[:en]Your Voice in My Memory[:es]Tu voz en mi memoria[:fr]Your Voice in My Memory[:]
Today, thirty years later, my memory has been dissipating that horror and now, in the midst of the confusion of having aged, I only seem to hear your voice, serene and vital, summoning me to an impossible new existence without limits of time and space.
What was your voice like, Nacho, in that childhood and adolescence we both shared? An uncontrollable physical force arose from your lungs and it became a gale in your throat, filling all the rooms of the house. Your voice did not fit in your body as a child. It was thundering and clear, with clear Castilian resonance. One day you abruptly pulled yourself up from the big table on which all of us siblings were eating with our parents and you shouted without thinking: “We must stop coddling this girl; nothing of ‘nena,’ we must call her by her name: Cristina.” All of us brothers chanted your cry with a cowardly boo directed to our little sister. Cristina had no choice but to take refuge in our mother’s lap. “Wow,” said mother sadly, “you’ve managed to make her cry.” But since that meal, Cristina stopped being “the baby,” becoming Cristina.
If your voice was impetuous, you also knew how to modulate it with persuasive nuances. In the evenings of your early childhood, you whispered to Lucero, the largest cardboard horse the Three Wise Men found on January 6. And you said patiently and seriously, “Let’s go to bed, Lucero, it’s too late.”
Your voice also picked up the echo of the street vendors. The pineapple vendors arrived in the city and stopped their cars, nets full of their produce, on the cobblestones of Simón Aranda Street, on the near south side of our house. They shouted in the air “Pineapples!” At that time, you opened the windows of the balcony and mockingly repeated: “Pineapples!”
In the summer garden, the voice of the town crier of El Espinar, seemed to suddenly stop the air, to launch his cries: “Announcement, the person who has found…” the words erupt- ed in shorter or longer bursts. You waited for the proclamation to end. You put your hands as a loudspeaker around your mouth and repeated the municipal announcement. On one occasion, your voice surprised our grandfather Fernando, who was walk- ing among the acacias of the garden with shorter, quickened paces. He stared at you and with a certain Granadian charm he restrained himself, saying: “Wow, Nacho, what a voice!”
But that powerful voice of yours suddenly began a long silence when you embarked on the adventure of reading Just William, Jules Verne’s novels or the comic books of the Masked Warrior. Nothing could interrupt your silence. Even your head seemed to become bigger with pure joy. What an ability you had to concentrate!
Later in your childhood, you decided to become a magician, but a real magician. Your voice settled into a happy silence, while you spent hours in solitude rehearsing tricks and learning to shuffle cards like a master. Between your hands, the cards opened and closed as if they were an accordion. In a few months you started to perform magic shows at birthday parties of the young children of our parents’ friends and within a year, you became a member of the Spanish Society of Illusionism. Your voice already possessed the complicity of children’s illusion. You smiled full of satisfaction when you took the card you were looking for out of a child’s ear or, as a final number, pulled letters from the deck of cards, colorful handkerchiefs or paper streamers from our father’s hat. I don’t know if you ever pulled out a white rabbit …
But your plans were different from your work as a magician. You entered the Society of Jesus and went to El Salvador, a country that would become your true home. Your voice reached us in recordings, sweetened by the sounds of the tropics. You sang and recited your own poems and spoke to us about your daily chores.
You completed your Jesuit studies and became a professor. Your voice began to sound with a clear depth of thought in American and European universities. You received your doctorate in social psychology from the University of Chicago and began to write. It was your same old voice now focused on writing that brought to life the pressing problems of the peoples of Latin America.
At the same time as you wrote, you taught and served as vice-rector to the students at UCA. And on weekends, you took your gear and a guitar and went to Jayaque to share the lives of the peasants. Your voice became action and was warmly poured on people who had nothing more than their own existence to count on.
After many years you came a few times to Spain, on short trips, invited to social psychology conventions or meetings. You came home and, like a big boy, you took our little children in your magician’s hands and threw them into the air laughing with them while calling them in Salvadoran slang cipotes [children] or cachimbones [awesome].
