do to another.

Children of Pinochet, yes. Those who survived. No, they...

Evita on display like a beautiful wax doll.

But it was a deja vu of death mocking the living.

Repentence? No amount of revenge can satisfy our sad country.

In any regime, the poets are always the first to go.

The words of lambs before the slaughter.

No, I didn’t remember. Mis manos, mis pobres...

Hell is paved like the prison cell. Si. La música, el corazón.

There is so much I don’t remember. The deaad rise.

Can’t remember, my mind broken, like my hands, they...

But still I sang, I sang, my voice escaped El Estadio,

it fled to the sky when they took my hands,

but not my will. And still my voice could be heard

singing throughout the city long after I was gone.

Yes. Si, si. Even death could not take my voice.

Singing Santiago de Chile, mi tierra. Por la libertad.

Yes. I would raise the stumps of these arms to embrace them all.

For my songs are the children of memory.

4/2/03 rev. 5/12