Barren Walls
In the next few pages, you will find several poems by Consuelo, in both English and Spanish. You will also find responses to these poems from people who were close to her - her partner and other family, her friends. The first is "Barren Walls", a tribute written for her cousin Oscar, who was assassinated during the dictatorship.
En las próximas páginas encontrará varios poemas de Consuelo, tanto en inglés como en español. También encontrará respuestas a estos poemas de personas cercanas a ella: su pareja y otros familiares, sus amigos. El primero es "Paredes Yermas", un homenaje escrito a su primo Oscar, asesinado durante la dictadura.
Barren Walls
You used to run
With wings in your feet
And tear gas in your throat
You engraved your horror
On dry walls
You threw doves of peace at war airplanes
Your young body used to sweat working alongside
Our working class compañeros
Who smiled at you with invisible teeth
In those voluntary works
You used to scream your rage
With your left fist high
Your father used to dream that you would be free some day
Your father, sad and silent for so many years
You used to love Marcela
Walking together, here in the south
Your urban eyes filled
With sea and green
You inhaled this clean air
Different in the summer
But you touched here the same anguish
The same misery you saw in Santiago
The sudden horror clouded your reason
And along your back red stars ran
They cooled your warm body
You went with them to light up other worlds
You used to cry your sorrow
Because of this bleeding Chile
Now you smile gently in your bed of silence
Because you know, dear Oscar
That the day you dreamed will arrive
When the dry walls
Get wet with the tears of our people
And hard fists of flowers
Grow from them
Consuelo Rivera Fuentes
In memory of my cousin Oscar Fuentes Fernandez who was assassinated by the military dictatorship on 9th of April 1985 for being young and wanting to be free.
Response from Lynda:
Oscar - I never met you; but I know and love your family. Their anguish, their agony remains raw.
I have never known the terrible pain of bloodshed, of blood running like rivers down the streets of my country.
But, to use Consuelo's words in another poem: You have, so I have*.
I have never seen my friends, my compañeras, gunned down in the street. But you have, so I have.
I can never know the fear, the futility of confronting such evil. But you did, so I have.
Perhaps, dear Oscar, the day will dawn, the dry walls delight in people's tears. And one day flowers will grow from them. But the time is not yet.
Consuelo loved her cousin very much, and I have heard this awful story many times; it always moves me. How many other families have been devastated to hear such news, in Chile or anywhere else in this unhappy world?
And I have long heard her recount her own stories of prisons and torture. It was hard to hear. I had never experienced anything like that in middle-class England. But I can empathise, I can be affected in my body: she had, so I had.
Nearly 40 years after his murder, memorials have been erected to Oscar; one on the street where he died (photo above left), the other on the campus of the Universidad de Santiago, where he was studying (above right, with his parents, Hugo and Silvia). He was shot in the back, while (unarmed) on a student demonstration against the dictatorship.
[Responses by Lynda Birke]
* In "Thinking of You".
Link to Isabel Ros-Lopéz reading this poem of Consuelo's
See the page, "Thinking of You"
You can also see a short video of Oscar's father, Tio Hugo, speaking of Consuelo's politics here