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It was not easy to endure being locked up in one of Villa Grimaldi’s miserable cells, which resembled vertical coffins. It was even harder in the high temperatures of the summer months of the Andes foothills in Peñalolén. I was inside one of those cells, blindfolded, my feet and hands in chains.

One day it occurred to me to sing a beautiful song I had heard and learned by heart a short time before my arrest, at one of the safe houses that hid me from my persecutors. The song was called 'Alfonsina y el mar'.

All of a sudden, I heard the metal gate that separated us from the rest of the facility unexpectedly open and the guard asking who was singing. To avoid collective punishment, I knocked on the door from inside my “coffin cell” and identified myself as the singer. The guard, who I could not see, opened the cell door and stood in front of me. 'Nice song', he said. 'Sing it again'.

I mustered enough courage to sing the beautiful verses of this song a second time. The song was written as a tribute to a poet who killed herself in the sea. To my surprise, the guard let me sing the entire song without interrupting or beating me. And all my tortured comrades could hear my voice in the silence of their own cells.

When I finished singing, the guard asked what the song title was and who had written it, and locked me up again. Then, he was gone.

A few days later he called me again, euphorically shouting my name from the other side of the metal gate. He wanted to let me know that he now owned the song and that he could listen to it every day. The night before, he had raided the house of a resistance fighter and taken all the phonograph records he found.