The poet has described her visit to a colonel of some military government in Latin America. The mundane details of life like his children, his wife and his typical western luxurious style of living is presented.
At the same time, the pistol on the cushion besides him shows the lethal side of the officer. Its presence is made noticeable amongst the things like pets and paper which are a common scene in any house. The bare moon brings out the feeling of emptiness and grieving in the house. The cop show that was showing on T.V. was in English which suggests the colonel’s preference.
The broken bottles embedded in walls are symbolic of the colonel’s attempt to keep people out of his enclave. After enjoying the dinner, the maid was called using a gold bell which is indicative of the royal style of living that the colonel lived. “A type of bread” suggests that the poet was unfamiliar with the bread being served as she was new to the country.
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The language barrier is apparent from the parrot saying “hello” on the terrace. The shutting up of the parrot by colonel is indicative of the fact that he wanted to shoot the government and the voices of dissent and of speakers by hanging them to death.
The poet’s role is seemingly quite and passive as he was interrupted by the Spanish T.V. commercial when he was about to answer the colonel about how he enjoyed the country. This all indicates that poet’s voice is of no real importance. The talk that followed was as if the colonel was trying to officiate and it wasn’t a discussion or debate in which they all participated.
The colonel’s audience which is evidently the poet and her friend became silent to his hostility and the atmosphere became so tense and strange that the communication between them existed but it was ominously limited to pleading through eyes.
The poet’s friend gave an indication to keep silent with a blink of eyes. The irony of human eyes shriveled and dried turning out from the grocery sack makes the visualization more horrifying. The poet introduces them like dried peach halves because the grocery sack being brought gave a suggestion of some root vegetables being present inside it.
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The poet was inevitably shocked by the spilling of human ears on the table where they had just finished eating and that makes the poet give the compulsive statement “There is no other way to say this”. Even though so much time has lapsed since the poet saw this incident, she still remembers the sight as a deliberate and unavoidable thing when they both were fully cognizant of the reality of the sight of human ears.
One of the ears coming alive in water is an expression of the dead who were tortured against this outrage. The ears are a living proof of the torture and the violent repression as they might have come from prisoners who are still alive. The ears are imagined to be keeping a scrap of hope that some outsider might publicize their plight.