In A Special Place In My Home I Keep Only Memories, Keepsakes From The Cordillera: Photos Of Many Of

In a special place in my home I keep only memories, keepsakes from the cordillera: photos of many of those who died, objects from the plane, things I collected from everyone who died and who we did not expect to stay alive. So I save them in this altar, which is my most sacred and beloved piece of furniture. I carried back a lot of objects in a bag, but there were some things that we didn’t know which dead boy they belonged to, nor did any survivor recognise it as his own. [...] I have dozens of things from ’72. But the thing I value most, because I feel that it symbolises everything we lived through, is a silver cross that is missing its left arm. It is a cross that somebody had hanging over his heart, although I found it lying in the snow. It is about 4cm long, and the whole arm that’s left measures less than 2cm. It suffered some sort of violent impact in the centre – whoever had it received a severe blow to the middle of his chest. But what moves me most about it is that despite being dented, despite the fact that it’s missing an arm, with the metal all jagged and torn, all the same it keeps being, unmistakably, a cross. That was what happened to us. We were dented and bruised, beaten down and terribly abused, but we kept on being whole men.