"Villa Grimaldi"

Villa Grimaldi
In Chile, there is a place called Villa Grimaldi,
A fossil from Pinochet
Testament to a time when men’s fear swallowed whole their compassion
Another example of a war against the Other, that hideous, greedy, larval enemy

We sat in a classroom first, listening to descriptions
As flashes hammered my memory of tattooed numbers and emaciated photos
How can tragedy have an effect after the Holocaust?
Perhaps a better question is, how can tragedy not have an effect after the Holocaust?

What paralyzed me were the contrasts:
We walked through the park and were shown, -
“Here is where people were tortured” and then,
“Here is where officers’ families would swim, and play guitar, and sing.”
Buildings were thin and the space was small, just an old country villa
And the sounds of screams and laughs would swirl together in the air like blood dripped into water.

The worst was a rose garden, the pride of the officers.
It had roses from all over the world - a thirty-meter spiral of rose bushes
Blossoming in blues and reds and purples and pinks and yellows and whites
Meticulously cared for in the center of the park
And in the open air, in the midst of beauty, the officers would rape the youngest women.
The officers would rape the youngest women and the sound would wash out over the roses, over the park, over the imprisoned, over the newly arrived, until it crashed against the walls and sank into the earth