DEATH OF PRESIDENT ALLENDE

 

 

It Was Told in La palomita blanca, a film   1

Around Noon, September 11    2

Death of President Allende      3

Still Picture     4

Allende Looks At Those Walking By    4

Brief Account    5

Many Years Later in Ottawa    6

 

 

It Was Told in La palomita blanca, a film

 

A shiny table with lights on both sides,

While the camera was filming from above;

There we were not following any script.

Only in passing, we were told

We should talk about what was going to happen.

Suddenly everything   had come to a complete standstill,

There was a deep silence all around

And all characters on the scene froze.

 

Then, somebody had to say something,

Putting a red matchbox at the centre,

A symbol of La Moneda Palace,

We went over the events that would happen

One by one, the siege by the military,

The tanks and machine guns on the streets.

Many had considered such premonitions.

 

The three o’clock sweltering heat of that afternoon

Became unbearable;

Somebody had to get up from the table,

Using any excuse whatsoever,

Somebody had to mumble any response,

Following the line of the conversations of course,

Repeated by every family and office worker.

For months the talk of the town rambled on

The events we all knew were coming to us.

 

The sky had taken a bright red hue but thick like blood.

 

 

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Around Noon, September 11

 

That overcast day in September, 

It was supposed to be just another ordinary day for me,

I found myself near Plaza Italia

And groups of people were rushing in all directions

Running from buses, struggling to move faster,

People crossed the street hurriedly

And dark vehicles were approaching in perfect order, 

Forming a slight curve as they advanced,

At a uniform velocity

When I perceived how Euclidian space is but a fiction

And in my head piled up

In huge monstrous piles

Cantor’s infinite series forming successive mountain ranges

The peaks of which were unattainable.

The climbers attempted to reach the highest peak but an endless series   

Of new hills and new peaks appeared while the ultimate peak

Remained unconquered in the distance.

 

We saw then, knifing the sky over the city,

The first of the Hawker Hunters

Which rumbled over Santiago at a very low altitude. 

We saw its polished surface,

Its belly full with a heavy load,  

(It was happening exactly as we had been predicting for so many days,

For so many weeks maybe, just as we had announced,

Just as we had repeated tirelessly time and again).

The ground itself seemed to tremble,

In the distance, we heard the thunder of some explosions.

It seemed as if the air repeated many times

In all directions of space

The wave carrying the echo of a sharp piercing sound.

There was a ring of fire in the sky, around the city.

Smoke columns rose over the government Palace.

 

Meanwhile, in Washington, thousands of kilometers north,

A dozen men in shirtsleeves

Gathered around the round figure of Henry Kissinger

Who read out loud with an unmistakable accent,

The coded message that had just arrived:

“The eagle flew with its prey firmly in its claws”.

 

 

 

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Death of President Allende 

 

Allende saw the flames rising.

Tear gas formed a thick fog in the hallways

And the water ran down the stairs;

The blaze raged through the Carrera Room.

The glass display case

With the founding documents of the Republic

Fell suddenly to the floor, shattered.

Sitting in an armchair,

The President crouched down to address the country by radio.

Neither his voice nor his hand trembled

As he improvised his last words to the country.

For an instant, everything seemed silent,

Only the burning wood crackled quietly.

 

Afterward, did he feel the floor falling under his feet?

Did he feel a wave dragging him to the depths of the Earth?

An abyss had opened before him

(But no one had predicted this),

The grand piano of the night rang in his ear, strident,

And he felt the vertigo of falling –

Spinning – spinning,

Crushed by the enormous forces

That weighed on his arms and on his chest.

Then, in the midst of the chaos,

Moving through a dense cloud of smoke,

Doctor Guijón turned back his steps

And entering the Independence Salon,

Like a howl from another dimension,

Two distinct shots were heard.

The whole structure of the building creaked

Like a ship lashed by a hurricane.

Very far away, agitated voices echoed in the corridors.

