Eduardo Galeano - Voices of Time - A Life in Stories

“Is Spain far away?”

She had never gone beyond the Gavilanes River. Oriol sketched a map to give her an idea. You have to cross the ocean, all the way across.

“It must be a very big boat for so much water.”

He tried to explain with words and gestures. And Maria del Carmen, who had never seen an airplane, even from a distance, interrupted him: “Okay, I get it. What you mean is you’re going to travel sleeping in the wind.”

“It’s really strong,” the father declared. “Like two hundred oxen.”

The son, Simon de la Pava, saw a huge ribbon of smoke rising on the horizon.

Soon the powerful beast appeared. As she approached, she grew larger. She roared. She howled.

The child was terrified and tried to run away, but his father held him fast by the hand.

A squeal of metal on metal, a long moan, and the train came to a halt.

Simon and his father traveled from the valley of Ibagué to the high plain of Bogota, from hot to cool and from cool to cold.

The journey lasted forever.

Snorting, the train drank rivers of water at every station. Then, wailing, sweating steam from her belly, she went back to lurching her way uphill.

The passengers reached their destination exhausted and covered in soot and dust.

While the father collected their suitcases, Simon approached the locomotive.

She was panting. He gave her a few pats on her hot rump, just to say thank you.

Across fields and through the ages, the train rolled from Seville toward Morón de la Frontera. And from the window, the poet Julio Vélez observed with tired eyes the groves and houses that rushed by in bursts, while his memory wandered across geography and through time.

Seated across from Julio was a tourist. The tourist wanted to practice his stumbling Spanish, but Julio was off who knows where, searching for something or someone, a word or a woman he’d lost.

“Are you Andalusian?” the tourist asked.

Julio, absent, nodded.

And the tourist, intrigued, asked, “But if you’re Andalusian, how come you’re sad?”

Two trains crashed into each other just outside London’s Paddington Station.

A fireman fought his way on board with an ax and stepped into a car tipped on its side. Through the smoke, which added fog to the fog, he could see passengers strewn about like mannequins smashed to pieces amid the splintered wood and twisted steel. His flashlight moved across the debris searching in vain for some sign of life.

Not a moan could be heard. Nothing broke the silence except the ringing of cell phones, calling and calling and calling, from the pockets of the dead.

Until well into the twentieth century, camels took care of transporting people and things on the island of Lanzarote.

The station, the Camel’s Abode, was downtown in the port of Arrecife. As a child, Leandro Perdomo always walked past it on his way to school. He saw lots of camels lying or standing. One morning he counted forty, but he was never very good at math.

Back in those days, the island floated outside time, a world before the world, when people had time to waste time.

The camels came and went, plodding slowly through the immense black lava desert. They kept no schedule, had no fixed departure or arrival, but depart and arrive they did. And there were never any accidents. Never, that is, until one camel suffered a sudden attack of nerves and sent its passenger flying. The unfortunate woman split her head on a rock.

The camel had cracked because a strange thing had crossed its path, a beast that coughed, gave off smoke, and walked without legs.

It was the island’s first automobile.

It happened overnight. Several poles, each with three eyes, sprouted up in the corners of the main street. The town of Quarai had never seen anything like it before, nor had anywhere else in that region near the border.

The curious came on horseback. They tied up their horses on the outskirts, so as not to disrupt the traffic, and they sat down to view the novelty. Mate gourd in hand, thermos under arm, they waited for nightfall when lights are really lights and it is a pleasure to sit and watch, the way people sit and watch the stars come out in the sky. The lights turned on and off at the same steady pace, always the same three colors, one after the other. But those country men, indifferent to the passing cars and people, didn’t weary of the spectacle.

“The one on that corner is prettier,” someone suggested.

“This one here takes longer,” offered another.

As far as we know, none of them asked what the lights were for, those magic eyes that blinked and blinked and blinked and never grew tired.

When Wagner Adoum drove his car, he always kept his eyes on the road ahead, without so much as a glance at the billboards yelling orders from the edges of Quito’s streets and highways.

“I never killed anyone,” he said. “And if I’ve reached the age I have, it’s because I pay no attention to those billboards.”

Thanks to his restraint, he explained, he managed to avoid dying from drowning, indigestion, hemorrhage, or suffocation. He didn’t drink an ocean of Coca-Cola, or eat a mountain of hamburgers. Nor did he dig a crater in his belly by swallowing a million aspirins. And he kept credit cards from sinking him up to his ears in a swamp of debt.

How many millions can squeeze onto a single street?

One day at noon, every person in Buenos Aires strode down Florida, the only walkable street left in the city. A drove of urbanoids had escaped from their jars, a multitude of legs zipping along, as if the refuge from the reign of motorcars would not last long.

In the middle of the crowd, Rogelio Garcia Lupo noticed a man elbowing his way toward him with some difficulty. The man, a respectable-looking sort, threw his arms wide open. Rogelio, before he had a chance to think, was being hugged and hugging back. The man’s face looked vaguely familiar. Rogelio could only manage to ask, “Who are we?”

I was trying to decipher the racket of birdcalls in the trees at Stanford University when an elderly professor approached. The professor, learned in some scientific specialty, had a lot to say bottled up inside. In his field, he knew everything while I knew nothing, but he was friendly, spoke softly, and it was a pleasure to listen to him.

At some point, his curiosity got the better of him, and he asked me what country I was from. I answered, and from his startled eyes I could tell the name Uruguay was not too familiar. I was used to that, and the professor made some polite comment about the traditional dress in my country. It was obvious he was confusing Uruguay with Guatemala, which by some miracle was in the headlines at the time. I returned the favor by becoming Guatemalan on the spot, and without poking fun I said something or other about the tumultuous history of Central America.

“Central America,” he said.

I wanted to believe he understood. Just in case, I didn’t ask.

How well I know that many of his compatriots believe that Central America is Kansas City.