I could write clearly, I could write without so many nooks and crannies, without so many useless twists and turns. I could write telegraphically for the globe, symmetrically, in order to appease the languages that have submitted and kneeled to English. I’ll never write in English, with any luck I can say go home. I could write novels and great tomes full of rational stories and symbolic silences. I could write in the silence of Tao, with the sumptuousness of choosing the correct words and I could also keep the adjectives under my tongue. I could write with no tongue, like a host on CNN, bluntly and without accent. But my tongue is sharp and my vocal chords choose to sing, instead of educating. I could write in order to educate, to give knowledge, so that the babel that is my tongue might learn to sit, without uttering a word. I could write with my legs together, with cheeks firmly closed, with a Sufi push and an oriental economy of language. I could better language by sticking my corroded metaphors, my stinking desires and my confusing and gay head up my ass, without a sunshade or with my umbrella, in reverse, and I could do this in full daylight, so that globalisation could make me go worldwide, exportable, and translatable even in Aramaic, even if it sounds like a flowery fart. I could keep my ire and the plumed¹ rage of my images to myself, feed the violence back into itself and sleep well, content with my cheesy stories. But that’s not my name. I invented a name for myself, one that sticks, and sounds like a gay-tango, rock-bolero or a transvestite-showgirl. I could be the chronicler of the high life and regret the hard to swallow nature of my writing. I could leave the riff-raff for the riff-raff and instead become an archaeologist of the Spanish language. But I didn’t come here to do that. The world is already full of writers that wear suits and ties and come equipped with flowery fountain-pens in their miserly breast-pockets. I didn’t come here to sing, ladies and gentleman; but I sing anyway. I don’t know how I got here, but here I am. And my language emerged like a stiletto, without words, like an extension of my hand, a growl or a cry. They sound like the cries of a cowardly woman, said the writers from the right wing soap opera. I came to writing without wanting it, I was going elsewhere. I wanted to be a singer, a trapeze artist, or an Indian-bird trilling at the sunset. But my tongue curled-up out of impotence, and instead of clarity or refined emotion, I produced a jungle of noise. I did not sing in the sweet sounds of rhyme, nor did I sing to the ear of transcendence in order to be at the right-hand of the gods of this neoliberal paradise. My father would ask himself, why do they pay you to write, when no one had ever payed him for his efforts. I learnt it by force. I learnt to write as a grown-up. Like Paquita la del Barrio² says; writing was not easy for me. I wanted to sing, but was battered with grammar. Strike after strike, I learnt onomatopoeia, diaeresis, the art of composition, and the big breasted rules of orthography. But I forgot it all quickly, so many rules made me ill, like so many crosswords of written thought. I learnt out of hunger, out of necessity, out of the need to work, to become like a pimp. But I had started to become sad. I could have had nice handwriting and written like a well- educated person, with clear writing, clear like that of the water that runs in the rivers of the south. But the city was bad to me, the streets mistreated me, and sex spat on my sphincter. I say I could have, but I know that I couldn’t. I lacked rigor and was won over by drowsiness and the sordid appeal of the lies of love. And I believed like a fool, like a wilted dog I let myself be swindled by baroque allegories and word games that sounded so very beautiful. I could have been different, my teachers said, drooling all over their prophet-like hairs. Despite everything, I learnt, but sadness fell over me like a veil. I didn’t become a singer, I tell you, but music was the only spot of Technicolor in my unsettled biography. Here goes this pentagram, where the story danced to its own tragic rhythm. Whether you like it or not, here I press play and let loose this songbook of memories.

The first of November has just passed, the only day of the year in which families migrate en masse to holy grounds and the various cemeteries that the marketplace of death has on offer. If on that day you don’t go, if instead you stay in bed watching the very ordinary TV broadcast, if drowsiness wins and you don’t pay tribute to those who are absent, then you will feel a claw press against your chest, leaving you with a heavy heart. That happened to me this week, and it’s because my mami used to say that, around this time of year, the forgotten tombs would always look so sad, full of weeds coming up through their cracks. Tombs split and cracked open where spiders weave and undo their spindles of gauze. Dead tombs where the moss bleeds on the gravestones like so much rust on metal. Tombs where no flowers brighten up the mortuary carnival that is this public holiday. This is the reason I left off early this morning, to the Metropolitan Cemetery, which borders the Panamericana Sur. The truth is that, although it is far, and I have to do a thousand pirouettes, getting on and getting off of the Transantiago¹, it is the best possible resting place for my mother’s remains, because she is surrounded by so much floral merriment. It is the best, most humble earth where the decorative variety, a party of colours, flanks the tombs, in-line, in a last goodbye. My mami always asked to be there. I want to be with the poor, together with those of my class, she would say. She always found the scenery of this cemetery to be so cheerful and generous. The prole² spend fortunes on bouquets of calla lilies, chrysanthemums, gypsy deep rose, and on so many other types of fresh petals offered by the ladies that sell flowers on the side of the street.

Bouquets for 1000, boss.
But these flowers look more wilted than I do.
It’s the heat, boss.
It looks like you make these bunches out of leftovers.
Well, if you want them, then you can take them.

