Santiago de Chile, like other Latin American cities, has a glowing face. For less than a dollar a day, legions of workers polish the mask.

In the middle of the Rio de Janeiro night, the Hunchbacked Christ stands, luminous and generous, with outstretched arms. The grandchildren of slaves find refuge beneath those arms.

A barefoot woman looks up at Christ from far below and, pointing at the shining light, says with great sadness:

"He won't be here much longer. I hear they're taking him away."

"Don't worry," the woman next door assures her. "Don't worry: He'll return."

Many people are killed by the police, and many more by the economy. Drums as well as gunshots echo through the violent city: the drums, impatient for consolation and vengeance, call to the African gods. Christ alone is not enough.

Certain voices from the American past, long past, sound very futuristic. For example, the ancient voice that still tells us we are children of the earth and that our mother is not for sale or for hire. While dead birds rain on Mexico City and rivers are turned into sewers, oceans into dumps and forests into deserts, this voice, stubbornly refusing to die, heralds another world different from this one that poisons the water, soul, air and soul.

The Peruvian Amazon Company hunted them down like beasts. The slave labor of the Huitoto supplied the world market with rubber. When the company caught an Indian who had fled the plantations, he was wrapped in a Peruvian flag soaked in kerosene, and burned alive.

The TV hurls out images that reproduce the system and voices that echo it, and there is no spot on earth it does not reach. The entire planet is a huge suburb of Dallas. We eat imported emotions as if they were canned sausages while the young children of television, trained to watch life instead of making it, shrug their shoulders.

In Latin America, freedom of expression consists of the right to protest on a few radio stations and in local newspapers. It has become unnecessary for the police to ban books: their price alone bans them.

Blatant colonialism mutilates you without pretense: it forbids you to talk, it forbids you to act, it forbids you to exist. Invisible colonialism, however, convinces you that serfdom is your destiny and impotence is your nature: it convinces you that it's not possible to speak, not possible to act, not possible to exist.

My certainties breakfast on doubts. And there are days when I feel like a stranger in Montevideo and anywhere else. On those days, days without sunshine, moonless nights, no place is my own and I do not recognize myself in anything or anyone. Words do not resemble what they refer to or even correspond to their own sounds. Then I am not where I am. I leave my body and travel far, heading nowhere, and I do not want to be with anybody, not even with myself, and I have no name nor wish to have any: then I lose all desire to call myself or be called.

Barbers humiliate me by charging half-price.

Twenty years ago, the mirror exposed the first bare spots concealed under my mop of hair. Nowadays, I shudder with horror at the reflection of my luminous, bald pate in windows and glass storefronts.

Every hair that falls, every single strand, is a fallen comrade who before falling had a name, or at least a number.

"Who are my contemporaries?" Juan Gelman asks himself.

Juan says that sometimes he comes across men who smell of fear, in Buenos Aires, Paris, or anywhere in the world, and feels that these men are not his contemporaries. But there is a Chinese who, thousands of years ago, wrote a poem about a goatherd who is far from his beloved, and yet can hear in the middle of the night, in the middle of the snow, the sound of her comb running through her hair. And reading this distant poem, Juan finds that yes, these people - the poet, the goatherd and the woman - are truly his contemporaries.

I was born and raised under the stars of the Southern Cross.

Wherever I go, they follow me. Under the sparkling Southern Cross, I live out the stages of my fate.

I have no god. If I had one, I would beseech him not to let me meet death, not yet. I still have a long way to go. There are moons at which I have not yet howled and suns which have not yet set me alight. I have still not swum in all the seas of the world, of which they say there are seven, nor in all the rivers of Paradise, of which they say there are four.