Eduardo Galeano - Voices of Time - A Life in Stories

Cortes ordered it made of adobe, with stones from the Huitzilapan River and coral from the reefs offshore near a place where he’d anchored his flagship.

The house still stands and looks alive even though it died of suffocation. An enormous tree with a thousand arms strangled the house of the quistador. Branches, vines, and roots shattered the walls, invaded the patio, and smothered the windows, barring the smallest flicker of light. The dense foliage left one door open, for no one. Day after day, the tree proceeds with its leisurely ritual of devouring the work of centuries, under the indifferent or scornful eye of the neighbors.

There she was born, there she took her first steps.

When Rigoberta returned, years later, her village was gone. Soldiers had left nothing alive in what had been called Laj Chimel, little Chimel, the place you could hold in the palm of your hand. They killed the people and the corn and the hens; the few Indians who managed to escape into the dense forest had to strangle the dogs so their barking wouldn’t give them away.

Rigoberta Menchú wandered through the mist, uphill and down, in search of the creeks of her childhood, but there were none. The waters where she once bathed had gone dry, or perhaps they’d just gone, far away.

Of the oldest trees, which she’d believed would stand forever, only rotten stumps remained. Their powerful branches had served as gallows, their trunks as backdrops for the firing squads; afterward the trees let themselves die.

Through the mist, into the mist Rigoberta walked, drop with no bud with no branch. She searched for her dear friend the cuxin and found only dry, exposed roots. Nothing else was left of the tree that during her years of exile used to visit her in dreams, covered with white, yellow-hearted blossoms.

The cuxin had aged overnight and pulled itself out by the roots.

Seven women sat in a circle.

From far away, from the town of Momostenango, Humberto Ak’abal brought them a few dry leaves he’d collected at the foot of a Spanish cedar.

Each woman crushed a leaf, quietly, next to her ear. And each opened a window on the tree’s memory:

One felt the wind blowing.

Another, the branch swaying softly.

A third, the beating of a bird’s wings.

Yet another heard rain falling.

One, the scurrying of a beetle.

Another, the echo of voices.

The last, the low murmur of footsteps.

It looks like an orchid, but it’s not. It smells like a gardenia, but it’s not that either. Its large petals tremble like white wings yearning to fly away and leave the stalk behind. That must be why in Cuba they call it mariposa, “butterfly.”

Alessandra Riccio planted a butterfly bulb she brought from Havana to Naples. In the strange earth of a far-off land, the butterfly came into leaf but did not flower. Months and years went by, and it sprouted nothing but greenery.

Until a few of Alessandra’s Cuban friends came to visit and spent a week at her house. The plant was surrounded by the lilting sounds of home, that melodious Caribbean way of singing the words they speak. For seven days and seven nights, the plant listened to the music of conversation, since Cubans talk whenever they’re awake and also in their sleep.

After bidding her friends good-bye at the airport, Alessandra returned home to find the white petals of a newborn flower.

By night, Norberto Paso hefted cargo in the port of Buenos Aires.

By day, far from the port, he built this house. Blanca brought him bricks and buckets of mortar, and the walls rose up around the dirt yard.

The house was half finished when Blanca brought home a jacaranda. It was a small tree, costing a small fortune. Norberto shook his head. “You’re nuts,” he said, and helped her plant it.

When they finished the house, Blanca died.

Years have passed, and now Norberto rarely goes out. Once a week he travels several hours to join other old men in the city center and protest because their pensions are crap that wouldn’t even buy enough rope to hang themselves with.

When Norberto returns late at night, the jacaranda is there, waiting for him.

His teacher died an infamous death on a cross in Jerusalem.

Twenty centuries later, bullets split open Carlos Mugica’s chest on a street in Buenos Aires.

Orlando Yorio, his brother in the faith, wanted to clean up Carlos’s blood. He brought a bucket of water and a mop, but the police wouldn’t let him. So Orlando stood in front of the house, mop in hand, his gaze fixed on the puddle big enough to be the blood of many.

Suddenly, without warning, a furious downpour washed the blood toward the foot of a plane tree. The tree drank it to the last drop.

They look stationary, but they breathe and move, seeking the light.

And they talk. Few people know this, but when a tree gets cut or bruised, it protects itself by secreting poison, and it sends out an alarm to other trees. Words travel through the air that in tree language say, “danger” and “watch out.” Then the other trees protect themselves by secreting poison too.

Maybe that’s how it’s been since trees first stood tall and multiplied, when the forests were so vast that it’s said a squirrel could circle the earth hopping from branch to branch.

Now, between one desert and the next, the surviving trees keep alive their ancient custom of taking care of each other.

Many are the rings inscribed on their trunks. These giant trees, heavy with years, have spent centuries chained to the depths of the earth, and they cannot escape. Defenseless against chain saws, they crack and fall. Whenever one topples, a world comes crashing down, and flocks of birds are left homeless.

Unwieldy old trees are fated to die. In their place grow profitable young saplings. Native forests give way to contrived forests. Order — military, industrial — triumphs over the chaos of nature. Pine and eucalyptus grown for export look like soldiers in formation, marching off to the world market.

Fast food, fast wood. Man-made forests grow overnight and are sold in the time it takes to say amen. Source of hard currency, triumph of development, symbol of progress, these wood farms suck the land dry and leave the soil barren.

No birds sing in them.

People call them “forests of silence.”

The macaw was but a chick in a nest when his tree was felled.

Imprisoned in a birdcage, he spent his whole life indoors. When his owner died, he was abandoned. The Schlenkers, who run a refuge for lost animals near Quito, took him in.

The macaw had never laid eyes on a relative. Now he can’t get along with other macaws or with any of his parrot cousins.

He can’t even get along with himself. Hunched in a corner, he shakes and screeches, pecks and pulls out his feathers, until his plucked skin bleeds.

Poor thing, I say. Nothing could be lonelier. But then Abdón Ubidia, who brought me to the refuge, introduces me to the loneliest creature in the world.

It is the last aguti paca, or wild guinea pig. He spends his nights walking in circles and his days hidden in the hollow trunk of a fallen tree. In this region, he is the only one of his species left alive. All of his kind have been exterminated.