And they keep singing out the tired melody of their flowery offerings: sempervivums, snapdragons, madonna lilies, lilies, dianthus. The ladies run around all day with the flowers in their hands, in their hair, paper-flowers on the tribute cards, saying ‘Mum, I remember you’. Plastic flowers on the flag that prays: ‘grandpa, why did you leave?’ The ladies run back and forward like paper windmills made out of sunflowers that spin in the mouldy tombs of a departed childhood. More: the plaster figure of a dog and sun-bleached teddy bears hanging from the cross of a little angel³ that has died. Mum wanted to be in the Metropolitan cemetery, where her mother was, amongst many good neighbours, like Mario Palestro⁴, miss María⁵ and the market next door selling hot dogs at 500 pesos and mote con huesillos⁶, 2 glasses for 1000 pesos. It was a good choice to leave her in the pop-commotion of that urban mourning. Upon her tomb I had this phrase engraved: ‘here I will remain, forever tied to your remains, mama‘; but the engraver did not want to write my name on the tombstone, because it’s against the law to include the names of the living. But he wrote it anyway. I thought to myself: Whoever knows me and reads this phrase as they pass by will leave a flower on this maternal abode. And there you stayed, Violeta Lemebel, after so much loving, smiling and dancing to the tango of this wretched life.

The day of the dead in the Metropolitan cemetery is a carnival where the poor adorn their sorrows until their sorrows become baroque objects. They seem to console themselves by accumulating Christmas knick-knacks around an altar for the deceased. Butterflies from Hong Kong and doves from Taiwan shine on the tombs. And even the tears shine like Christmas lights on the cheeks of the mourners. My mami, Violeta, wanted to be here, near a group of gypsies. She loved gypsies, they suffer so much, but they dance and sing their weary expatriation. And it was almost a miracle that the tombs of the Nicolich⁷ surrounded her sepulchre. They come in their vehicles, with their sunshades and umbrellas, rolling out the rugs where the gypsy ladies sit, with their golden and turquoise veils. And there, they spend all day, drinking mate, yelling in Romaní at their zíngaro children playing between the tombs. Sometimes the gypsies sing. Sometimes a thick tear rolls down the creased cheek of a matriarch. Sometimes the gypsies, my mother’s neighbours, sing, and a young woman shakes her hips in the afternoon. Sometimes the gypsies sing and they cheer-up the twilight, as I leave the cemetery, after leaving a bouquet of violets at my mother’s resting place.

There were many blows, so much love destroyed and blasted into the open by the violence of the raids. There were so many times that they asked us about them, over and over again, as if they were returning the question, giving it back to us, pretending they were innocent, as if they were joking, as if they didn’t already know the exact place where they had made them disappear, where they swore on the dirty honour of the fatherland that they’d never reveal the secret. They would never reveal in which part of the pampa, in which fold in the mountain range, in which green and wavy section of the sea they had lost their bleached bones.

That’s why, in the long run, after so much running around and rattling our sorrows through military tribunals, ministries of justice, offices and courtroom-windows, they would say: it’s those old hags again with their stories of the disappeared, where they would make us wait for hours while they would process the some old response: lady, forget it, lady, bore yourself, lady, there’s no news. They must have left the country; they must have run away with the terrorists. Ask in the investigations department, in the consulates, in the embassies, because it is pointless to ask here.

Next person, come through.

That’s why, in order to avoid that muddy wave of depression that would tempt us into desertion, we had to learn how to survive by carrying our Juanes, Marías, Anselmos and Carmens, Luchos and Rosas by the hand. We had to take our disappeared ones by the hand and become responsible for their fragile load, walking through the present with the heavy load of that search. We couldn’t leave them barefoot, unprotected against the cold, in the open, trembling. We couldn’t abandon them, dead in that no man’s land, in that barren land, fragmented beneath the earth of some non-place. We couldn’t leave them there, detained, tied-up, under a steel sheet, beneath a metallic sky, in that silence, at that time, in that infinite minute of burning bullets, with their beautiful mouths open as if they were uttering a deaf question, a question aimed at the executioner who was aiming back at them. We couldn’t leave those beloved eyes all alone, like orphans. Perhaps they were terrified in the darkness of their blindfolds. Perhaps they were trembling, like excited children entering a cinema for the first time, stumbling in the dark and after a minute finding a hand in the dark to guide them. We couldn’t leave them there, so dead, so erased, burnt like a photo that evaporates in the sun. Like a portrait that becomes eternal, bathed in the rain of its final goodbye.

We had to reassemble their countenance every night, every night their jokes, gestures, tics, loathings and laughter. We forced ourselves to dream them, to remember time and time again their way of walking, their special way of knocking at the door or of sitting down after coming home from the street, work, the university or high school. We forced ourselves to dream them, as if we were drawing the faces of our lovers against an invisible backdrop. As if we were returning to our childhood and putting together an endless puzzle of a face destroyed, at the very moment of placing the last piece, by the force of a gun-shot.

Even so, despite the cold that enters uninvited through the cracks of the doorway, we like to sleep in the velvet warmth of their memory. We like to know that every night we will exhume them from that aimless swamp, without address, without number, without direction, nor name. It couldn’t be any other way. We couldn’t live without touching, in each and every dream, the frosty silk of their brows. If we let the perfume of their breath evaporate, then we couldn’t stand straight.

That’s why we learnt to survive by dancing Chile’s sad cueca¹ with our dead ones. We take them everywhere like the warm sun of the shadows in our hearts. They live with us, silver-plating our rebellious grey-hairs. They are the guests of honour at our table and laugh with us and dance with us and sing and dance and watch TV. They also point at the guilty when they appear on the screen, talking about amnesty and reconciliation.

Each and every day our dead are more alive, younger, fresher, as if they were rejuvenated forever in a subterranean echo that sings them, in a love song that rebirths them, in the tremors of an embrace and in the sweat of one’s hands where the stubborn humidity of their memory never dries.