The war definitely made you real. From the Salvadoran UCA, your presence and your work — your voice! — spread to American and European universities. You gave lectures in Boston, Chicago, Bogotá, Havana and Madrid. Your thought was centered on the helplessness of the children of war, so distant and yet so close to those other happy children of your sessions as an illusionist.
You created the first university institute of public opinion in El Salvador. The reach of your voice multiplied, as if you felt urged by the premonition that your time was running out.
In what would be your last stay in Madrid, your voice, without losing its vitality, had acquired an apprehensive tonality. Any sound seemed to you to be an alarm. You told us about that brutal and unjust war. It was hard for you to fall asleep. Did you already sense the nearness of your death?
In the early morning of November 16, 1989, the Salvadoran military surrounded the house you shared with your Jesuit col- leagues and violently entered all of your rooms. They forced all of you into the garden while stabbing you and began shooting at each of you at point-blank range. You were given time to raise your voice, the most surprising and accusing, to say to those military commanders: “This is an injustice, you are carrion [dead meat].” Your voice could be heard in the neighboring houses.
Then, the lieutenant who was directing the massacre, unloaded several shots at you. Immediately after, the total darkness and a final silence were accompanied by the irony that the soldier who ended your life had been a student at the Jesuit high school in San Salvador.
As a result of your death, your ideas spread. People were interested in your vision of the problems and the methodology through which you noted that action is an essential prerequisite for thought. Endowed professorships were created with your name; professional meetings were focused on you as a person, scholar, priest.
As time unfolded your voice was displaced by the voices of other people who added hasty labels motivated by ill-intentioned motives, or worse, pure ignorance.
Yet, today your voice is a splendid reality in institutions like the The Ignacio Martín-Baró Fund for Mental Health and Human Rights, created in Boston, or the Guernica 37, a group of attorneys who continue to fight for justice from San Francisco and Madrid and to ensure that those military murderers, no matter where they may be, appear before international tribunals.
Every November 16, the people of El Salvador raise their voices and those of their comrades along the wide avenues of San Salvador, in a unanimous procession with lanterns.
Meanwhile, dear Nacho, in the backward gazing that accompanies aging, my memory continues to search for that voice of yours from our shared childhood. Are we children again in the loneliness of the world? Is everything yet to be discovered? Perhaps in that voice of yours is found the last mystery of being alive.
And, as in the nights of childhood, I still hear your voice, persuasive and somewhat tired, saying to your cardboard horse while you take him to the edge of your bed: “Let’s go to sleep, Lucero, it is already very late.” This is enough for me.
Carlos Martín-Baró, Ignacio’s brother, is a professor of English. Together with his sisters he has been supporting the judicial processes in Spain and the USA to bring those intellectual authors of the assassinations to trial in search of justice. He is the author of “Memoria de tu muerte” (Spanish, 2002, “Memory of Your Death”). This text was translated from the Spanish by Nelson Portillo. The collage was designed by Meredith Hawkins with photographs from MBF members and the Martín-Baró Family and the drawing of Ignacio is by Suzanne Ouellette (http://www.souellette.com/)[:es]Aquella muerte tuya, Nacho, tan salvaje y cobarde, a manos de los militares salvadoreños, dejaba tu cuerpo tendido sobre la grama del jardín de la Universidad Centroamericana José Simeón Cañas (UCA), junto a los cuerpos de tus compañeros y los de las dos colaboradoras del hogar, madre e hija. Era una muerte individual y colectiva que componía un puzle macabro de cuerpos desparramados. De tu cráneo, horadado por una bala, salía aún un reguero de sangre reciente. Tu rostro quedaba oculto por tus brazos que mantenían su último vigor muscular. De ellos se expandía una ternura familiar inconsolable: llevabas puesto el mismo niqui azul que, días antes, te habíamos planchado en casa.
Aquella imagen recorrió inesperadamente el mundo, como un signo más de la barbarie humana.
Hoy, treinta años después, mi memoria ha ido disipando aquel horror y ahora en medio de la confusión de haber envejecido sólo me parece oír tu voz, serena y vital, convocándome a una imposible nueva existencia sin límites de tiempo ni espacio.
