108

It was winter. My father called us urgently. They found his naked body on the floor. There was a crowd of people at his corner. The police separated the curious. My relatives were there. They asked me to go inside and choose the clothes in wich he would be buried. I opened his wardrove, it was empty. When I asked them what he died of they told me: "of sadness". That answer contradicted all my memories of his life. I think my parents made a mistake when they told me as a child: You must not enter your uncle's house. From that moment on, everything he did attracted my attention. Rodolfo was different. He wore flashy clothes, listened to Elvis and danced at every birthday party. The strange thing was that the chair by his side always remained empty. He was the only one among my father's brothers who didn't want to be a blacksmith like my grandfather. In the Paraguay of the seventies, under Stroessner's dictatorship, he wanted to be a dancer. This is the search of the traces of his life and the discovery that he was included in one of the "108 lists", arrested and tortured. Still today in Paraguay when someone calls you "108" they mean "hooker, faggot". For more than one generation, the time Stroessner's dictatorship lasted, men who came under suspicion of being homosexual or against to the regime were the favourite target of the collaborators. When they released him, my uncle hid in his corner until his wounds healed. As the years went by, Rodolfo became invisible to everybody and he couldn't approach the family because to do so, he would have had to change. One night he cried... and disappeared. Rodolfo's story reveals a part of the hidden and silenced History of my country. Renate Costa Perdomo