Ghost
— after The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende
The ghost still lived in the back room when the squatters found the house.
Leaves from dead seasons drifted through open windows
from the rooftop. Rubble, piled head-high, filled the courtyard. At first,
the sounds of the living frightened her. The weeks-long clatter of stones heaved,
bucket by bucket to the curbside, left her confined to the upper halls.
The tree stretched to the roof where the squatters would watch the sunset drip
its tint along the ridgeline, her movement mistaken for a shadow, a bird
startled by ringing bells. In time, the courtyard was cleared.
It soon filled with sofas and potted plants, banners and music.
To celebrate the house’s rebirth, someone painted Botticelli’s Venus across
the northern wall. Others arrived and others left, speaking many languages.
These days of music reminded her of the times before the dictatorship,
before her daughter’s disappearance, so she began to make contact.
In the evening: a flit of blue light reflected in a mirror, books of Gabriela Mistral’s
poetry left open on the stairs, an unseen weight at the foot of a bed.
The squatters then knew they weren’t alone. Those were spectacular nights,
of films projected from the rooftop to the cathedral walls, of paella,
of revolutionary whisperings. And when the troubles geared through
the streets again, the squatters tolled their pots and pans and heard
the city’s echoed reply. And when the city stumbled, blinded
by blood and smoke, she watched her people scour the gas
from their eyes. And when they rose up again the earth
trembled with their footsteps. This is the cycle, she knew,
this is rubble, these are leaves, this is the window we all must drift through.
* * * * *
Cacerolazo, October 2019
— This is to say we remember. Not that remembering saves us. — Miller Williams, “For Victor Jara”
Three million pans death-rattle this iron-celled era.
What is a revolution?
We run through the barricades of La Alameda as trash fires glow through tear gas clouds on each corner.
The armed takeover of a palace? The trampled grass of a plaza?
The cacerolazo’s morse-rhythm pushes us to Casa Violeta in the minutes before martial law.
Military fatigues? A student hopping a turnstile?
Snipers set up in the Entel Tower. My roommate Iván’s Birth of Venus emerges from a seashell on the courtyard wall.
A killing field? A national strike?
Police helicopters whirlpool through the orange dusk.
What shall we do with the stillness, do with the hate and the pity?
We climb to the roof, turn the speakers streetward, play Victor Jara’s “El derecho de vivir en paz.”
What shall we do with the love? What shall we do with the grief?
We bang our pots as tanks fill the streets and round up protesters among the flowers and broken glass.
What is a revolution?
The symphony of kitchenware tolls tin between us.
A wall of faces in the Museum of Memory? Today, these millions marching?
/ / /
“Cacerolazo, October 2019” borrows lines from the Miller Williams poem “For Victor Jara.” A cacerolazo is a form of mass protest in which protesters bang on pots and pans to call attention to a cause. Protesters can perform this from their windows, thus reducing the chance of detention by State security forces. This also allows protests to continue after curfews have been declared, often well into the night. The Chilean estallido social, or “social explosion,” began in October, 2019 as a protest against a fare hike by Santiago’s metro system, but it quickly evolved into a popular uprising against neoliberalism and the constitution imposed during Chile’s dictatorship era, a document that still governs the country to this day.