Some of the passages are written in pencil.
They're from that time.
I wrote them then and I was going to translate them
into the narrative voice and then
I decided that I didn't want to do that.
And I decided to bring them intact into the book
because they were in this fast language
without punctuation that was a language of some urgency.
I felt that it resembled the language
of what I felt at the time.
So I'll read one of those.
"This is the village abandon, a pitted road
stretches between burned shacks.
In the mud there is a Saint's picture
decorated with foil stars.
There is no smoke rising from the cook fires
where women would have turned the family's daily tortillas
nor any from the fires that chewed through this village
during a search and destroy operation.
The people returned here briefly and held orange rinds wrapped
in cloth over their mouths.
As they gathered the dead, listing the names
and where this was possible, sex and approximate age,
they poured lime over the assembled
remains until the bodies seemed covered with hoarfrost.
A woman who had hid in the branches of a tree
worked her skirt into knots as she told
the story of what happened.
But she had so rubbed her eyes from grief
that all she had seen could be seen in them.
A different village a man told the story
of having pretended to be dead.
In place of the cries of children for their parents
a light rain sticks against the corrugated roofs
that have slipped into the wet palms of the ravine.
In Salvador death still patrols,
wrote Pablo Neruda
in a poem.
The blood of dead peasants has not dried.
Time will not dry it, rain will not erase it from the roads."