The Disappeared

Three Poems by Mark Trechock

by

Mark Trechock

photo by Rodrigo Paredes

Dancing on a Rooftop in Buenos Aires

The other guests came in ones and pairs

from desperate jobs vending gewgaws

or taking orders at pizza restaurants,

shook hands formally with the host,

who spent a good hour testing the heat

and strength of the yerba mate before

its passing, solemn as a bishop’s high mass,

between sips the communicants asking

blessings and health for kindred and compadres,

curses for Menem, for Bush, for the dirty

war, the inflation, the intermittent

electricity and water, for the “misery villages,”

for the robbery of Ernesto’s few worthless bills

and his clothes and shoes and his long walk

naked home, and the lack of working telephones.

Midnight, the evening just starting, we climbed

the stairs to the rooftop where cuts of beef

were roasting over a spit, the red wine

uncorked, the broom dance just beginning,

one misstep close to the edge and twelve

floors straight down to the concrete already

breaking up from half-repaired

sewers and other public works.

At the two a.m. supper, one compadre,

a Methodist student of divinity,

sat on the roof with a gaucho knife,

fit to skewer a chunk of beef,

slice a pear, or split a slab of bread.

It took me back to church suppers

at home—the rows of gelatin salads

with cottage cheese, hamburger hot

dish with canned tomatoes, flanked

by sweet bars in aluminum pans

with cooks’ surnames in green magic

marker on masking tape, but nothing

requiring knives, which were never set out,

and certainly no talk of politics, as if

we didn’t know who canceled our votes.

The Disappeared

Appearing only slightly dispirited

that the secret police in their green Falcons

never took him to join the disappearance

of everybody worth killing for the sake of order

six or eight years ago

at some torture house in the Pampas,

or out the cargo door of a chopper,

the theologian sat with me drinking tea

at a time of day marking no specific task or urgency,

as safe and blameless for now as Methodist women

making quilts and gossiping in a church kitchen.

I listened to him wonder if another Fascism

would replace the new yet suddenly abandoned form,

and if the currency would find its level

or keep swirling like the thousand peso notes

blowing untouched down the aisles of Buenos Aires buses,

and when if ever the mothers of the disappeared

would cease parading swaddled photos

of the children and lovers they would never see again

before the successors of their executioners,

sequestered in their Pink House.

I couldn’t say, but thought of how,

at a vineyard in Mendoza the week before,

I toured the vats, guided by a woman

wearing lipstick as red as Reagan’s second election

and the swagger of a suburban realtor.

I sampled a malbec, aged for years

in cellars as dark as the torture houses.

At the last stop, a case of the red

slid down the conveyor and fell to the concrete.

Wine pooled like blood on the floor

as the shipping department stifled

the kind of nervous laughter I used to hear

from children watching horror movies.

It will leave a stain.

Spring 1990, Santiago de Chile

The pavement pitches right to left

to right like a carnival slide,

down from the ice of Aconcagua,

the bus picking up speed

around the twenty-ninth curve,

hurtling past the hillside apple orchards

hung with blossoms,

toward the shimmering smog

arising in greeting

from the city of the disappeared.

At the depot

the brittle staccato of Spanish

clatters to diesel accompaniment.

A street full of young philosophers

stroll through the November spring,

arguing over what might happen next,

cranking to a crescendo at the last word,

unhurried and genial in their force,

only to be countered by another’s burst,

probing the edges of free speech.

“Bush returns to the scene of the crime,”

warns the newspaper kiosk,

as the traffic cops still in camouflage,

machine guns slung over their shoulders,

occupy the next intersection

to protect the man who did away with Allende

and now wants endorsement

for doing away with Sadaam.

I slant my path the other way—

toward the side streets, past

the sidewalk fruit vendors

and the improbable Chinese restaurants

redolent of sweet and sour pork,

seeking anonymous shelter

where Bush would not have made

a reservation.

 

author bio

Mark Trechock lives in North Dakota and has spent two sabbaticals in Argentina and Peru and made several shorter journeys in Colombia, Chile, Guatemala and Mexico. After a 20-year hiatus from marketing poetry, he recently began resubmitting for publication: poems related to Latin America have appeared in Radius, Life and Legends, Shark Reef, Verse-Virtual, Raven Chronicles, and Badlands Literary Journal