I was lying in the dark when the telephone rang. “Yes,” Leonel said, “but Pablo Neruda also wrote The poet gives us a gallery full of ghosts shaken by the fire and darkness of his time. The blood of dead peasants has not dried, time does not dry it, rain does not erase it from the roads. In Salvador, death still patrols, wrote Pablo Neruda in a poem. This is the village abandoned a pitted road stretches between burned shacks in the mud there is a saint’s picture decorated with foil stars there is no smoke rising from cook fires where women would have turned the family’s daily tortillas nor any from the fires that chewed through this village during a “search-and-destroy” operation the people returned here briefly and held orange rinds wrapped in cloth over their mouths as they gathered the dead listing their names and where this was possible sex and approximate age they poured lime over the assembled remains until the bodies seemed covered with hoarfrost a woman who had hidden in the branches of a tree worked her skirt into knots as she told the story of what happened but she had so rubbed her eyes from grief that all she had seen could be seen in them in a different village a man told the story of having pretended to be dead in place of the cries of children for their parents a light rain ticks against the corrugated roofs that have slipped into the wet palms of the ravine.

Leonel had driven as slowly as he could through the smoke. On both sides of the road there was smoke it was blue and still rising when we passed although the fields were already black from being burned everything was burned they had shot the cattle yes even them and the pigs they had also shot so they were lying there already bloated and there was a smell of meat as well as death and a howling that couldn’t actually have been heard but it was there the wattle in the houses was burned and the corn in the cribs we didn’t stop we slowed down the turkey vultures were above us many also already on the ground they don’t sing they hiss some things we saw through the field glasses some with naked eyes we couldn’t tell how many people we didn’t know how long it had been that’s all I told them.

Carolyn forche what you have heard