Neruda: entierro y testamento

"In September 1973, Fina Torres, a photojournalist active in Venezuela at that time, was in Santiago during the coup that overthrew the government of the Unidad Popular. She photographed the damage done by the artillery to the facade of the Palacio de la Moneda, the armed soldiers in the streets, and other unsettling scenes of everyday life at the time: the cleaning of painted slogans from the walls, people lining up to buy food, the surveillance of the embassies, and the anguished seriousness of people waiting outside the morgue. Photographs of similar scenes can be found in the photobook Chili September 1973 by Koen Wessing, one of whose images is virtually identical to another taken by Torres. Both photographed a dark-haired girl standing at the door of the nourgue and showing the ID photo of a soldier. Torres decided to repeat the image to show more clearly the features of the young man who had disappeared, and Wessing did the same. Ten days after the coup, the poet Pablo Neruda died in a clinic in Santiago. Torres photographed the funeral procession, which also laid to rest the Unidad Popular and a whole era of leftist aspirations. The procession turned into a demonstration, in spite of the menacing presence of numerous armed soldiers. Fina Torres left a testimony of the vigil held around the dead body of Neruda. As she racalls, she was "the only photographer in the writer's residence on the day of his death." The house had been entered and sacked by the soldiers, an event almost prophesied in the lines "Traitor / generals: / behold my dead house" from España en el Corazon. The photos show empty shelves, ashes from the auto-da-fé, open closets, flooded rooms, and other signs of plunder and destruction - images of the desolation that the deceased poet's relatives, also captured by Torres' camera, seem not to notice" Horacio Fernandez in The Latin American Photobook, p 102 — Testi: Sarmiento Alvaro. F.to: 14x19; pagg. 152; 48 BN; rileg. brossura. Editore: Inventarios Provisionales, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 1973.