BIO
M. Soledad Caballero is a CantoMundo fellow, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and a New Poet's Prize. She has also been a finalist for the Missouri Review's Jeffry E. Smith poetry prize and the Mississippi Review's annual editor's prize. Her work has appeared in the Missouri Review, the Mississippi Review, the Iron Horse Literary Review, Memorius, the Crab Orchard Review, Anomaly, and other venues. She is an Associate Professor of English at Allegheny College, and her scholarly work focuses on British Romanticism, travel writing, post-colonial literatures, WGSS, and interdisciplinarity.
“The CIA’s plan to disrupt Salvador Allende’s
candidacy in Chile was called Track I.
Track I expanded to encompass a wide range of
political, diplomatic, psychological, and economic policies, as well as covert
operations designed to bring about the conditions that would encourage Chileans
to stage a coup.” – from the CIA’s website CIA
Machinations in Chile in 1970
We
buried the silverware deep, on a Sunday
afternoon
behind the rose bushes, in sand
and
gravel imported in from Tata’s factory.
An
army of hands and legs, we hid in
the
kitchen, a look out at the door. The rest
of
us carried fistfuls of coffee spoons, salad forks,
butter
knives, across the terrace. We snaked
through
wicker furniture, bare feet on red clay,
ran
to the far corner of the yard, scooped out
mounds
of dirt, digging out wet heaps with
soup
ladles. Five, six, seven, eight holes carved
out
of the earth. We threw the silver stash inside.
Abuela’s
wedding dowry, patted down the sand,
laughed
about empty, drawers cleaned out of utensils,
lonely,
friendless spaces, left abandoned.
“A coup climate exists within Chile.”
Sons,
fathers, husbands, executioners. They threw
limp
bodies, drugged, broken, out of planes over
the
Atlantic Ocean. They buried bodies in the desert.
Starved,
beaten, cooked through, electrocuted.
They
wanted water and dirt to swallow dissidence,
hide
the screams, cover over the blood and spit,
the
cracked bones. Colonia Dignidad, Tres Álamos,
Villa
Grimaldi, Londres 38. From Arica to Chillán
they
fed death to water, earth, and sky. Fed bile and spit
and
sadness to dry, muted places. Decades later
the
water graves cannot be found. Birds peck,
scavenge,
fly over nameless mounds. Creatures of flight
and
song, birds know nothing of the death flights
or
the mounds. They witness only the rain, the buds
and
flowering plants that wake with water and light.
“It’s that son of a bitch Allende.
We’re going to smash
him.”
We
wanted to be pirates, a gang. The oldest,
I
was seven, maybe, leader to my younger cousins.
We
were bored. The sun was out. It was spring.
Our
parents were at the dining room table,
lingering
over wine, coffee, dessert. Somewhere
laundry
spinning. The afternoon breeze filtered
through
the windows. The birds in the birdcage
sang.
Their sounds trembling through bushes
as
we stumbled past them with our loot. Our lives
soft
like the bird feathers fluttering, dancing,
small
sails falling through the air. We marched
past
with kitchen treasures. Something to put
into
the ground, something hidden. A world made
of
games and sticky candy.
“The key is psychological war within Chile.”
The
truth discovered, our parents marched
to
the sand in silence. Forced us to bend
into
the dark dirt. Watched us scoop, shovel.
Piles
and piles of gravel and dirt, mounds
with
no evidence inside. We found very little,
a
fork, a butter knife. It had all gone missing
How
to discipline the wildness. To find the trail,
the
secret passage to the silver. They searched
for
weeks, looking through the dirt for signs.
Hoped
the earth would reveal the order we
ignored.
We buried silver, wanting joy in the dirt,
looking
for secrets and love in the wet clay.
“You have asked us to provoke chaos in Chile.”
We
knew nothing about what else the earth
will
carry. What else the earth will hide,
season
after season, year after year, decade
after
decade. We did not know the secrets
of
the ground, the thick tears absorbed in dank,
hidden
rooms. We made funeral pyres out
of
silver and soil, little knowing of the pyres
to
be unearthed. The dirt and sorrow left to be
discovered.
Decades later, we grow our own
gardens,
plant our own flowers beds, make
our
own families and stories. Some of us hide
from
the dead of those years, from their bones,
from
their longing, their graves, still abandoned