Two poems ready. And I fear. I have ideas written down. And I fear. I have opened closed doors many years ago. And I fear. I write down the words that come to mind, sketches of literary figures, of ideas that I want to give rhythm to, that I can turn into what are known as verses. And I fear. Resentment, anger, sadness. A delicate uncertainty settles in my chest as I cut pieces of chicken and think about the earrings. And I fear.
So, I look for the noise.
***
I listen to a podcast. It is a report about twin sisters, daughters of a mother who is serving a sentence for being part of a political dissident group in Paraguay. They lived in Argentina, with an aunt and cousins. They both travel to Paraguay to meet other relatives one summer. Their relatives and the circle of friends and acquaintances close to those relatives are also dissidents, part of a group that is still carrying the actions of a resistance guerrilla. They survive on the margins, in wooded spaces, in the mountains. The pandemic arrives and they cannot return to Argentina. The months pass and they live in the routine of hiding and resistance tactics. The group is persecuted, they are divided, they confront them. They see their eleven-year-old cousin fall, an aunt, others. One of them is injured. They learn of the deaths of those they have caught alive and unarmed, including their eleven-year-old cousin. They have to separate. One of them, with another companion, manages to find help. He goes to look for his sister, he doesn’t find her, nor the aunt who accompanied him. He returns to Argentina without his sister, with an arrested and convicted aunt. The State insists on its narrative of the subversion, that they were armed, that they were being trained to fight. The story is full of contradictions and devoid of evidence.
Cry.
She is without her sister, without her twin. Life goes on.
The noise.
***
I was fourteen years old. She was killed in a bathroom by three other teenagers. There are no clear explanations of how he arrived at a center of the National Council for Children and Adolescents (Conani). Her family tells about a headache and a cousin who took her to a hospital, from where she was transferred. They claim that they were not informed about this transfer. Did they neglect her? Were they unaware of any situation? How is it possible that she was murdered in a place with custody, where she would presumably be protected from whatever was threatening her life on the streets of her neighborhood, behind the door of her house?
His body was in the morgue for eleven days. It was delivered in black bags. On television, in videos on social networks, they show their relatives crying, screaming, fainting. The three teenagers are in custody. Why did they do what they did? What did they see in her that they wished would disappear?
What is behind the noise of the statements of his relatives, of the lawyer who explains to reporters the measures against the teenagers accused of homicide, of Conani’s silence, of the white coffin embraced by his grandmother?
***
Trenches.
Three lawyers exchange comments, points, arguments. Twitter (I refuse to say X) is a forum where you read intense exchanges, you rarely read the lines between the lines.
The lawyer who exposes the responses of others, in what is called retweeting, probably calling a hearing in favor of what he says, writes: “From trench to trench.”
According to the dictionary, a trench is a “defensive trench that is dug close to enemy lines and allows firing while remaining under cover.” Despite the modernity of the means of warfare, seen by those of us who are soldiers in their original capacity in that Gulf War in 1991, which inaugurated the transmission of remote launches of rockets and bombs during nighttime news, trenches are still built, less than in the armed conflicts of the 19th century and the two great wars of the 20th century. You can see them on YouTube, used by Russians and Ukrainians.
So the metaphorical figure of the trenches in a discussion on Twitter has as many between the lines as the noise of the bombs that still fall in our 21st century wars.
***
Every day I get up careful not to make too much noise. I want to walk barefoot around the apartment, in silence. Arriving in the kitchen, looking for the coffee maker, observing it placed on the stove, having as the first external sound the particular bubbling of the black liquid that rises under pressure through the mechanisms of that coffee maker.
The son sleeps. He goes to school in the afternoon. When he gets up, the small chaos of a new and clumsy adolescence begins, which requires a supervised freedom to which I still cannot adapt. But at coffee time, he is still sleeping and I can think about the two poems ready, my notes, the closed doors that I open, the fear, the pending…
And in the noise.
