In closing this section, I read a little elegy
for a friend of mine.
Do you remember when the two American labor advisors
were shot in the Sheridan Hotel while they were
having dinner, January 4, 1981?
There was another man with them who was also killed.
His name was Jose Rodolfo Viera.
He was a Salvadoran, and his name
didn't appear in the papers here.
They would just say, Michael Hemmer, Mark Perlman,
and a Salvadoran man.
So I felt sort of badly.
Jose Rodolfo Viera was the leader
of a rural labor organization.
He couldn't read or write.
And he found himself in the position of being a leader,
and at a time in Salvador when these things were happening.
And he said to me, I have never even
been able to kill a chicken.
How am I going to protect myself here?
Well, he was killed, and I wrote this for the funeral.
There is language in here which is
figurative, but also the final metaphor
or whatever is a literal rendition of something there.
Because One is Always Forgotten.
When Viera was buried, we knew it
had come to an end, his coffin rocking
into the ground like a boat or a cradle.
I could take my heart, he said, and give it to a campesino,
and he would cut it up and give it back.
You can't eat heart.
In those four dark chambers, where a man can be kept years.
A boy soldier in the bone hot son
works his knife to peel the face from a dead man
and hang it from the branch of a tree flowering with such faces.
The heart is the toughest part of the body.
Tenderness is in the hands.