53.

   Tears flowed down Claudia's face. She walked into a field and collapsed. I dropped down beside her. Startled insects took to the air and hovered around us. “When my people elected Salvador Allende, your president Nixon told the head of the CIA to make the Chilean economy ‘scream’. After the coup, Pinochet was appointed President by the junta. With the help of lists provided by the CIA, thousands were murdered and thousands more were soon screaming in the torture cells of Chile. Our national troubadour, Victor Jara, a beautiful man with a beautiful voice who sang our revolution with a beautiful heart was arrested and thrown into prison. His hands and fingers were crushed before he was shot forty-four times. I never knew my parents. My mother was eight months pregnant when she and my father were arrested. My father was a university professor with no ties to Allende. His crime was his education, and he was tortured to death for it. My mother was tortured and repeatedly raped by her captors. She went into premature labor. After I was born, they murdered her. I was left on the doorstep of my aunt who was a friend of the poet Pablo Neruda, our Nobel Prize Laureate and a great ally of Allende. She fled with me to Neruda’s home in Santiago hoping that his international status could protect us both, but he had been poisoned. He had died the day before and the police had ransacked the house. My aunt found the poet’s body in the house where his wife had placed it in tragic defiance, lying in state among the smashed furniture and burned books.”