Eduardo Galeano - Voices of Time - A Life in Stories

The following day, José Miguel sat in a chair and declared, “I’m not moving an inch until I know who I am.”

It happened in 1950. Against all predictions, against all indications, Brazil lost the World Cup on home turf, beaten by Uruguay.

After the final whistle, with darkness falling, the crowd remained seated in the stands of the brand-new Maracanà stadium. People sculpted in stone, a gigantic monument to defeat: the largest crowd ever in the history of soccer could not speak or move. The mourners stayed until late into the night.

Isaías Ambrosio was there. He was one of the workmen who had built the stadium and he’d been given a free ticket.

A half century later, Isaias is still there, tethered to the same spot in the empty grandstand.

Every day at the fatal hour, his lips pressed to an invisible microphone, broadcasting to an imaginary audience, Isaias recounts the play that brought defeat: every step, every painful detail. Then, in the tones of a radio commentator, he bellows out the fatal goal, the goooooooooooal, he wails it and wails it again, as he did the day before and will the day after and every day to follow.

Part radio, part telephone, and part clothes iron, complete with a wind-up handle and a microphone, Rusvelt Nicodemo’s machine was definitely high tech.

As Rúsvelt told it, the machine brought him back to life after his blood turned to jelly like blood sausage. From then on, he believed only in the machine.

Whenever he got permission to go out, Rúsvelt headed for Conde Street and would spend hours watching Santo Domingo’s society girls go by.

There was one whose light always shone brighter than the rest, and he’d trail her glow, at a respectful distance.

One night the machine, which never lied, told him, “She adores you.”

At the next corner Rúsvelt crossed to cut the girl off. “How long are you going to go on pretending you don’t care? Your lips say nothing, but I hear the voice of your heart.”

The machine confirmed, “She’s dying for you.”

But the moment she caught sight of him, she took off at top speed. Rúsvelt lost patience and ran after her shouting, “Coward, temptress, liar.” Not from disappointment but from indignation. He could not stand playacting.

His outings always ended the same way. An awful beating and back to the asylum in Nigua.

The machine consoled him, “If women were necessary, God would have one.”

His tractor broke down: it had to happen sometime.

His crop failed: the weather didn’t help.

But when the run of bad luck hit his cow and the calf was stillborn, Antonio was certain: his neighbors had put the evil eye on him.

It couldn’t just be a plain and simple evil eye. Too efficient. Antonio figured his enemies had cast the spell from some apparatus that looked like a television but wasn’t one. He searched the town of Ambia for this electronic eye, studying the antennae house by house. He couldn’t find it.

He had no alternative but to move to the forest, where there was no electricity.

He girded his fortress with holly and garlic cloves and bottles stuffed with bread and a huge necklace of salt, and he carpeted the inside with crosses of every size and portraits of Galicia’s most famous soccer players.

And in the door he plunged the knife that cuts through envy.

Almir D’Avila came in as a child, was declared insane, and never left.

No one ever wrote him a letter, no one ever paid him a visit.

Though he might like to leave, he has nowhere to go; though he might like to talk, he has no one to talk to.

For over forty years, he has spent his days in the Sao Paulo asylum walking in circles, a transistor radio pressed to his ear. Along the way he always meets the same men walking in circles, each with a transistor pressed to his ear.

One of the doctors organized a field trip to see Joan Miró’s paintings.

Almir put on his only suit, threadbare but well ironed by his mattress, pulled his admiral’s hat down over his eyes, and set off with the others.

And he saw. He saw exploding colors, a tomato with a mustache, a dancing fork, a bird that was a naked woman, the heavens with eyes, faces with stars.

He looked at painting after painting and frowned. It seemed Miro was a disappointment, and the doctor wanted to know why.

“Too much,” said Almir.

“Too much what?”

“Too much craziness.”

For over a year, Titina Benavidez couldn’t find the strength to lift her eyelids.

In the hospital they thought it could be ataxia, a rare condition, but tests ruled it out. The opthamologist found nothing.

Titina, eyes shut day and night, remained cloistered at her family’s farm on the outskirts of Las Piedras.

Perhaps her eyes had lost the will to go on looking. Nobody knows. What we do know is that her healthy young heart lost the will to go on beating.

On December 31, 2000, Titina died, as the year, the century, and the millennium died, perhaps as tired as she of seeing what they saw.

On the open plains of Salto, the supervisor, now getting on in years, had a reputation for seeing what no one else could.

Carlos Santalla asked him, with all due respect, Sir, if it was true what people said, that he saw things that were invisible because he had a broad mind. So broad, people said, that it was too big for his skull and gave him headaches.

The elderly gaucho laughed loudly. “I’ll tell you this, I’m curious and I’m lucky. The narrower my vision gets, the more I see.”

Carlos was nine at the time. When he was about to turn one hundred, he still remembered it. For him, too, the years had narrowed his vision and he saw more.

Somewhere in time, beyond time, the world was gray. Thanks to the Ishir Indians, who stole color from the gods, the world today is resplendent with colors that dazzle the eyes of all who look at them.

Ticio Escobar lent a hand to a film crew that came to the Chaco to shoot scenes of daily life among the Ishir.

An Indian girl pursued the director, a silent shadow glued to his side, staring into his face as if she wanted to jump into his strange blue eyes.

The director turned to Ticio, who knew the girl and understood her language. Through him, she confessed, “I want to know what colors you see.”

The director smiled. “The same as you.”

“And how do you know what colors I see?”

Gods and devils merge in the crowd, coming and going in the variegated flow of the many. Here nobody has a job but everybody has lots to do.

The light shouts, the air dances. Each person is a walking color. The black bodies cast green and blue shadows, and the glorious breeze contains so many shades that the rainbow hides its head for fear of looking foolish.

Above the sea, splashed across the slopes of the flayed mountains, Port-au-Prince presents itself to the eyes as a shrill palette of color, where life gets distracted and forgets how little it lasts and how much it hurts.

Could it be that the city imitates the artists who paint the city? Or is it without help of any kind that she transforms her garbage into beauty?