Eduardo Galeano - Voices of Time - A Life in Stories

While he awaits death, he has not a soul to talk to.

His captors cut off one wing when they took him in the jungle. Kitty Hischier found him in the Puerto Vallarta market. She felt sorry for him and bought him thinking she’d set him free. But the parrot couldn’t manage on his own. In his mutilated state, he’d have been an easy snack for the first hungry gullet to come along. Kitty decided to sneak him across the border in her pickup. He would join the thousands upon thousands of other undocumented Mexicans in the United States.

She called him Houdini, because he kept trying to escape. The first day on the road he raised the cage door with his powerful beak. The second day he pulled up the cage floor. The third day he made a hole in the wire screening. On the fourth, he tried to flee through the roof, but he no longer had the strength.

Houdini wouldn’t eat or utter a sound. On hunger strike and in mutinous silence, he died.

They say a girl’s kiss will turn a frog into a prince. Frogs don’t seem all that kissable, but there are girls who have tried. It hasn’t worked.

But when pesticides kiss a frog, it turns into a monster.

In the past, little frogs rarely turned out deformed. But the rare has become commonplace in the lakes of Minnesota, the woods of Pennsylvania, and elsewhere. Fewer and fewer frogs develop at all, and more and more emerge without eyes or with an extra leg or one leg missing.

By the time frogs had their fatal date with chemicals, they’d lived between water and land for millions of years, beginning on the remote day when the song of the first frog broke the world’s silence.

In Brazil, peasant farmers asked, Why are there so many people without land when there is so much land without people? The answer came by bullet.

Fear was their only inheritance, and they lost it. They kept on asking questions and taking land and committing the crime of wanting to work.

In their millions they asked, Why are chemicals allowed to torture the earth? What will happen to us if seeds are no longer seeds?

At the beginning of 2001 landless peasants invaded an experimental plot planted with genetically modified seeds belonging to the Monsanto corporation in Rio Grande do Sul. They left not one artificial soy plant standing.

The plantation was called Nao me toque—”Do Not Touch.”

For heartburn, tomatoes peeled and grilled.

For indigestion, boiled leaves of tepozàn.

For muscle aches, ointments of maguey, India rubber, or cooked cactus pears.

Cactus flesh and sarsparilla purified the blood, pea pods cleansed the kidneys, and pine nuts purged the intestines.

Five-fingered flowers from the tree of little hands gave the heart serenity and courage.

The conquistadores found these novelties in Mexico. They carried them back to Spain, along with other herbs with unpronounceable Indian names that relieved fever, killed parasites, soothed the urinary tract, countered the poison of snake bites.

Ancient American pharmacology was well received in Europe.

A few years later the Holy Inquisition unleashed its dogs. Knowledge of plants was a tool of witches and demons disguised as doctors, who deserved the rack or the stake. Beneath their exotic robes lay the cloven hoof of the Malignant one.

Brews and unguents from America came from Hell, as did the fires of chocolate and the smoke of tobacco, which incited sinning in another’s bed. Likewise, the devilish mushrooms pagans ate to float in the air by the cunning evil of their idolatries.

Is this mountain really a mountain?

Or is it a woman — monumental breasts, curved knees — lying in the sun?

In the Navajo language, her name is Diichiti.

Clouds shower her body, from which sprout herbs that offer cures or consolation.

Her insides are made of pumice. The company Arizona Tufflite has nibbled away at her for years, laying bare her raw flesh. Not much is left of her green skin. The great wounds are visible for miles.

The pace of excavation has picked up since fashion deemed the new must look old and jeans worn soft by pumice became all the rage. But so has the pace of protest, and this time the many voices became a single thunderclap. United were the Navajo, Hopi, Hualapai, Dine, Zuni, and other peoples forever divided by those who rule over them. And the company had to depart.

As the new millennium commenced, the Indians began to heal the lady who heals them.

At the same time, thousands of leagues to the south, bullets chased the U’wa Indians off their land in the mountains of Samoré.

Helicopters and ground troops cleared the way for Occidental Petroleum, and the Colombian press hailed “this advance party of progress in a hostile environment.”

When the drills set to work, experts declared the wells would produce no fewer than four hundred million barrels of oil.

Every day at dawn and dusk, the Indians gathered on the misty peaks to chant their incantations.

After a year the company had spent sixty million dollars and had found not a drop of oil.

The U’wa proved once more that the earth is not deaf. She heard their pleas and hid the oil, her black blood, so the trees would not die, the grass would not wither, the springs would not be poisoned.

In their language, U’wa means “People who think.”

Not long ago in the Valley of Mexico, a mountain erupted.

Clouds of flame, rocks on fire, blistering ash: Popocatepetl vomited the stones that had stopped up its mouth, which was as wide as four soccer fields.

Evacuating the nearby towns was almost impossible.

“No,” people said. “He is good. He won’t harm us.”

The locals have always eaten and drunk with Don Popò. They offer him tortillas, tequila, and music, and they ask him for rain for the beans and corn and for protection against hail and evil winds in the air and in life. He answers through the mouths of the masters of time, who listen to him while they dream and then recount his words.

That’s the custom. But this time Popò gave no warning. The masters of time did not know that the volcano was choking, that it had had enough of talking through other mouths.

The volcano spoke his piece.

He killed no one.

In one town on the slopes, three weddings took place on the night of the eruption, as if nothing were amiss. The red glow from above lit up the ceremonies.

In colonial times, Cerro Rico in Potosí produced much silver and many widows.

For over two centuries in the freezing heights of South America, Europe observed a Western Christian ritual: day after day, night after night, Europe fed the mountain human flesh in exchange for silver.

For every ten Indians who entered the mouths of the shafts, seven never came out. The killings occurred in Bolivia, which did not yet have that name, so that the dawn of capitalism, which also did not yet have that name, could occur in Europe.

Today, Cerro Rico is hollow, his silver long gone.

In the Indians’ language, Potosi, or Potojsi, means “ to thunder” or “to explode.” Tradition has it that the mountain would thunder when wounded. Now emptied, he remains silent.