Eduardo Galeano - Voices of Time - A Life in Stories

At the end of each night, Avel put the letters in their envelopes, stuck on fresh stamps, and dropped them in the mailbox.

She said she suffered from tachycardia every time she saw him, even from a distance.

She claimed that her salivary glands would go dry when he would look at her, even just a glance.

She admitted to a hypersecretion of the sweat glands each time he spoke to her, even just to return a greeting.

She acknowledged wild swings in her blood pressure when he would brush against her, even by mistake.

She confessed that because of him she suffered nausea, blurred vision, weak knees. During the day she could not stop from babbling stupidities and at night she could not sleep.

“That was a long time ago, doctor,” she said. “I never felt it again.”

The physician raised his eyebrows. “You never felt it ever again?”

He made his diagnosis: “Your case is serious.”

Captain Camilo Techera always went about with God on his lips: Good day, God willing. Until tomorrow, God willing.

When he took over the artillery base in Trinidad, he discovered that not a single soldier was married, as God commands, that all were living in sin, rolling in the hay of promiscuity like beasts in the field.

To put an end to this scandalous offense to the Lord, he sent for the priest who said mass in town. In a single day the priest ministered the holy sacrament of matrimony to all the troops, each with his girl, in the name of the captain, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

From that Sunday on, all the soldiers were husbands.

On Monday, one soldier said, “That woman is mine.”

And he buried a knife in the belly of a friend who had been looking at her.

On Tuesday, another soldier said, “This’ll teach you.”

And he wrung the neck of the woman who had vowed to obey him.

On Wednesday. .

A derelict old man was selling contraband cigarettes from a little table in an alley in downtown Santiago, Chile. He was sitting on the ground, drinking from a bottle. I stopped to chat and accepted a sip of wine that promised instant cirrhosis.

As I was paying him for the cigarettes, a melee began. All at once the flies scattered, the wine capsized, the table collapsed, and a steamroller of a woman picked up the old man with one fist.

I bent to collect the cigarettes strewn on the ground, while the woman shook the bag of bones in her hand and screamed, You philandering cocksucker you Don Juan asshole who do you think you are you bare-faced swine so you’ve been screwing Eva and Lucy— and he muttered, I don’t even know that one — and Pamela too— and he moaned, She came after me, — but the bombardment continued, You’ve been fucking Martha that bitch and that whore Charito and Betty and Patty, to the complete indifference of passersby, who showed no interest in this string of platinum blondes in fake eyelashes and reptilian boots.

While the indignant woman had her culprit by the throat and up against the wall, the man was mumbling vows, You are my only love you are my cathedral the others are nothing but little mission halls, until she, squeezing with intent to strangle, tossed him aside. Get out of here, she ordered. Get going, I never want to see you again. If I ever do. .”

Without another word she pronounced her dreadful verdict. Her eyes fixed on his sacred parts, she scissored the air with her fingers.

Bravely, I edged away.

Kneeling in the confessional, a repentant sinner admitted to greed, gluttony, lust, sloth, envy, pride, and anger.

“I’ve never confessed. I didn’t want you priests enjoying my sins more than me, so out of greed I kept them to myself.

“Gluttony? From the moment I saw her, I confess, I wanted to eat her alive.

“Is it lust to enter someone and get lost inside and never find your way out?

“That woman was the only thing in the world that didn’t make me slothful.

“I was envious — of myself, I confess.

“And I confess that later on I committed the sin of pride, believing she was me.

“And crazed with anger, I tried to break that mirror when I didn’t see myself.”

Because the woman never shut up, because she was always complaining, because there was never a small misunderstanding that she didn’t turn into a major problem, because he was tired of working like a mule for her and all her relatives, because he had to plead like a beggar in bed, because she had another and she pretended to be a saint, because she was a gnawing ache like nothing else he had ever felt, because he could not live without her or with her, he had no choice but to wring her neck like a chicken’s.

Because the man never listened, because he never paid attention, because there was no major problem that he didn’t treat like a small misunderstanding, because she was tired of working like a mule for him and all his relatives, because she had to obey like a whore in bed, because he had another and told the whole world, because he was a gnawing ache like nothing else she had ever felt, because she could not live without him or with him, she had no choice but to push him from the tenth floor like a sack of potatoes.

In the morning, they ate their breakfast. The radio was blaring the news like any other day. Nothing they heard caught their attention. Reporters don’t cover dreams.

They shut her up in a room, tied to the bed.

Every day a man entered, always the same one.

After a few months, the prisoner was pregnant.

Then they forced her to marry him.

The prison guards were not policemen or soldiers. They were the father and mother of the girl, practically a child, who had been caught kissing and stroking a classmate, another girl.

In Zimbabwe, at the end of 1994, Bev Clark heard her story.

Mr. or Mrs.? Or both? Or sometimes a he and sometimes a she? In the depths of the sea, you can never tell.

Sea bass and other fish are virtuosos in the art of nonsurgical sex change. The girls become boys and the boys become girls with astonishing ease, with no condemnation or ridicule for betraying nature or God.

The house, made of grass and twigs, is much larger than its inhabitant.

Building it in the thorny brush takes only a couple of weeks. Adorning it, however, demands much more time and effort.

No two houses are alike. Each home is painted to order, with pigment made of crushed berries, and each is decorated in its own way. The surroundings are dressed with treasures from the forest or from the detritus of some nearby town: pebbles, flowers, snail shells, weeds, mosses are laid out to create harmony, and beer-bottle caps and bits of colored glass, preferably blue, depict circles or fans on the ground. These designs are arranged and rearranged a thousand times until they occupy the best spots for catching the light.

Not for nothing are the birds called bowerbirds. They are the most flamboyant art architects in the islands of Oceania.

When the bird finishes building his home and garden, he lingers. He sings and waits for the females to pass by. For one of them to pause in its flight and admire his work. And then to choose him.