Eduardo Galeano - Mirrors - Stories of Almost Everyone

Today’s cities are immense jails holding prisoners of fear, where fortresses masquerade as homes and armor as clothing.

A state of siege. Do not get distracted, do not let down your guard, do not ever trust, say the lords of the world, masters of impunity who rape the environment, kidnap countries, extort wages, and murder by the throng. Watch out, they warn, the bad guys are right there, huddled in miserable slums, chewing on their envy, resentfully licking their wounds.

The poor: the ragamuffins for all bondage, the dead for all wars, the flesh for all prisons, the bargain-basement hands for all jobs.

Hunger, which kills silently, kills the silent. Experts speak for them, poorologists who tell us what the poor do not work at, what they do not eat, what they do not weigh, what height they do not reach, what they do not have, what they do not think, what parties they do not vote for, what they do not believe in.

The only question unanswered is why poor people are poor. Could it be because we are fed by their hunger and clothed by their nakedness?

The blame-o-meter indicates that immigrants have come to steal our jobs, and the danger-o-meter is flashing red.

If poor, young, and nonwhite, the intruder from outside is deemed guilty at first sight, guilty of indigence, of chaos, of carrying the unconcealed weapon of his skin. If neither poor nor young nor dark, a nasty welcome is justified in any case, since he or she has come prepared to work twice as hard for half as much.

Anxiety about losing one’s job is among the most fearsome of all the fears that govern us in these times of fear, and immigrants are always at hand to take responsibility for unemployment, shrinking wages, crime, and other calamities.

In times past, Europe showered soldiers, prisoners, and starving peasants on the south of the world. These protagonists of colonial adventures went down in the history books as envoys of God and civilization sent to save barbaric lands.

Now comes the return voyage. Those who travel south to north, or perish in the attempt, are protagonists of colonial misadventures, and in the history books they will go down as envoys of the devil and barbarism sent to ruin civilized lands.

In Renaissance Europe, fire was the fate reserved for the children of hell, since from fire they had come. England punished with “horrendous death those who had had sexual relations with animals, Jews, or persons of the same sex.”

Before the Spanish Conquest, homosexuals were free in America, except in the kingdoms of the Aztecs and the Incas. Conquistador Vasco Núñez de Balboa took Indians who practiced that abnormality with utter normality and threw them to hungry dogs. He believed homosexuality was contagious. Five centuries later, I heard the same story from the archbishop of Montevideo.

Historian Richard Nixon knew the vice could be fatal for civilization:

“You know what happened to the Greeks? Homosexuality destroyed them. Sure, Aristotle was a homo, we all know that, so was Socrates. Do you know what happened to the Romans? The last six emperors were fags.”

Civilizer Adolf Hitler took drastic measures to save Germany from the peril. “Degenerates guilty of aberrant crimes against nature” were obliged to wear a pink triangle. How many of them died in the concentration camps? No one knows.

In the year 2001, the German government decided “to rectify the exclusion of homosexuals from being counted among the victims of the Holocaust.” It took them more than half a century to correct the omission.

Hitler believed “the Gypsy plague” was a threat, and he was not alone.

Centuries ago many people became convinced that this race of dark color carries crime in its veins, and they believe it still: always unwelcome, drifters with no home but the road, defilers of lasses and latches, charmed fingers for cards and the knife.

In a single night in August 1944, 2,897 Gypsies, women, children, men, perished in the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

Of all the Gypsies of Europe, one in four was annihilated during the war.

About them, who even asked?

The conquistadors confirmed that Satan, expelled from Europe, had found refuge on the islands and coasts of the Caribbean kissed by his fiery mouth.

There lived beastly beings who called carnal sin “play,” and who practiced it at all hours and with all comers, who knew nothing of the Ten Commandments or the Seven Sacraments or the Seven Deadly Sins, who went about naked, and who had the habit of eating each other.

The conquest of America was a long and thorny exorcism. The evil one was so deeply rooted in this land that when the Indians seemed to be devotedly kneeling before the Virgin, they were really praying to the serpent crushed beneath her foot. And when they kissed the cross they were celebrating the encounter between the rain and the earth.

The conquistadors fulfilled the mission of returning to God the gold, silver, and numerous other riches that the devil had usurped. Recovering the booty was no easy task. Now and again, however, they got a little help from above. When the lord of hell laid an ambush in a narrow canyon to keep the Spaniards from reaching the mountain of silver in Potosí, an archangel came down from the heights and gave him a tremendous thrashing.

In Cuba, according to Christopher Columbus, there were mermaids with men’s faces and roosters’ feathers.

In Guyana, according to Sir Walter Raleigh, there were people with eyes on their shoulders and mouths in their chests.

In Venezuela, according to Father Pedro Simon, there were Indians with ears so big they dragged along the ground.

In the Amazon, according to Cristóbal de Acuña, there were natives who had their feet on backward, heels in front and toes in the rear.

According to Pedro Martín de Anglería, who wrote the first history of America but never visited it, in the New World there were men and women with tails so long they could only sit on seats with holes.

In America, Europe encountered the iguana.

This diabolical beast had been foreseen in depictions of dragons. The iguana has a dragon’s head, a dragon’s snout, a dragon’s crest and armor, and a dragon’s claws and tail.

But if the dragon was like the iguana is, then Saint George’s lance missed the mark.

It only acts strangely when in love. Then, it changes color and mood, grows nervous, loses its appetite and its way, and becomes skittish. When not tormented by love, the iguana makes friends with everyone, climbs trees in search of tasty leaves, swims in rivers just for fun, and naps in the sun on flat rocks, hugging other iguanas. It threatens no one, knows not how to defend itself, and is not even capable of giving a stomachache to humans who eat it.