Eduardo Galeano - Voices of Time - A Life in Stories

René Favorolo, the only doctor around, was also a handyman. With the few instruments in his satchel and the medicines at hand he filled the role of cardiologist, surgeon, midwife, psychiatrist, and all-round specialist in whatever needed fixing.

One fine day, René went to Bahia Blanca and brought home an instrument never before seen in those solitudes inhabited only by the wind and the dust.

The record player had its quirks. After a couple of months it stopped working.

Along came Bautista on his bicycle. He sat on the ground, scratched his chin, poked around, soldered a few wires, tightened a few screws and nuts. “Now give it a try,” he said.

René chose a recording of Beethoven’s Ninth and placed the needle on his favorite part.

Music filled the house, spilling through the open window into the deserted night, and it lived on in the air after the record stopped spinning.

René said something or asked something, but Bautista didn’t answer.

Bautista had his face buried in his hands.

A long moment passed before the electrician was able to say, “Pardon me, Don René, but I never heard anything like that. I didn’t know there was such. . such electricity in this world.”

When Alfredo Zitarrosa died in Montevideo, his friend Juceca accompanied him to the gates of Paradise so he wouldn’t have to face the proceedings alone. When he came back, Juceca told us what he’d heard.

Saint Peter asked for his name, age, and occupation.

“Singer,” said Alfredo.

Singer of what, the gatekeeper wanted to know.

“Milongas,” said Alfredo.

Saint Peter hadn’t heard of them. His curiosity was pricked, though. “Sing,” he ordered.

Alfredo sang a milonga, then another, then a hundred. Saint Peter didn’t want him to stop. Having for so long strummed the earth, Alfredo’s voice now strummed the heavens.

God, who was out somewhere shepherding clouds, cupped his ear. Juceca said it was the only time God wasn’t sure who God was.

Liliana Villagra had been trying for a long while to fall asleep, wanting to but unable, and after a lot of tossing and turning and fighting with her pillow she heard the clock strike three and needed air. She got up, opened the window wide.

All the snow of all the winters that ever there were had fallen on Paris. Pigalle was always a noisy neighborhood, ringing with quarrels and carousing, the comings and goings of whores and transvestites. But that night Pigalle was a white desert, inscribed with the pattern of passing steps.

Then a song rose up from the snow to the window: a voice like a little bird’s crooning a sad old melody. It was a woman leaning against the wall, waiting for customers. A few snowflakes drifted down on rue Houdon and landed on the flea-market leather coat she held open, baring her body to the empty street.

Leaning out the window, Liliana offered her coffee: “Would you like to come in?”

“Thanks, but I can’t. I’m working.”

“Nice song,” said Liliana.

“I sing to keep from falling asleep.”

Prague was mute.

On the cornerà where Celetna Street gives onto the great plaza of the Old City, a voice suddenly split open the hush of the night.

From a wheelchair moored amid the cobblestones, a woman was singing.

I had never heard such a voice, so beautiful and so strange, a voice from another world, and I pinched myself. Was I dreaming? What world was I in?

I got my answer from a group of young men who came up behind me. They taunted the crippled singer, mimicking her and laughing themselves silly. She fell silent.

Ren Weschler took down his story. In 1975 Breyten Breyten bach was the only white prisoner among the many blacks on death row in the Pretoria jail.

At the end of each night, one of the condemned would be marched to the gallows. Before the floor opened beneath his feet, the man would sing. Every dawn, Breyten awoke to a different song. Alone in his cell, he listened to the voice of the man about to die.

Breyten lived. He hears it still.

Don Julian lived alone on the loneliest of the islands of Xochimilco, in a thatch hut watched over by dolls and dogs.

The dolls, picked up in garbage dumps, hung legless or armless from the trees. They protected him from evil spirits. The four skinny dogs defended him from evil people. But neither dolls nor dogs knew how to scare off the mermaids.

From the depths of the waters they called to him.

Don Julian knew a few spells. Whenever the mermaids came to carry him off, chanting his name over and over, he chased them away by singing back:

I’m telling you, I’m telling you,

the Devil can take me, God can too,

but never you, no never you.

And also:

Back to the brine, back to the brine,

give other lips your fatal kiss,

but never mine, no never mine.

One afternoon after plowing the earth to plant squash, Don Julian went to the water’s edge to fish. He caught a huge one, a fish he knew because twice before it had got away. Taking out the hook, he heard voices he also knew.

“Julian, Julian, Julian,” they sang, as always. And as always, Julian leaned out over the water above the shimmering pink intruders, and he opened his mouth to intone his unfailing response.

But nothing came out. This time, nothing came out.

Deserted by the music, his body was seen drifting among the islands.

In the days when it took a horse to carry a tape recorder, Lauro Ayestaràn crisscrossed the countryside collecting musical memories.

In search of lost ballads, Lauro once went to a hut hidden in the far-off realms of Tacuarembo. There lived a gaucho who had been a dancer and guitar player, and a champion dueler in verse.

The man was ancient. He no longer went from town to town and fair to fair. He walked little and fell down a lot, and to get up he had to lean on the back of one of his dogs. He couldn’t see. Neither could he sing; he sort of mouthed the words. But he was known as one who remembers.

“Up here there’s nothing missing,” he whispered, tapping his head with his finger.

Guitar in hand, barely brushing the strings, the old man recited, purred, hummed. In the late afternoon, a dry rasp celebrated the memory of free men and cattle on the range.

Round and round went the wheels of the tape recorder. The blind balladeer listened to the whirr without comment, until at last he asked what was buzzing.

“It’s a machine that keeps voices alive,” explained Ayestaràn. He rewound the tape, and the verses rang out again.

For the first time in his life, the old man heard his own voice.

He didn’t like the imitation one bit.

Some nights in the cafes, the competition was fierce.

“Me, when I was a child, I got peed on by a lion,” one said in a low voice, making light of his tragedy.

“Me, what I liked best was walking on walls,” said another, complaining that at home this pastime was forbidden.

And another: “Me, as a kid I wrote love poems. Then I lost them on a train. And who do you think found them? Neruda.”

Don Arnaldo, an orthodontist, refused to be cowed. Elbows on the bar, he let slip a name: “Libertad Lamarque.”

He paused for impact, then, “Sound familiar?”