Eduardo Galeano - Voices of Time - A Life in Stories

“He says he abandoned his corn,” Carlos translated. “He says the cornfield is very sad. Many days since he last went.”

“He says he abused the fire. He cursed the flames, because they didn’t glow brightly.”

“He says he defiled the path, cutting back undergrowth when there was no need.”

“He says he hurt the ox.”

“He says he chopped down a tree, without telling it why.”

The priest had no idea what to do with these sins that don’t appear anywhere on Moses’s list.

Jeronimo, José Saramago’s grandfather, didn’t know how to read or write, but he knew a great deal and what he knew he kept to himself.

When he fell ill, he knew that his time had come. He walked silently through his orchard, stopping beside each tree, and one by one he hugged them. He embraced the fig tree, the laurel, the pomegranate, and the three or four olive trees.

On the road, a car waited.

The car took him to Lisbon, to his death.

It was Enrique Castanares’s birthday, and there was a party.

Nobody had invited Manuela Godoy, but the guitars called out to her.

She wasn’t the sort to join in. She had lived and drunk away no one knew how many years, but with no one, for no one, always keeping to her shack on the outskirts of the town of Robles. People knew only that she was so poor she had nothing, not even fleas, and so lonely she slept with her arms around a bottle.

But the night of the party, Manuela hung about the Castanares house, peering in the windows, until they asked her in and she joined the dancing throng.

She wore everyone out, dancing to every song and drinking all the wine.

She was the last to leave. They wrapped up what was left of the barbecue and a few empanadas, and with them bundled into a sack she headed off at the end of the night. Weaving from side to side, she entered the cornfield and vanished.

The following morning, when Enrique looked out the door, she was standing there, waiting. “What did you forget, Dona Manuela?”

She shook her head. In her hands, as if in a chalice, glowed a squash. It was the first harvest from her garden. “For you,” she said.

Those weren’t fireworks, they were the sounds of war.

Over Zagreb, shells and bombs jolted a sky lit up by tracer bullets.

The old year was dying, and Yugoslavia was dying too, while Fran Sevilla filed his final story of the year for Radio Nacional in Madrid.

Fran hung up the phone and flicked his cigarette lighter to see his watch. He ran his tongue over his lips, swallowed. He was alone in an empty hotel, accompanied only by the screams of sirens and the thunder of bombs, and the new year was just a few minutes away. Flashes from the explosions were the only light in the room.

Lying in bed, Fran pulled twelve grapes from a bunch. At midnight, on the dot, he ate them.

With each grape, one by one, he tapped with a fork on a bottle of Rioja he had brought from Spain.

Clinking the bottle was something Fran learned as a child from his father, when they lived on the outskirts of Madrid in a neighborhood that had no church bells.

Lucila Escudero didn’t act her age.

Though she had buried seven children, she still looked at the world with the eyes of a newborn. She puttered around her three gardens in Santiago, Chile, three tiny jungles she watered every day. After chatting with her plants, she’d set off to explore the neighborhood, deaf to her own sorrows and sufferings and to all the sad voices of time.

Lucila believed in Paradise and knew that she deserved it, but she felt much better at home. To put death off the scent, she slept in a different spot every night. Some great-grandchild was always available to help her move the bed, and she grinned ear to ear imagining the Grim Reaper’s rage when he came for her.

Then she’d light her last cigarette of the day, in her long, carved cigarette holder, fill a glass with Maipo Valley red, and glide into dreamland with her Our Fathers and Ave Marias and a sip for every amen.

We called it The Webs, after the output of the spider Ramona, who wove endlessly on the ceiling, setting a fine example for the working class in the port of Montevideo.

A greengrocer’s by day, the place became a wine shop by night. Under the stars, we nighthawks drank and sang and talked.

The running tabs were kept on the wall behind the counter.

“That wall’s so dirty it’s going to collapse,” customers would say, now and then, between drinks.

The D’Alessandro brothers, Lito and Rafa, one roly-poly and the other gaunt, turned a deaf ear until they ran out of room for more numbers.

Then came the Night of Forgiveness, when whitewash cleared the accounts.

The regulars celebrated the occasion, baptizing new customers with a clink of a wineglass to the forehead.

The elixir leads to ruin. To the ruin of slugs.

At nightfall they emerge from their hiding places and at a slug’s pace march off to dine on the green flesh of plants.

In the middle of the garden, a glass of beer keeps watch. The temptation is irresistible. Drawn by the aroma, the slugs climb the side of the glass. From the edge of the abyss, they contemplate the tasty foam, and then, forgoing all caution, down they slide. In the sea of beer, drunk and happy, they drown.

Dàmaso Rodriguez had cows but no pasture. His cows wandered everywhere, and the moment he got distracted, they’d set out for the town of Ureña, for the park of their temptation.

They’d go straight to the big mango grove, where the trees stood swollen with fruit and a carpet of mangos covered the ground.

The police would interrupt their banquet. They’d drive the cows out with their nightsticks and lock them up.

Dámaso spent hours in the station house, putting up with the long wait and the longer lecture, until at last he could pay the fine and free his cows.

Aura, his daughter, sometimes went with him. She’d be all teary-eyed, while her father explained that the officers knew what they were doing. Even though there were plenty of mangos and they’d just wither on the ground, animals don’t deserve such a feast. Cows are not worthy of the golden nectar, reserved for men as solace for living.

“Don’t cry, my dear. Police are police, cows are cows, and men are men,” Dômaso said.

Aura, who was neither police, nor a cow, nor a man, squeezed his hand.

He made the count as usual. His men didn’t know how it had happened, or they were lying. He counted again, made sure. A calf was missing.

He caught the hired hand he suspected, secured him with rope, mounted his horse, and dragged him off.

The man was more dead than alive, his flesh torn by the rocky ground, but Don Carmen Itriago still took his time and pinned him with great care. He drove in stakes one after the other, and with moist rawhide he tied down the condemned man’s hands, feet, waist, and neck.

What remained of the man cried out, “I’ll pay for the calf, Don Carmen. I’ll give you whatever you say. I’ll give you my life.”

“At last, an offer I can’t refuse,” the boss said from high up on his horse, and he trotted off through the dust.