For you, short, dark, under-fed, with sweaty hands, who know nothing of grammar, accents and declensions, your turn had come that year to be called up for military service, in the army at the lowest rank, just a private with no stripes.
Today I sing to you.
Because when I had no eyes you lent me yours and when I was cold you lent me your coat.
Because at that time when fear and isolation were at their most overwhelming, you rolled me a cigarette.
You brought me a painkiller, ointment, delivered an urgent note to my family.
How we cared for each other in those dumb hours, your shivering was my shivering and one and the same demon dominated our lives.
I know about your powerlessness in the vicious night and your despair under the shrunken sun.
I did not see you and I saw you.
I never knew your name or where you came from, the roll-up, the painkiller, the blind eye turned, the anonymous biscuit, the delivered note.
You did not tell me your name or where your home was but I know what you are called. Human.
Prayer in the National Stadium I pray to you, St Quixote, visit me today and in this dreadful night of fear comfort my delirium, give me strength to stand this long night and those to come even longer and darker in their cruel hands.
St Sancho, as this twilight turns to grey, come and give us bread, the true sure tenderness that is in my blood, the one thing necessary for ever and ever Amen.
And I Cried And they were torturing children, mother, they were stretching their bones, mother, and giving them electric shocks, mother.
Hour upon hour, mother, interminable ages, then ages again, mother, and their shrieks were all round me, mother, and to blackest black the demented world, mother, whirled giddy with grief.
And I cried as I have never cried before, mother, I cried in a frenzy, mother, desperate to my last fibre, mother, and the children screamed in more and more anguish, mother, and I cried, mother, as I will never cry again as long as I live.
The other 9/11 María Eugenia Bravo Calderara was a young university teacher at the time of the coup that overthrew President Allende of Chile on September 11th 1973.
She was rounded up and confined with thousands of others in the Santiago National Stadium, imprisoned and tortured, finally escaping to England, where she has lived ever since. In the National Stadium, she found herself praying, not to God, but to Don Quixote the ‘knight of the doleful countenance’ and to his earthy squire and ‘side-kick’ Sancho Panza, because, she says, they represented ‘humanity’ in a terrifying world that seemed to have completely lost it.
The above poems, translated by Dinah Livingstone, are taken from María Eugenia Bravo Calderara’s bilingual collection, Prayer in the National Stadium (Katabasis, London 1992). She lives in London and her poems have appeared in many anthologies, including Captured Voices, an anthology for the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, edited by Janna Letts and Fiona Whytehead (Victor Gollancz, London 1999).