The Destruction of the Soul: A Treatable Disease

One evening while I was struggling to write this paper I received a pressing telephone request: could I take part in a radio interview that very same evening? I would be asked to respond to a few questions about the importance of an artistic and cultural centre in the treatment of victims of torture and other forms of political atrocity. Someone who had been himself tortured would be interviewed along with me. His testimony plus my professional opinion could be important in the defence of the Casa Latino-Americana, which was threatened with an impending amputation in its meagre budget by the London Boroughs Grants Scheme.

Tired, I am not sure whether from a long day's work or a lifetime of taking part in lost struggles, I joined my companions in the cab taking us to the City. Oscar, the tall, young man who had been chain-smoking in the front of the car was interviewed first. In fact he had not been tortured, he said, only beaten, but his father had been through terrible things. Among these he had been left for three weeks in a pit together with the bodies of his dead comrades. Oscar seemed more interested in talking about his father's experience than his own, or perhaps he could not clearly separate the two. But eventually he was telling the nice woman recording his words how he was one of the two survivors of a group of twenty-two young people, ranging from 14 to 18, mercilessly massacred one evening in a shanty town in Santiago. His girlfriend was among them: ‘she died in my arms’, he said. He choked and was speechless for a long while as if gasping for air but was in fact struggling against the sobs.

Later on I learned that the broadcast had been cut to only three minutes which included the Andean music and part of Oscar's words. My ‘professional’ contribution had been suppressed, surely no great loss to the world. I just wondered about the fate of Oscar's words in the immensity of the London morning and whether the sobs had been part of the transmissio