Brothers

Those who shot your brother now have government pensions.That day in the cornfield you are alwaysrunning away, your sister gone mad.The Congressman who rushed to vote on that dayon Capitol Hill on the militaryappropriation bill does not rememberbut the dank earth received his bones.

The dead are luminous in memory.The killers know thisand could care less.

The past crouches within you. The past is taking aim.

The poet Jaime Suárez Quemain was disappeared.

Say the poet’s name slowly, first in Spanish and then in Vietnamese, Arabic, Pashtun, or Urdu. Make from his name a chant, a prayer.

The gray coffins lay in the courtyard of the church beneath statues of Cristobal Colon and Bartolome de Las Casas.

The army had surrounded the church and would not let the dead be buried in the Metropolitan cemetery, and so it was decided to bury them there inside the church. Picks and shovels were found and we hacked at the earth, the dampness rising, until a man could stand in the hole and each coffin was lowered in. We barely spoke and afterward ate stale tortillas. Who cried, who prayed, who stared in disbelief?

Jose is hardly taller than a boy, but his conviction and dignity command attention. It is he who lets us beyond the door of the church. There are no arms here. Small groups of people sit on the benches conversing, boys and girls of fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen; some have faces covered with red bandanas to conceal their identity, most do not.

Yo ya estoy quemado no me importa—I am already buried, it’s not important.

The fact is they call us extremists, but we are realists. It is we who are living the reality

Carlos is one of those who dug the graves with us. His features are small and he has the skin of a campesino; bleached crow’s feet show at the corner of his mouth and eyes.

We are fourteen in my family, three sisters and eleven brothers. By the age of seven I was out in the fields working a full day. I would have liked to have gone to school, but we had only one pair of pants each that was our clothing, and the school was four leagues away and I had to do my part to feed the family. It was that way for about ten years, up at three in the morning, walk four hours to work, pick coffee all day, and then carry it to the hacienda. The terrain is so steep that not even a horse can get in there. Then we had to wait until the baskets were weighed, which sometimes took hours, and then it would be eight or nine o’clock before we were home again. The owner had a great barrel in which they brought us our food: a few tortillas with raw salt, but the salt stuck in your mouth and burned, so I never used it much. When I was seventeen they saw that I was a strong worker, so they offered me the job of overseer. Well, I took it and my salary nearly doubled. I wasn’t one who could just sit by and watch somebody work, so when we picked I picked with them, and when we were cutting I cut with them, but if you cut a wrong branch you lost almost a whole day’s wages. I didn’t have to work with them but I did. After about six months I realized what was happening, and I couldn’t do it anymore. I was being paid more but was expected to do less. It didn’t seem right. So I left home and came to the capital. I did small jobs with friends, and we got a small business going, and I was sending money home and going to high school at night. It was better than being in the country because there we worked only about six months out of the year, and we had to survive on that. If we ran out we would have to...