There was a crack in the past.
But it was forbidden.
We had laid a gravestone over it —I mean, we were forced to.
Because the past was the reason for the present…
For that present of torture and death.
We were forced to talk about stupid, trivial things.
We talked mostly about love poets.
Poets who sang of love while the world was burning.
In other words, we talked about love.
That’s how the adoration for that girl began.
She was a beautiful creature, one we believed had escaped from somewhere close to heaven.
Her eyes looked like two blue roses just beginning to bloom.
Her body burst with unknown illusions.
Gustavo was the first to approach her.
He said he was looking for a stepmother
For when his father —me—
Who was, of course, the youngest of the group,
Was no longer there to care for him.
We used to meet in the same place, and when the patrol came, we’d scatter.
Street gatherings were forbidden.
We weren’t just any country.
We were the kind that appeared in the press celebrating its leaders.
We went to bed with fear. We woke with fear.
But even pronouncing the word fear was a mortal offense.
Dimas had become obsessed with her and started speaking to us with hostility.
We fought. Like never before.
As if love had turned against us.
We started calling her Kitsune.
Kitsune looked at us without promising anything.
She smiled as if she knew something we hadn’t lived yet.
Sometimes she’d come and hand us anti-government pamphlets.
Little by little, she pulled us away from the filth.
Little by little, she taught us how to bleed memory out of forgetfulness.
Love had served us to disguise our fear.
Until she came to teach us another kind of love.
One that hurt more.
One that asked no permission.
And that blood had names… surnames…
They were our old friends, our brothers,
The ones we had buried out of fear.
Those who had found a more habitable, purer love:
Love of country.
We joined the resistance.
One by one, we were captured and tortured.
She was the first.
Out of all of us, only Arturo and I survived.
Arturo, because he talked and denounced the others.
Me, because my father had important connections.
Though calling him my father is more of a courtesy.
Out of fear —not love, not duty— he sent me to a convent-boarding school for orphan girls.
I was the only one who wasn’t a girl.
And the only one whose parents, though alive,
Were dead from fear.
That’s where I discovered love.
In its vain and primal form.
It wasn’t tenderness.
It was hunger.
It was contact.
It was the need to touch something that wasn’t punishment.
I heard from her again many years later.
The tortures she endured were horrific.
When I saw her again, she was missing things that once made up her laughter.
Her nipples had been torn off by a cannibal dwarf
Who guarded the detention centers
Like a hellhound within the walls.
Even so,
Out of all of us,
Only she hadn’t forgotten the word freedom.