The Colonel

The Colonel has been haunting me since I read it earlier this week. What has captured my mind most are the first and final lines. Carolyn Forche captured me with the honest simplicity of the first two lines: "What you have heard is true. I was in his house." She then goes into an abundance of short but sweet sentences describing the Colonel's household. Her statements are clear cut and easy to understand, but they convey so much imagery. She is really only describing everything going on in the house in the most simple manner, but every statement plays out a moving picture in front of my eyes. The broken bottles embedded in the walls, the sack of human ears like dried peaches laying on the wooden table. The expansion of the ear coming back to life in a jar of water, like a grow-your-own pet. When the Colonel becomes stern with the narrator and friend, accompanying his harsh words and actions with "Something for your poetry, no?" Everything becomes so much more vivid, and I believed every word as truth. Forche turns her story into a recollection, almost like a testament spoken and recorded on paper. Finally, the impact of the final two sentences which have stuck in my head all week. The Colonel swipes the ears from the table onto the floor, and "Some of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground." This is one of the more intense images I've felt and seen in the reader this semester. It creates a feeling of speechlessness among the three people who sit at the Colonel's table, forced by the intensity of his words and the fear of the two foreigners. Silence seems so much more profound after the bang of a shotgun, and the earth feels so much more still after a rattling storm.