Allende was lying on the red sofa,

With no eyes, and broken skull,

His body now a grotesque figure as though painted by Francis Bacon.

The cold, objective eye of the military photographs shows  

The brain scattered on the ceiling,

The blood and brain matter all over the walls and ceiling.

 

 

 

 

 

Still Picture

 

That day was imprinted on me like a red-hot iron

Burning through the skin of an animal.

I felt that everything was spinning

As if I was on a carousel turning

With the force of dozens of runaway horses.

All the space in the universe spins,

It moves away at an increasing speed,

Thousands of times faster than the Southern express train,

Driven by an incalculable force

But it turns making a great spiral.

The totality of space and the galaxies

Also, form spirals in all directions;

They move away leaving on their instruments

A red signature.

 

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Allende Looks at Those Walking By

 

Poor Chicho, they made him into a statue,

They made him stone clothes

They dressed him like a prophet

Walking on a Mesopotamian or biblical desert,

Walking by himself, lost in another time,

As if he were heading toward his own cross

Where soldiers of the Imperial Army were awaiting him,

Resplendent in their breastplates.

 

Like other images cast in metal or hammered in stone:

Forms where the pulsating life of a person could not be contained

Nor could they capture the voice

Or the uncertainty when taking a set course.

An attempt to remember someone.

In this case: A sentence with broken syntax.

 

 

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Brief Account

 

I, who could be seen day after day

Endlessly walking the streets of that grey city,

Exploring the dark side of things,

But because I had tasted the prolonged tedium of parks

And the bitterness of the empty streets at noon

And the sinking feeling in front of all those shut doors,

I knew the secret thoughts of the city dwellers,

Even of those who remained silent and motionless

When night fell.

It was certain to me that those who waited vigilantly, 

With eyes wide open, would go insane

If they really heard the opaque hissing noise

Of electricity slipping through the city cables,

But they waited alert and only heard the night.

 

Before me, the edges of my own destiny´s shape became sharply defined.

Everything was already a memory,

Memory buried like a knife in the middle of my brain,

Even when nothing had yet happened.

On the station platform, I said farewell forever

To that young woman with large black eyes

And saw her tears running slowly down her cheeks

But without exaggerating the situation, no big operatic melodrama,

She just had no intention of hiding anymore,

Neither her sorrow nor her surprise.

 

I saw the city illuminated by skies

Where dark omens had appeared --

Skies that receded towards the altitude of the light--

When nobody protested the neglect of hospitals,

When nobody was by my side to witness

That the theatres repeated the same movies over and over again,

But nobody was there anymore to watch them;

Heard the sound of a car’s horn trying the limits of patience,

The asphalt softened by the heat of summer.

In the eyes of the people I encountered,

You could see how broken they were inside,

Hopelessness and fear.

 

Now, let me just tell you about a young girl

Who wandered tired and thirsty,

Dragging a rag doll behind her,

And disappeared from my sight, her lips blackened,

Astonishment filling her eyes.

I want to finally mention the madness which overcame us all

And made us torch whatever buildings stood in front of us

(I don’t want to go into details)

And to hastily raise gallows for the execution of rebels,

Dissenting students, and workers;

A collective frenzy that made us plunder the homes

Of citizens accused of suspicious activities

And then the fatigue (to finish with all this)

And the voyages and other distant skies.

 

 

 

 

Many Years Later in Ottawa

 

Many years later I’m in Ottawa, looking again, around my room.

The city has fallen asleep and the telephone is off the hook.

The flashlight illuminates precise segments of the bedroom,

Stuck on the ceiling I see countless small pieces of brain,

On the walls blood propelled by spurts stains the surface red.

On the walls, the blood splatters stain the surface red.

It is known that in each brain cell great volumes of memory are stored.

Each piece of the brain contains millions of cells.

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Erik Martinez Richards

London, Ontario

CANADA

2020-09-04

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