Distances by Otto Rene Castillo 1. The irony 2. The understanding 3. The cowardly nation 4. Local logic 5. The question 6. Light and shadow 7. The lesson of the assassinated 1. In 1935 Hitler said "The Third Reich will last a thousand years." What did Hitler say ten years later under the ruins of Berlin? A few years later Mister Dulles, snoring like a caterpillar said "This decade will see the end of the slavery of communism." What did Yuri Gagarin do a few years later, sending his greetings to men over the wide oceans and vast territories of America? Thomas Mann was right when he said "Anti-communism is the most ridiculous mode of the twentieth century." Still the interests the profit continue their fanfare continue killing still.‬ 2. Under the bitter December air a friend says "I'm disillusioned. Everything goes so slowly. The dictatorship is strong. I'm desperate and pained by the calvary of my people." And I, sensing his anguish, the gray and noble sadness of my friend, knowing his fight to keep on fighting, do not say: coward or go to the mountains or lazy or pessimist, rigid, poor devil. I only put my arm around his shoulder, so the tearing cruelty of his cold be less. 3. A knock at the door. Before me, two sore eyes. And behind them, a child whose six years barely support the national misery, the national infamy, the cowardly nation. He extends his hand and on the face of my country the pieces of my heart fall split by blows protesting this man's death already dead. Still when I give him bread his tender eyes speak to me from the depths of his ignorance. 4. Someone hums the National Anthem. In the street. I get up and look from the window of the house where I live now. He who sings is barefoot. Surely without breakfast. He is a hawker of lies morning and afternoon.‬ Fifteen years at best. Fifteen years of misery, I bet on that. And from his hoarse throat, like a Greek god well fed, emerges the National Anthem of Guatemala. If I hadn't seen it, surely I'd have said: "A soldier singing." 5. Recently returned from Europe one of my nephews asks me if I know Madrid. I say no, brusquely, and continue talking about Paris. But my story goes pale. The blood, hitting hard and sudden in my heart, the horrible bleeding. 6. In the days of Ubico the tyrant, end of '42, as the story goes, there was a mason in the parish who dared paint "Liverty, Doun with th blody jenral" on the city walls. The mason was caught, questioned, —why was he so crazy as to hate the General if the General had complete military support and his power was invincible. And the mason said: Ubico will fall. And everyone laughed. This is a crazy man, they said. The General will rule forever in Guatemala. Until he dies. Like God, he is all powerful. No one will lift a finger against him. His power is infinite and the people are cowardly, resigned, afraid of his granite strength. But the stubborn mason said: Ubico will fall. He will not rule forever in Guatemala. The people will rise against him. And they shot him, in the morning, in the barracks, more for disbeliever than subversive, the mason of the parish who wrote: "Liverty. Doun with th blody jenral" on the walls of the city. 7. In the street someone stops me and cries against my chest. Those who pass look and close a bit more the obscure rose of their nonconformist blood. "They've killed him, my son. They've killed him, those gorillas!" she tells me, letting the ashes of her voice fall, blackened forever. And I, who love life so, who fight so that all will love it and no one will have to complain of it, feel the desire to kill he who killed, blind, awkward, rude indian desire to revenge the killed by killing. But I say and do nothing. I stroke the white head of the old woman crying on my chest, and life is more painful than ever. And still I know: there are many ways to give life for life. The important thing: to give it as it must be given!