5. "THE WEARY MOTHERS OF THE EARTH"

Beautiful Laura Bonaparte was a psychoanalyst from Argentina. On June 11, 1976 her husband, a biochemist, was dragged out of the house in front of her eyes and she never saw him again. When she went looking for her daughter, who had also "disappeared," she was given her daughter's hand in a jar for identification.

When I visited Argentina, in spring of 1981, I was teargassed, thrown out of my hotel, prevented from singing publicly, and interrupted twice at a press conference by bomb threats. The bomb squad came and carried off two bombs.

The Mothers of the Disappeared say that the lucky ones among them are the ones who know their children are dead. Then they can mourn and get it over with, and try to start a new life. They say the hardest part is the night, when the images of their missing children pass before their eyes in the dark.

I was banned in Chile, too, but students organized an evening of music, and the police came in big vans and just surrounded the hall  and listened to the concert over the outside speakers. Seven thou sand people showed up after just two days of leafleting and word of mouth. Sprinkled throughout the hall were piano players, violinists, comedians, singing groups, dancers, poets, professors, writers, and  actors. There were people who had been censored, imprisoned, detained, tortured -- people who had not performed in public since the coup of 1973. I was told there had not been such a cultural event in seven years.

The strangest place was Brazil. It had an open press, and I could talk all I wanted, but I could not sing in public.

I almost went to perform at a student concert, but the police showed up at the hotel and said my papers weren't in order. We put them in order, and the police chief was on the spot, what with all these foreigners standing in his station waving documents in his face. I made him say that he was refusing to let me sing, and then I went out in front of the building under the precinct sign and sang "Gracias a la Vida" at the top of my lungs.

Then the lovely congressman with the drooping blue eyes, who once had been beaten up in that very same police station, took me over to the hall and sat me in the audience. All of a sudden, there was complete silence, and I began to sing. Everyone in the packed house sang with me, and when we got up to leave they stood up too, and sang "Caminando," their "Blowin' in the Wind." Sometimes it's impossible to stop goodness from happening.

On the way home we went to Nicaragua.

"The ambassador can wait," General Tomas Borges, Minister of the Interior, said to me in Spanish during the intermission of my concert while his teenage bodyguards finished poking around the corners and closets of my dressing room with their gun muzzles. Borges was shorter than I. He sized me up while puffing defiantly on his cigar. I had told him I was obliged to visit with the American ambassador after the concert.

"I'll have dinner with you on one condition," I told him. "You put out that disgusting cigar."

He not only put it out, he never smoked it again in my presence. He returned after the concert.

He took me to dinner, and after dinner to the prisons packed with national guards from the Somoza regime. He walked up to a grimy black cell crammed with unhappy, bored, dirty inmates, told the guard to open it, and his bodyguards to stay outside. Then he walked right in, a small stump of a man next to the taller prisoners. He peered into the face of a boy.

"How old are you?" he demanded.

"Dies y seis." Sixteen.

"How long have you been in here?"

"Tres anos," the boy said wonderingly.

"What is your crime?"

"My father was a guardista. I was with him when he was arrested so they took me too. I have no crime other than that."

"Pack your things. You're going home."

The boy stood staring for some seconds, and then began snatching up his few belongings.

Senor Borges looked very pleased with himself and repeated the performance in two more cells. Then he took us upstairs to a special block, and became very emotional. He stopped at an empty cell and was silent. I knew what was coming.

"Aqui esta donde ... Here is where they kept me for three years. For six months my wrists were chained together and attached to these bars, so I could not lie down. My head was covered with a sack, and for six months I saw nothing."

"Why do you come back here to torture yourself all over again?" I asked.

"So that I won't forget what it's like. I promised myself that I would not forget."

We stayed just long enough to see history repeating itself. Marxism began to take root in every field of workers, every rally of young people, every drill practice in the town square. And the United States administration was, as usual, and as though communism were something it secretly wanted to nourish, doing everything possible to make the Nicaraguans build an army against us. Speaking of forgetting ... has the administration forgotten Somoza? Or will he go down in our history books as a good guy?

Go to Next Page