Queen Kat, Carmel and St Jude Get a Life by Maureen McCarthy

Author:Maureen McCarthy
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: JUV000000, book
ISBN: 9781742696126
Publisher: Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd
Published: 2012-02-20T05:00:00+00:00

I will never forget that moment. The rain had begun in earnest. I looked over at my friend’s glowing face, her springy red curls now flat and plastered around her head, then down at the good-humoured crowd, which had begun to sing along with us. I wanted to weep, to reach out to every single one of them. We weren’t singing for ourselves. We were singing for all the people in the world without a voice, for the poor and the disappeared. The ones who had been plucked from their homes, offices, hospitals and factories, detained and tortured, maimed and killed because they had the audacity to believe that life might be different. We were singing for their suffering and the suffering of their relatives and friends who must go on without them. Not just in Chile, not just in Latin America, not just in our own time . . . for all of them, everywhere. We were singing for the man who wrote those words: a popular musician who’d had his hands smashed by rifle butts on the first day of the coup in 1973. By the end of the third day he had been shot, his body riddled with bullets. Two days later his wife had found him under a pile of other bleeding bodies in the Santiago morgue.

And in a very real way I was singing for my father. I had never before felt quite as close to him. It was as though his spirit was sitting like an angel at my shoulder. I would turn around every now and again and sort of expect to see him there. When Carmel and I got down I went and stood next to Juan. I looked up at his profile, lit only by flashing streetlights – this man who’d shared so much with my father all those years ago – and was overcome again with a sense of my father’s presence; an almost unbearable stab of grief mingled with the flooding wave of joy pulsing right through me.

Inside I was crying: I am with you . . . my father . . . I am with you, always!

It was nearly midnight. The president’s limo was gliding off. We couldn’t get very near; the rows of police had surrounded him from the building to the car. Someone had put up a black umbrella so he wouldn’t get wet. I saw his face though, small and very grave, staring at us from the warmth and protection of his car. Expressionless. A man who’d done his best to bring down a democratically elected leader and was now in power himself. A man who made deals with thieves and thugs and torturers. A man who, although president, had no real authority over the military, which had grown enormously in power and influence over the previous twenty years.

The night had ended, but I felt like I could have gone on singing forever.

‘Where shall we go then?’ cried Eduardo. Most of the crowd had dispersed. There were just a dozen of us left, soaking wet and ebullient in the damp city street.

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