by Ángel González. Translated by Steven Ford Brown.
A revolution.
Then a war.
In those two years---that were
a fifth of my whole life---,
I had mixed feelings.
I imagined later,
as a grown man, what conflict is like.
But as that child,
the war, for me, was simply:
dismissal of classes at school,
Isabelita in panties in the cellar,
automobile graveyards, abandoned
apartments, an indefinable hunger,
blood discovered
on the ground or cobblestones of the street,
a terror that lasted
just as long as the fragile sound of the windowpanes
after the explosion,
and the nearly incomprehensible
sorrow of the grown-ups,
their tears, their fear,
their repressed rage
that entered my soul
through some crack,
to disappear later, quickly,
in the face of one of the many
daily miracles: the discovery
of a still warm bullet,
the burning of a nearby building,
the remains of a looting
---papers and photographs
in the middle of the street...
Now it's all gone,
everything is blurred now, everything
except for what I scarcely noticed
at the time
and which, many years later,
surged up again inside me, to remain forever:
this pervading fear,
this sudden rage,
this unpredictable
and profound desire to weep.