WEBVTT

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Some of the passages
are written in pencil.

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They're from that time.

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I wrote them then and I
was going to translate them

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into the narrative
voice and then

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I decided that I
didn't want to do that.

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And I decided to bring
them intact into the book

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because they were in
this fast language

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without punctuation that was
a language of some urgency.

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I felt that it
resembled the language

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of what I felt at the time.

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So I'll read one of those.

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"This is the village
abandon, a pitted road

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stretches between burned shacks.

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In the mud there is
a Saint's picture

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decorated with foil stars.

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There is no smoke rising
from the cook fires

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where women would have turned
the family's daily tortillas

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nor any from the fires that
chewed through this village

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during a search and
destroy operation.

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The people returned here briefly
and held orange rinds wrapped

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in cloth over their mouths.

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As they gathered the
dead, listing the names

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and where this was possible,
sex and approximate age,

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they poured lime
over the assembled

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remains until the bodies
seemed covered with hoarfrost.

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A woman who had hid in
the branches of a tree

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worked her skirt into
knots as she told

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the story of what happened.

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But she had so rubbed
her eyes from grief

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that all she had seen
could be seen in them.

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A different village
a man told the story

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of having pretended to be dead.

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In place of the cries of
children for their parents

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a light rain sticks against
the corrugated roofs

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that have slipped into the
wet palms of the ravine.

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In Salvador death still patrols,

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wrote Pablo Neruda

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in a poem.

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The blood of dead
peasants has not dried.

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Time will not dry it, rain will
not erase it from the roads."

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