456

Tununa Mercado

learned to discern between the pasilla and the arbol, the morita and the mulato,
without abandoning their traditional hot ground pepper. I get impatient when
I hear them say that it is possible to get chile serrano for sauces in Buenos Aires,
when what Bolivian women sell in the market- seated on the ground like
Mexican women, as is the manner of their race, and having a startling mirage
effect on the Argenmex- is really chile arbol and cannot even remotely add
the same flavor to a salsa verde; and it bores me to hear others and myself engaged in long dull conversations about Mexican eating habits with people who,
I suspect, never ate anything other than breaded fried veal scallopini and fried
potatoes, and it seems incredible to me when they pronounce the letter yin the
Mexican way while complaining of how much they miss the papayajpapaia
from their table, a fruit whose memory they cherish but in fact rejected, and
even more tedious do I find the fact that there is nothing with which we can
diminish our nostalgia today, just as we could not diminish our nostalgia then
with our dulce de leche 1 and other ploys of outcasts.
Translated by Peter Kahn

Note

Corpses
Nestor Perlongher

Nestor Perlongher (1949-92) was a sociologist, gay activist, and one ofArgentina's best
and most prolijic poets. In a style that mixes the most convoluted neobaroque tropes
with the profanity ofsensual sordidness, his poetry registers the main cultural and political transformations in Argentina's recent history-from the revolutionary dreams
ofthe 196os and 1970s and the unspeakable crimes ofthe dictatorship to the triumph of
neoliberalism and the explosive spread ofAIDS. In 1981, on a bus from Buenos Aires to
Siio Paulo, Brazi-l, Perlongherwrote "Corpses," a long poem about the dictatorship. By
invoking the myriad places touched by pervasive political violence, "Corpses" depicts
a society whose most intimate acts are tainted by the rotting memories of death.

1 Dulce de leche is an Argentine caramel spread.

Beneath bushes
In scrub
On bridges
In canals
There are Corpses
In the track of a train that never stops
In the wake of a ship that sinks
In a ripple that vanishes
On quaysides railway halts trampolines piers
There are Corpses
In fishermen's nets
In stumbling in crabswamps
In she whose hair is pulled
With hairclasp hanging undone
There are Corpses
In the necessity for this absence
In what underlines that speech

458

Nestor Perlongher

In your godly presence

Commander, in your line
There are Corpses
In the warm sleeves of the woman with the passport who
Throws herself out of the boat with a baby in her arms
In the muffin man compelled to roast peanuts
In the peanut man who gets coated
In liver, in straw, there
There are Corpses
Precisely there, and in the happiness
of she who unravels, and
in that sideways glance of the woman you had best not
say, and
in the scorn of the woman you must not say does not
think, maybe
in she who you do not say it should be known ...
There are Corpses
Notwithstanding, in the tongue of that shoe that's tied,
secretly, in the mirror, in the
strap of that buckle pulled tight, without wanting, on the
upturned roof of
that purse that deflates, like a fat owl, and, nevertheless,
in that c ... that, how do you spell it? c ... for what? But,
Cunsidering Everything
Above All
There are Corpses
In the shawl of she who decompresses herself, feverishly,
in the
waggle of she who lizards herself in that ivy, defenseless,
in the
gutspill of she who has only a small jacket to cover herself,
and in the big trunk full of jackets, and old
mannequins, past
fashions like dead shells from which
There are Corpses
They can be seen, they've had their bellies cut floating
descriable in the swamp:

Corpses

in the butt of the trousers mucked, similarly;

in the hem of the train of the silk gown of the bride, who

never gets married

because her fiancee has
....................... !
There are Corpses
In that below-the-belt punch, in the lowness
of that cheek, in the ambiguous
disguise of that vulture, the z: of
those azaleas, on fire, in that darkness
There are Corpses
It's full: in the little jars of sow's milk with which
peasant girls
fete their pimps, in the
fiords of the port women who wake up, secretly,
with their pants full;
in the
damp of those little bags, balls, that get rolled flat in the
movement from which
There are Corpses
It looks residual: in the hobble
of those gauchos, in the hair of
that wild herd, in the canefields (rough straw), in that
vagrant's wine jug, that sheriff's smell of weeds
There are corpses

In the subtlety of the seamstress attaching ribbons where

a hole was,
In the delicacy of the manicurist's hands electrifying
nitrous nails, in the
cuticles she exposes, as in a dressing room; on the dressing
table, so ... indecisive ... , where she
sticks pins charmingly, in the queen's hips and
the princess's little notebooks, which in the sound of a
falling monarchy, oui
There are Corpses

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460

Corpses

Nestor Perlongher

Yes, in the camphorated bag on that pretty teacher's breast

Ecco, in the charcoal where that pretty teacher traces the
embers of that incense;
Da, in the throat of that bracelet, or in the gizzard of
that bruise
run through by a ring, petticoat, in
Ya
There are Corpses

In the thing that pushes

that sticks in the throat.
In what swallows
what prostitutes
In what amputates
what impales,
In what whores
There are Corpses
It cannot be sustained: the handle
of the spade that nails its rosary of mosses in the earth
the rosary
of the cross that impales in the wall of the earth of a nail
the current
that fixes to the rushes of the piss- tin, tin ... -of the
rattle in the sputum that's spat
There are Corpses

