Their hands were tied or handcuffed, yet their fingers danced, flew, drew words. The prisoners were hooded, but leaning back, they could see a bit, just a bit, down below. Although it was forbidden to speak, they spoke with their hands. Pinio Ungerfeld taught me the finger alphabet, which he had learned in prison without a teacher:

"Some of us had bad handwriting," he told me. "Others were masters of calligraphy."

The Uruguayan dictatorship wanted everyone to stand alone, everyone to be no one: in prison and barracks, and throughout the country, communication was a crime.

Some prisoners spent more than ten years buried in solitary cells the size of coffins, hearing nothing but clanging bars or footsteps in the corridors. Fernandez Huidobro and Mauricio Rosencof, thus condemned, survived because they could talk to each other by tapping on the wall. In that way they told of dreams and memories, fallings in and out of love; they discussed, embraced, fought; they shared beliefs and beauties, doubts, and guilts, and those questions that have no answer.

When it is genuine, when it is born of the need to speak, no one can stop the human voice. When denied mouth, it speaks with the hands or the eyes, or the pores, or anything at all. Because every single one of us has something to say to the others, something that deserves to be celebrated or forgiven by others.

Galeano, Eduardo. "Celebration of The Human Voice/2." The Book of Embraces. Trans. Cedric Belfrage. New York: Norton, 1989. 25.

"Night calls to the water lily, and at the stroke of midnight those white points of light burst open in the river, opening the darkness, penetrating it, breaking it apart and swallowing it up."

"My certainties breakfast on doubts. And there are days when I feel like a stranger in Montevideo and anywhere else."

"The sun lit up the snow and set a big white fire ablaze at the edge of the ocean that brought tears to my eyes . . . The ocean looked very happy, licking this enormous plate of ice cream, and my last images of Calella de la Costa were the sea's joy and that radiant field of white."

"For we are all mortal until the first kiss and the second glass, which is something everyone knows, no matter how small his or her knowledge."

United your resolve, united your hearts, may your spirits be at one, that you may long together dwell in unity and concord.

rig veda - the final mantra