Dedicated to my country and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Nobody expected our country to return to the way it was before.
But nobody thought the transformation would be so lethargic, so monotonous, so drawn out.
We were all confused.
Let’s take the mothers as our first example. During the gray time, many were kidnapped and tossed into the back of a van, where they gave birth to quintuplets. After the gray time, instead of throwing out the trash, they breastfed stale bread and threw away white plastic bags with their live babies, their babbling cries echoing through the streets.
Telephone lines spied upon each other at 2 am, searching for silent conspiracies and hidden paranoias.
The interrogation rooms reverberated with violence, yet empty.
In the family homes, wooden doors would splinter and shatter, by force of habit.
Terrified families would reunite in the living room, raising their hands in the air as the invisible rifles threatened them, accusing them of uncertain and unlikely crimes.
Artists infused fear into their colors. They used sweaty pigments from their foreheads as ink, and their fingers moved with the pulsating anxiety that the color of their blood, would splatter the last stroke onto the canvas. Music writers codify and decode their songs, with the motivation of someone afraid to drown in the landfill.
Beneath their muffled songs, a ripple can be heard, a murmur that will grow like a green stem against marble, a glistening of golden sunlight and hope that will hurt the eyes.
This pain will be necessary, as it is the only way to wake up from a world where the sun is confused
and the sky doesn’t know that it’s supposed to be blue.
You can’t enjoy Spring if you are not aware that it is Spring. Peace can’t be true if you can’t feel it within yourself.
The children alone knew this. Everybody else was blind to it, including the municipal trashcans, colored green and white.
In one of those communal trash cans, I found my body.
Face up, hands and feet trying to touch the sky, like a dog having a good dream, and mistaking the sky with trash bags, filled with dreams and innocence.
In this confused manner, the populace inhabits a winter that moves but doesn’t change.
In this winter, government officials distribute bread for the people, and the masses look at the bread with a puzzled look, they drop it, dump themselves on the ground, and proceed to groan and shiver with hunger.
In this world, schools don’t know they can change their oppressive, outdated curriculum, and the youth does not know that they have to remove their shoes before showering.
Those with good and bad intentions mixed, and they weren’t strangers to each other. Politicians and taxi drivers, rich and poor, we became all the same, and in this manner, it became easier to fool ourselves.
My last glimpse of clarity disappears, and from above, I try to pick up the trash bags so I can see my disheveled body but the bags are too heavy, and I am too ethereal.
The rats and skunks help me, then the children, and afterward, the Grandmas of Plaza de Mayo.
They bring my body in front of the obelisk, and they immolate my memories, while my ashes fly towards the lungs of Videla.
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