In the mucous that also curdles in the throat; in the likewise

glacial tonsil; in the staff that can't be sucked with pleasure
because it's fringed with shit; in the sputum
imprinted on a prick,
in the saliva an elephant penetrates, in those jokes
about ants,
There are Corpses
In the canals of slags
In the shaft of a southern gladiator, a dream
In the florin of a debauchee who winds himself, in some
breaches, in the shroud of the client
who's paid an exorbitant price for a screw
in the screw
There are Corpses

In the desert of consulting rooms

In the dust of "unconscious" couches
In the ceaselessness of that business, that "process" in
hospitals
where the dead circulate, in the corridors
where the nurses say SHHH! With a needle in their ovaries,
in the holes
in the displays behind orchestral glass where surgeons
dress up as "draped man,"
the opossums of rubbish, where a palate is tattooed, or
slashed
(or palated), in lathes
There are Corpses
In mama's shopping bags alter~ately filled and
emptied with
emeralds, tubes, in the pleats of that
binding that girdles- a bit too much- those corsets, in
moon-blue hair,
seaglory, in the suck of that tit as expressed, in the
salami reclining against a mandolin, full of smooth pipes
There are Corpses
In those circunstances, when the mother
washes the plates, the son his feet, the father his belt, the
sister the pus stain getting bigger under the
armpit, or
There are Corpses
Impossible to count any more: in the small line of ash
that my horse leaves smoking in the fields (fields, huh ... ),
orin
the pastures, eh, you'll see it's not
There are Corpses
When the horse steps on
cracked polders,
it sinks plumed
into the forage;
when the swallow, tera, tera,
flies in circuits, like a cock, or when the tram

461

462

Corpses

Nestor Perlongher

like a cobra's milk serpent dissipates itself,

observers reach the following
conclusion:
There are Corpses

In the blurring of these legends

In the conversations of lesbians who show surrender

In the country where the miller sweats

in the state where the butcher sells his steaks, for cash,
and where all occupations have a name ...
In the regions where a tart flicks her nylon fox,
they smell her from far off, from long ago
There are Corpses

Is it not a miracle to say "in"?

A presumption of centering?
A centering of the centered, whose forward
dies at dawn, decomposed by
The tunnel
There are Corpses

In the province where no truth is told

In the places where no lie is spoken
-This will not go beyond these four wallsIn the sites where drunks piss and a red spot appears on
the flies of one who urinates- this will not stop
here- against the
tiles, in the doorway of the number 14 or rs police stations,
at the corner of
Corrientes and Esmeraldas
There are Corpses

An area where the foremost graves?

A parrot where caged edges?
A pavilion of fun girls?
A pip, broken up, in cubism
of frivolous surfaces . . . ?
There are Corpses

And becomes immediately the Captive,

the Indian chiefs her an enema,
open her c ... to take out the boy,
the husband keeps the baby girl,
but she manages to keep a scapular with a faded photo,
of a room where ...
There are Corpses

In
the country
In the country
In the house
In the hunt
There
There are Corpses
In the decline of this writing
In the smudging of these inscriptions

marks to each other,

In that elastic cuff,
There are Corpses

Allegorical coffins!!
Metaphoric basements!
Metonymic coffee cups!
Ex-plicit!
There are Corpses
Exercises
Campaigns
Consortiums
Condominiums
Contracts
There are Corpses

Yermos or Luengos
Poz'(js or Westerleys
Rouge or Eyeshadow
Flounces or Pleats
There are Corpses
-None of this just happens
-Why not?

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464

Nestor Perlongher

-Don't tell me you're going to talk?

-Don't you think so?
-When did you qualify?
-Was he a party member?
-Are there Corpses?
You went out alone
In the cool of the night
When the storm caught you
Without a jacket
And
There are Corpses
Does it make sense?
Was it clear?
Was it not a bit too much for nowadays?
Blue fingernails?
There are Corpses
Translated by William Rowe

War in the South Atlantic

Graciela Speranza and Fernando Cittadini

In 1982, the dictatorship's political apparatus began to weaken. Serious allegations of

human rights violations and the steady deterioration of the economy led to a series of
public demonstrations. These gained momentum in the general strike of March 1982,
which was savagely repressed by the police. Four days later, the military junta in power
announced that Argentine troops had retaken the Malvinas Is lands from British hands
and that the country was consequently at war with the United Kingdom. Within afew
weeks, the Argentine armed forces would suffer a humiliating defeat at the hands of
an enemy remarkably superior in both military and financial resources. For years, the
true circumstances ofthe defeat and the conditions ofsurrender were not made public.
The war divided the Argentine people. Although most opposed the dictatorship, many
supported the country's national claims to the islands. The emotional testimonies of
officers and drafted soldiers published by Graciela Speranza and Fernando Cittadini
in 1997 attest both to the heroism of those who fought on the front and to the sense of
betrayal that they felt once the war was over.
juan Jose Gomez Centurion
In 1982 I was a lieutenant in the Twenty-fifth Infantry Regiment in General
Sarmiento, Chubut, a place in the middle of Patagonia. Beginning with the
first days of March we shared the agitation that everybody was experiencing in
Argentina because of the problem in the Georgian Islands. But we only participatedin a very distant way. Ever since 1978, because of our geographic location,
all our activity was concentrated on Argentina's problems with Chile. Early in
March, as was usual, all of us who were officers in the regiment left to take
part in a reconnaissance on the Andean border, with the idea of bringing up
to date a tactical defense plan in case of Chilean aggression.
We spent a week in the thick of the cordillera without any kind of contact
with the regiment. When we returned, we found a rather strange atmosphere.
That morning, the chief officer of the regiment had a meeting with all the officers. He sat us down in front of a blackboard covered by a sheet, and he swore