¿Cómo era tu voz, Nacho, en aquella infancia y adolescencia que compartimos los dos? Una fuerza física incontenible surgía de tus pulmones y se hacía vendaval en tu garganta, llenando todas las estancias de la casa. Tu voz no te cabía en tu cuerpo de niño. Era tronante y clara, con límpidas resonancias castellanas. Un día te arrancaste de pronto en la gran mesa camilla en la que comíamos los seis hermanos con nuestros padres y gritaste sin contemplaciones: “A esta niña hay que desmimosarla; nada de Nena, hay que llamarla por su nombre: Cristina”. Todos los hermanos coreamos tu grito con un cobarde abucheo, dirigido a nuestra hermana pequeña. Cristina no tuvo más remedio que refugiarse en el regazo de nuestra madre. “Vaya”, dijo entristecida la madre, “habéis conseguido hacerla llorar”. Pero desde aquella comida, Cristina dejó de ser la Nena, para convertirse en Cristina.
Si tu voz era impetuosa, también sabías embridarla con matices persuasivos. Por las noches de tu primera niñez, le hablabas a media voz a Lucero, el caballo de cartón más grande que encontraron los Reyes Magos un 6 de enero. Y le decías paciente y grave, “Vámonos a la cama, Lucero, que ya es tarde”.
Tu voz recogía también el eco de los vendedores callejeros. Llegaban los piñeros a la ciudad y detenían sus carros, colmados de redes con piñas, sobre el empedrado de la calle Simón Aranda, en el cercano costado sur de nuestra casa. “El piñeroo! gritaban al aire. Tú entonces, abrías las ventanas de la galería y repetías con sorna: “El piñeroo”.
En el jardín de los veranos, la voz del pregonero municipal de El Espinar, parecía detener de pronto el aire, para lanzar su pregón: “Anuncio, la persona que haya encontrado…” las palabras llegaban acortándose o alargándose. Tú esperabas a que terminara el pregón. Ponías tus manos como altavoz en torno a tu boca y repetías el anuncio municipal. En una ocasión, tu voz sorprendió al abuelo Fernando que paseaba por entre las acacias del jardín con pasitos cortos y rápidos. Se te quedó mirando y con cierto gracejo granadino se limitó a decirte: “Caramba, Nacho, ¡qué voz!”
Pero aquella voz tuya tan poderosa iniciaba de pronto un largo silencio cuando emprendías la aventura de leer Las travesuras de Guillermo, las novelas de Julio Verne o los tebeos del Guerrero del Antifaz. Nada era capaz de interrumpir tu silencio. Hasta tu cabeza parecía hacerse más grande de puro gozo. ¡Qué capacidad tenías para concentrarte!
Este mismo silencio inquebrantable podía adquirir tonos épicos cuando te quedabas dormido como un animal humano sobre el suelo, después de una dura batalla con nuestra madre, que te amenazaba con “abrirte en canal”, si no te lavabas. Tú soltabas una gran risotada. “Si será ladrón” remataba la madre, “encima se ríe”.
Al alcanzar tu primera juventud, decidiste hacerte mago, pero mago de verdad. Tu voz volvía entonces a su feliz silencio, mientras pasabas en soledad las horas ensayando trucos y adquiriendo un dominio malabar de la baraja. Entre tus manos, los naipes se abrían y cerraban como si fueran un acordeón. En unos meses empezaste a dar sesiones de magia en los cumpleaños de los hijos pequeños de los amigos de nuestros padres y en un año, lograste ser miembro de la SEI, la Sociedad española de ilusionismo. Tu voz poseía ya la complicidad de la ilusión infantil. Sonreías pleno de satisfacción al sacar de la oreja de uno de aquellos niños el naipe que andabais buscando, o como número final, salían de la chistera de nuestro padre cartas de la baraja, pañuelos de colores, serpentinas de papel. No sé si alguna vez llegaste a sacar un conejo blanco …
Pero tus planes eran otros distintos a tu labor de mago ilusionista. Entraste en la Compañía de Jesús y te fuiste a El Salvador, país que se convertiría en tu verdadera casa. Tu voz nos llegaba en grabaciones, dulcificada por los sonidos del trópico. Cantabas y recitabas tus propios poemas y nos hablabas de tus quehaceres cotidianos.
