Three songs by Violeta Parra, a manifesto about pain, a Do Not Touch poster

night 1
How sad the soul feels.

I listen to Violeta after many years, by chance, because I was looking for something else. It's been a bad day and that woman doesn't help.

[About the atria and the cavities, my heart went blind].

How sad the soul feels It is the sweet song that I needed, because it talks about luck as opposed to wishes. Violeta knew things and I need to forget the things that Violeta knew.

Like her, I dropped out of school and wanted to have a circus, and I wanted to be a happy girl. I was also the abandonment and I wanted, like her, to get out of a lacerating sadness.

Violet couldn't.

Violet doesn't suit me.

It's a bad night and my forgetfulness settles in her voice, like in a blind well.

When it sounded, I thought about the structure of pain. It doesn't hurt and that's it. It doesn't kill and that's it. The pain sometimes comes in the form of simple quatrains. I thought of unholy luck.

[Right ventricle.
Atria, cavities.
Chest.
The pain does not stay there, even if it hurts like a heart attack].

I know that when Violeta wrote that song she was writing a sentence. 

I lay down. I sing softly Not forgetting that it's late, not forgetting the hours...

Not forgetting your eyes

without hearing your voice.

night 2
What have I gotten out of loving you?

She sings and gastritis is taking its toll on me because gastritis hurts and feels like a hole and like a ball of candle. She sings, she doesn't care. Food doesn't let me down. Food disgusts me most of the time and I have lost I don't know how many kilos, and Violeta goes around saying that here is the same moon, and those few kilos feel like 100 on your ribs, as if the moon were a stomach giant, as if the stomach were a moon. Now food lowers me less because I'm afraid. 

And the four marked feet 

on the side of the road

I have Violeta's song in my stomach and it burns. I have the feeling of not having gotten anything out of love. I have the feeling that love is an ulcer. 

I keep singing softly, let's see if I forget Violeta, let's see if the names are erased. But not.

The two names on the wall,

And your trace on the road.

When a song like this is written, it is because nothing has been taken from love, except abandonment. Violeta's love was also ulcerated.

Day 3
Thanks to life

In the midst of pain, Violeta thanks, like someone who doesn't want to thank, or like someone who gives thanks before leaving, like someone who gives thanks before the final goodbyes. They say that she fell in love with that man, they say that she loved him madly, that she sang to him, that she let go without wanting to let go. That man was also life, he was the one sought in the crowds, he was the bottom of his own eyes. I know it.

Thanks to life It's a farewell song and a love song, nobody cheats on me. It's a goodbye-song, it's a gun-song, it's an anguish-song. It is not a gratuity. No. It's the reverse.

It is a shadow in which the tenderness of another voice is cursed without cursing itself.

[The right ventricle feels a deep sorrow. Get your sight back. Contributes to vague pumping. It contributes to my stomach that feeds on itself. To the game of hunger. The hunger that welcomes the song like a piece of bread, like a recently healed ulcer].

What else is left but to thank, raise your face, give thanks to love, to the patios, to the starry sky, older even than the night itself...?
Life... Life that is a song.
I am grateful, like Violeta, for my heart shaking its frame, and I am grateful for the decompressed chest after crying.

I appreciate the route of the soul.
And the breakdown.

Although that acceptance is a bullet in the temple. Although I throw myself, hopelessly, against so many forms of death.

Do not touch / Let it decompose / Manifest

It would be enough to put a little food for many days in one place. It would be enough to look at the process to understand the bullet in Violeta's temple. Pain is a rotten feeling when you don't know how to do anything about it, and she sang to the pain, as if to put it to sleep. Pain is sometimes a museum piece, the indescribable one, the most remote, to which everyone looks, and on whose edge there is a huge sign that says Do not touch.

As if someone wanted to touch the rotten food, as if that warning had to be made, as if someone was going to think of getting involved with a heartbreaking gratitude to life.

In his last letter, he wrote: “(…) I had nothing. I gave it all. I wanted to give, I did not find anyone who would receive (…)”.

They left her to rot. He didn't know how to get out. She was denied everything and she cried out for a hand that wasn't her own, eyes that weren't her own. That's where he started to die. The bullet was nothing more than the death of the body. Violeta was killed by a love and a country killed her and the absence of another's hand killed her.

The time comes when the flies also left, and the person in charge of putting the piece in the box for the next exhibition left, and the man who closes the door left. They all left. The pain is lonely. No one else inhabits it although everyone contemplates it. No one can open their chest and frame all that amount of atria and blood in the chest of the other [because they can't, because they don't live there].

Violeta felt anguish and a bullet passed through her dermis and epidermis. Violeta knew the last state of pain: fright. Violeta killed the fright.

That girl's songs were all prescient, she understood human miseries early, she understood what was denied. His songs were the certainty that after the pain there are not even the decomposed remains, nor the flies, nor the stench, nor the process, nor the spectators. How terrible to know that...
Silence and the Do Not Touch sign remain. That remains.

[And the song, Violet. Your song that kills me in life, your song that hurts like Don't go. Your offered song that hurts like what is denied.
That hurts like running away.
That hurts like death.
Or worse,
because it still hurts].