Eduardo Galeano - Voices of Time - A Life in Stories

When the applause subsided, a hired hand from a large ranch approached Margarita, head bowed, hat in hand, and told her, “I understand how you feel. I also lost a son.”

After Garcia Lorca was riddled with bullets at the dawn of the Spanish Civil War, The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife was never produced in his country. Many years later a Uruguayan troupe took the show to Madrid.

They acted with all their heart and soul.

At the curtain, there was no applause. Instead, the audience began to stamp their feet wildly. The actors did not understand.

One of them, China Zorrilla, told the story: “We were shocked. A disaster. It was enough to make you cry.”

Then the ovation began, long, grateful. Still the actors didn’t understand.

Maybe that thundering of feet on the ground was applause for the playwright. For the playwright executed for being a pinko, a fag, a weirdo. Maybe it was a way of saying, “Listen, Federico. Hear how alive you are.”

PERFORMANCE TODAY! DON’T MISS IT!: Portugal went all out to celebrate the five hundredth anniversary of the arrival of Bartolomeu Dias on the southern coast of Africa. The country became a vast theater of imperial nostalgia, and center stage was the intrepid navigator who reached the Cape of Good Hope in 1487, a time of supreme glory, when God bestowed on Portugal half the world.

Actors, dressed in period costumes of silks and velvets with fine swords and many-feathered caps, filled an exact replica of the ship in which Bartolomeu Dias put to sea and set sail for Africa.

On a South African beach, according to the script, a crowd of blacks was to jump for grateful joy for the explorers who five centuries earlier had done them the favor of discovering them. But in 1987 the beach was reserved for whites only. Under apartheid, blacks were not allowed.

A euphoric throng of whites, painted black, welcomed the Portuguese.

In 1889 Paris celebrated the hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution with a grand world’s fair.

Argentina sent a varied display of the country’s products. Among them was a family of Indians from Tierra del Fuego. They were eleven Ona Indians, rare examples of an endangered species: at that moment the last Onas were being hunted down with Winchester rifles.

Of the eleven, two died en route. The survivors were exhibited in an iron cage. “South American Anthropophagi,” the sign read. For the first few days they were given nothing to eat. The Indians howled with hunger. Then they were tossed bits of raw meat. It was beef, but it made for a horrifying spectacle. The onlookers, who had paid to get in, crowded around the cage to watch the savage cannibals wrestle over the food.

Thus was celebrated the first hundred years of the Declaration of the Rights of Man.

It was the fiftieth anniversary of the atomic explosions that annihilated Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The Smithsonian Institution in Washington announced plans for a large exhibit.

The display would include documentary information and comments from scientists, historians, and military experts. It would feature statements by the protagonists, from the colonel who commanded the bombers and lost no sleep over the affair, to several Japanese survivors, who lost sleep and everything else.

Visitors to the exhibit would run the risk of learning that the masses murdered from the sky were mostly women and children. Worse yet, the background information might lead them to conclude that the bombs were dropped not to win the war, because the war was already won, but to intimidate the Soviet Union, soon to become the next enemy.

To avoid such grave dangers, the show was announced but never mounted. Everything was dropped but an exhibition of the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, so that fervent patriots could kiss it on the nose.

He swore he would fly. He swore on all the buttonholes he’d ever opened and all the buttons he’d ever placed and all the suits and dresses and coats he’d ever measured, cut, basted, and sewn, stitch by stitch, day after day his entire life.

From then on, Reichelt the tailor spent his time sewing a pair of enormous bat wings. The wings folded so they’d fit in the grotty hole where he worked and lived.

At long last, after a huge effort, the elaborate cloth-covered framework of pipes and metal rods was ready.

The tailor spent the night unable to sleep, praying to God to give him a windy day. And in the morning, a gusty morning in the year 1912, he climbed to the tip of the Eiffel Tower, spread his wings, and flew to his death.

Flags fluttered high in the breeze.

Officials chased off the cows grazing on the runway.

No one was missing. The entire town of Lorica had been waiting for hours. In lace, bows, neckties, everybody was starched as if for a wedding or a baptism, their eyes glued to the sky, all roasting in the sun without a word of complaint.

From afar, they saw it coming. And they swallowed hard. And when the one they were waiting for touched down, the battle roar and the whiplash of wind caused a stampede.

No airplane had ever come to Lorica.

The throng, mouths open, peered into the cloud of red dust and made out something shiny. The propellers came to a stop. A brave spectator broke ranks, ran toward the thing never before seen, and reported back that it smelled of soap.

When the bands struck up, two at once, the first playing the national anthem, the second a medley of vallenatos, people rushed forward. They carried off the passengers on their shoulders and drowned the pilot in a sea of flowers. In celebration of the apparition come from the heavens, they started pouring drinks, whooping it up, and the party was on.

The airplane had landed for a short stopover on its way to other destinations, but it couldn’t take off.

“That was the first hijacking in the history of Colombia,” says David Sanchez-Juliao, the youngest of the hijackers.

She was an airplane. On her back, lying flat, she flew.

Suddenly she realized she’d lost her way, and couldn’t even recall where she was supposed to be going.

The passengers inside couldn’t have cared less. They were all busy drinking, eating, smoking, talking, and dancing, because in her body there was plenty of room, the music was terrific, and nothing was out of bounds.

She wasn’t worried either. She’d forgotten her destination, but the wings, her outstretched arms, grazed the moon as she whirled around the stars, turning circles in the heavens, and it was great fun to speed through the night to nowhere.

Helena woke up in bed, in the airport.

The doctor, Oriol Vail, was leaving. He’d spent a long while in Ajoya, deep in the mountains, taking part in village work and life, and the time had come to say farewell.

He went house by house. In the tiny dispensary, he stopped to explain things to Maria del Carmen, who had given him so much help.

“I’m going back to Spain, Dona Maria.”