Culminaste tus estudios de jesuita y en seguida fuiste profesor. Tu voz empezó a sonar con clara profundidad de pensamiento por las universidades europeas y americanas. Te doctoraste en psicología social por la Universidad de Chicago y comenzaste a escribir. Era tu misma voz de siempre ahora volcada en escritura viva acerca de los acuciantes problemas de los pueblos de la América Latina.
A la vez que escribías, dabas clase y atendías como vicerrector a los alumnos de la UCA. Y en los fines de semana, cogías tus bártulos y una guitarra y te ibas a Jayaque a compartir las vidas de los campesinos. Tu voz se hacía acción y se vertía cordialmente sobre aquellas personas que sólo contaban con su existencia.
Después de muchos años viniste unas cuantas veces a España, en viajes cortos, invitado a congresos de Psicología Social. Llegabas a casa y, como un niño grande, cogías en tus manos de mago a nuestros hijos pequeños y los lanzabas al aire riéndote con ellos mientras les llamabas cipotes o cachimbones.
La guerra te hizo definitivamente real. Desde la UCA salvadoreña, tu presencia y tu obra, – ¡tu voz! – se extendía por las universidades americanas y europeas. Dabas cursos en Boston, Chicago, Bogotá, La Habana o Madrid. Tu pensamiento se centraba en el desamparo de los niños de la guerra, tan lejanos y cercanos a aquellos otros niños felices de tus sesiones como ilusionista.
Creaste el Instituto Universitario de Opinión Pública (IUDOP), el primer instituto universitario de opinión pública de El Salvador. Se multiplicaban los ámbitos de tu voz, como si te sintieras urgido por la premonición de que se estaba agotando tu tiempo.
En la que sería tu última estancia en Madrid, tu voz, sin perder su vitalidad, había adquirido una tonalidad aprensiva. Cualquier sonido te parecía una alarma. Nos hablabas de aquella guerra tan brutal e injusta. Te costaba conciliar el sueño. ¿Intuías ya la cercanía de tu muerte?
En la madrugada del 16 de noviembre de 1989, los militares salvadoreños rodearon vuestra casa, entraron violentamente en vuestros aposentos, os sacaron a culetazos al jardín y empezaron a dispararos a quemarropa. A ti te dio tiempo para erguir tu voz, la más sorprendente y acusadora, para espetarles a aquellos comandos militares: “Esto es una injusticia, ustedes son carroña”. Tu voz se pudo oír en las viviendas vecinas. Entonces, el teniente que dirigía la matanza, te descerrajó varios tiros. Acto seguido, la oscuridad total, el último silencio acompañando a la ironía de saber que ese teniente que había acabado con tu vida había sido alumno tuyo en el Externado de San Salvador.
A raíz de tu muerte comenzó a expandirse tu obra. Interesaba tu visión de los problemas y la forma en que la acción se convertía en presupuesto esencial del pensamiento. Se crearon cátedras con tu nombre, se organizaron congresos en torno a tu persona.
El tiempo le fue quitando a tu voz adherencias ajenas y etiquetas apresuradas motivadas por intereses bastardos, o lo que es peor, por pura ignorancia.
Hoy día tu voz es una espléndida realidad en instituciones tan fundamentales como el Fondo Ignacio Martín Baró para los Derechos Humanos y la Salud Mental, creado en Boston, o la agrupación de jueces G 37 Guernica, que sigue luchando desde San Francisco y Madrid por que se haga justicia y aquellos militares asesinos, huidos o desaparecidos, comparezcan ante tribunales internacionales.
Cada 16 de noviembre, el pueblo de El Salvador alza tu voz y la de tus compañeros por las anchas avenidas de San Salvador, en unánime procesión con farolillos.
