[APPLAUSE]
Sometimes I'm asked questions about that poem
that I'm hoping that these few little excerpts of prose
in the photography book will help with.
There are four of them.
I'll just pause between them.
"The woman is thin like a tree in winter.
Her hands fly out from her like two birds as she speaks.
She is wearing her apron, but unties it
as she comes in and digs through one of her pockets
for the photograph she has folded several times so
that a crease now divides the face in two.
This is my son.
This is him as he looked before they took him away.
It was at night.
He had been cleaning the church after school."
How long ago did he disappear?
She looks helplessly at each of us.
Two, maybe almost three years.
My friend says what it is possible to say with the eyes.
Don't tell her what you think, tell
her you will look for him."
"When someone joins a death squad, he is in for life.
If you quit, you might talk, and no one
wants to be fingered later for these crimes.
The first time such a man goes out on an operation,
he is tested by the others.
They tell him he must rape the victim in front of them, then
cut off certain pieces of the body.
They want to see if he has the stomach for this.
After that, he is as guilty as the others and he is in.
His reward is usually money.
Why isn't it enough to kill a victim?
Why must each also suffer mutilation?
The death squad members must all be guilty of every murder.
So one rapes, another strikes blows,
another uses the machete, and so on,
until it would be impossible to determine which
action had caused the death.
And the squad members are protected from each other
by mutual guilt. Also, when mere death no longer
instills fear in the population, the stakes must be raised.
The people must be made to see that not only will they die
but die slowly and brutally."
"El Playon is a lava bed, a skirt
of black sponge-like stone in the lap of the volcano.
There is a graveyard beside it.
El Playon, the beach, is a rock strewn with refuge and sea
rack, a body, a tin spoon, bottle glass purple
from the sun, paint cans, a skull with hair,
a shoelace, trousers, more bodies,
flocks of vultures fattening themselves
on the ground, a stripped spine, a broken plate,
a palm open to the rain.
El Playon is a body dump."
Yo lo vie Goya wrote beside his sketches.
"I saw it, and this, and also this."