Mientras, querido Nacho, en el apartamiento de la vejez, mi memoria sigue buscando aquella voz tuya de nuestra infancia compartida. ¿Volvemos a ser niños en la soledad del mundo? ¿Está todo aún por descubrir? Tal vez en aquella voz tuya se halle el último misterio de estar vivo.
Y como en las noches de la infancia, sigo oyendo tu voz que, persuasiva y algo cansada, le dice a tu caballo de cartón mientras le llevas hasta la vera de tu cama: “Vámonos a dormir, Lucero, que se ha hecho ya muy tarde”. Esto me basta.[:fr]That death of yours, Nacho, so savage and cowardly, at the hands of the Salvadoran military, left your body lying on the lawn of the garden of the Universidad Centroamericana José Simeón Cañas (UCA), next to the bodies of your companions and those of the two collaborators of the Jesuit residence, mother and daughter. It was an individual and collective death that composed a macabre puzzle of scattered bodies. From your skull, pierced by a bullet, still came a stream of fresh blood. Your face was hidden by your arms that showed their last signs of strength. An inconsolable family tenderness spread from them: you wore the same blue polo shirt that, days before, we had ironed for you at home. That image traveled unexpectedly around the world, as one more sign of human barbarism.
Today, thirty years later, my memory has been dissipating that horror and now, in the midst of the confusion of having aged, I only seem to hear your voice, serene and vital, summoning me to an impossible new existence without limits of time and space.
What was your voice like, Nacho, in that childhood and adolescence we both shared? An uncontrollable physical force arose from your lungs and it became a gale in your throat, filling all the rooms of the house. Your voice did not fit in your body as a child. It was thundering and clear, with clear Castilian resonance. One day you abruptly pulled yourself up from the big table on which all of us siblings were eating with our parents and you shouted without thinking: “We must stop coddling this girl; nothing of ‘nena,’ we must call her by her name: Cristina.” All of us brothers chanted your cry with a cowardly boo directed to our little sister. Cristina had no choice but to take refuge in our mother’s lap. “Wow,” said mother sadly, “you’ve managed to make her cry.” But since that meal, Cristina stopped being “the baby,” becoming Cristina.
If your voice was impetuous, you also knew how to modulate it with persuasive nuances. In the evenings of your early childhood, you whispered to Lucero, the largest cardboard horse the Three Wise Men found on January 6. And you said patiently and seriously, “Let’s go to bed, Lucero, it’s too late.”
Your voice also picked up the echo of the street vendors. The pineapple vendors arrived in the city and stopped their cars, nets full of their produce, on the cobblestones of Simón Aranda Street, on the near south side of our house. They shouted in the air “Pineapples!” At that time, you opened the windows of the balcony and mockingly repeated: “Pineapples!”
In the summer garden, the voice of the town crier of El Espinar, seemed to suddenly stop the air, to launch his cries: “Announcement, the person who has found…” the words erupt- ed in shorter or longer bursts. You waited for the proclamation to end. You put your hands as a loudspeaker around your mouth and repeated the municipal announcement. On one occasion, your voice surprised our grandfather Fernando, who was walk- ing among the acacias of the garden with shorter, quickened paces. He stared at you and with a certain Granadian charm he restrained himself, saying: “Wow, Nacho, what a voice!”
But that powerful voice of yours suddenly began a long silence when you embarked on the adventure of reading Just William, Jules Verne’s novels or the comic books of the Masked Warrior. Nothing could interrupt your silence. Even your head seemed to become bigger with pure joy. What an ability you had to concentrate!
Later in your childhood, you decided to become a magician, but a real magician. Your voice settled into a happy silence, while you spent hours in solitude rehearsing tricks and learning to shuffle cards like a master. Between your hands, the cards opened and closed as if they were an accordion. In a few months you started to perform magic shows at birthday parties of the young children of our parents’ friends and within a year, you became a member of the Spanish Society of Illusionism. Your voice already possessed the complicity of children’s illusion. You smiled full of satisfaction when you took the card you were looking for out of a child’s ear or, as a final number, pulled letters from the deck of cards, colorful handkerchiefs or paper streamers from our father’s hat. I don’t know if you ever pulled out a white rabbit …
But your plans were different from your work as a magician. You entered the Society of Jesus and went to El Salvador, a country that would become your true home. Your voice reached us in recordings, sweetened by the sounds of the tropics. You sang and recited your own poems and spoke to us about your daily chores.
You completed your Jesuit studies and became a professor. Your voice began to sound with a clear depth of thought in American and European universities. You received your doctorate in social psychology from the University of Chicago and began to write. It was your same old voice now focused on writing that brought to life the pressing problems of the peoples of Latin America.
At the same time as you wrote, you taught and served as vice-rector to the students at UCA. And on weekends, you took your gear and a guitar and went to Jayaque to share the lives of the peasants. Your voice became action and was warmly poured on people who had nothing more than their own existence to count on.
After many years you came a few times to Spain, on short trips, invited to social psychology conventions or meetings. You came home and, like a big boy, you took our little children in your magician’s hands and threw them into the air laughing with them while calling them in Salvadoran slang cipotes [children] or cachimbones [awesome].
The war definitely made you real. From the Salvadoran UCA, your presence and your work — your voice! — spread to American and European universities. You gave lectures in Boston, Chicago, Bogotá, Havana and Madrid. Your thought was centered on the helplessness of the children of war, so distant and yet so close to those other happy children of your sessions as an illusionist.
You created the first university institute of public opinion in El Salvador. The reach of your voice multiplied, as if you felt urged by the premonition that your time was running out.
In what would be your last stay in Madrid, your voice, without losing its vitality, had acquired an apprehensive tonality. Any sound seemed to you to be an alarm. You told us about that brutal and unjust war. It was hard for you to fall asleep. Did you already sense the nearness of your death?
In the early morning of November 16, 1989, the Salvadoran military surrounded the house you shared with your Jesuit col- leagues and violently entered all of your rooms. They forced all of you into the garden while stabbing you and began shooting at each of you at point-blank range. You were given time to raise your voice, the most surprising and accusing, to say to those military commanders: “This is an injustice, you are carrion [dead meat].” Your voice could be heard in the neighboring houses.
Then, the lieutenant who was directing the massacre, unloaded several shots at you. Immediately after, the total darkness and a final silence were accompanied by the irony that the soldier who ended your life had been a student at the Jesuit high school in San Salvador.
As a result of your death, your ideas spread. People were interested in your vision of the problems and the methodology through which you noted that action is an essential prerequisite for thought. Endowed professorships were created with your name; professional meetings were focused on you as a person, scholar, priest.
As time unfolded your voice was displaced by the voices of other people who added hasty labels motivated by ill-intentioned motives, or worse, pure ignorance.
Yet, today your voice is a splendid reality in institutions like the The Ignacio Martín-Baró Fund for Mental Health and Human Rights, created in Boston, or the Guernica 37, a group of attorneys who continue to fight for justice from San Francisco and Madrid and to ensure that those military murderers, no matter where they may be, appear before international tribunals.
Every November 16, the people of El Salvador raise their voices and those of their comrades along the wide avenues of San Salvador, in a unanimous procession with lanterns.
Meanwhile, dear Nacho, in the backward gazing that accompanies aging, my memory continues to search for that voice of yours from our shared childhood. Are we children again in the loneliness of the world? Is everything yet to be discovered? Perhaps in that voice of yours is found the last mystery of being alive.
And, as in the nights of childhood, I still hear your voice, persuasive and somewhat tired, saying to your cardboard horse while you take him to the edge of your bed: “Let’s go to sleep, Lucero, it is already very late.” This is enough for me.
Carlos Martín-Baró, Ignacio’s brother, is a professor of English. Together with his sisters he has been supporting the judicial processes in Spain and the USA to bring those intellectual authors of the assassinations to trial in search of justice. He is the author of “Memoria de tu muerte” (Spanish, 2002, “Memory of Your Death”). This text was translated from the Spanish by Nelson Portillo. The collage was designed by Meredith Hawkins with photographs from MBF members and the Martín-Baró Family and the drawing of Ignacio is by Suzanne Ouellette (http://www.souellette.com/)[:]