Eduardo Galeano - Voices of Time - A Life in Stories

Butterflies and swallows and flamingos have forever spread their wings to flee the cold, the way whales swim in search of other seas and salmon and trout seek out their rivers. Year after year, they all travel thousands of miles on the open roads of air and water.

The roads of human flight, however, are not free.

In immense caravans they march, fugitives fleeing their unbearable lives.

They travel from south to north and from rising sun to setting sun.

Their place in the world has been stolen. They’ve been stripped of their work and their land. Many flee wars, but many more ruinous wages and exhausted plots of land.

These pilgrims, shipwrecked by globalization, wander about, unearthing roads, seeking homes, knocking on doors that swing open when money calls but slam shut in their faces. Some manage to sneak in. Others arrive as corpses that the sea delivers to the forbidden shore, or as nameless bodies buried in the world they hoped to reach.

In forty countries, over several years, Sebastiao Salgado photographed them. Three hundred portraits of this immense human tragedy amount to barely a second. The light that entered his camera for those pictures was barely a wink of the sun’s eye, no more than an instant in the memory of time.

Christopher Columbus couldn’t discover America: he didn’t have a visa or even a passport.

Pedro Alvares Cabral couldn’t get of the boat in Brazil: he might have been carrying smallpox, measles, the flu, or other foreign plagues.

Hernan Cortes and Francisco Pizarro could never have begun the conquest of Mexico and Peru: they didn’t have working papers.

Pedro de Alvarado was turned away from Guatemala, and Pedro de Valdivia couldn’t enter Chile: they couldn’t prove they had no police record.

The Mayflower pilgrims were sent back to sea from the coast of Massachusetts: the immigration quotas were full.

In March of the year 2000, sixty Haitians put to sea in a leaky dinghy.

They all drowned.

Since this happens all the time, it didn’t make the news.

The men swallowed by the waters of the Caribbean were all rice farmers.

They had fled in despair.

The rice farmers of Haiti have become raftsmen or beggars since the International Monetary Fund forbade government protection for local producers.

Now Haiti buys its rice from the United States, where the International Monetary Fund, which is rather absentminded, forgot to forbid government protection for local producers.

Like a birthday but not a birthday. Beneath garlands of flowers and streamers, amid steaming cauldrons filled with corn dumplings, the devil in the bottles flowed freely and dancing feet raised a cloud of dust to the strains of guitars and quenas.

When the sun peeked in, a few guests were snoring in the corners.

Those still awake were saying good-bye to the man who was leaving. He was heading off with nothing but the clothes on his back and a passport from the Republic of Ecuador in his pocket. They gave him a woven blanket to brighten up his travels. He left by mule, and before long he vanished into the mountains.

He wasn’t the first.

In town, only children and old folk remained.

Of those who left, not a one returned.

The guests stayed on to talk. “Such a wonderful fiesta! We cried so much!”

A woman is heading north. She knows she might drown crossing the river or die crossing the desert from a bullet or thirst or snakebite.

She says good-bye to her children, wishing she could say see you later.

And just before leaving Oaxaca, at a little altar by the roadside, she kneels before the Virgin of Guadalupe and pleads for a miracle: “I’m not asking you to give. I’m asking you to put me where I can get for myself.”

He set off walking from his village in Sierra Leone with no papers, with no money, with nothing. His mother sprinkled water on his footsteps to bring him luck on his voyage.

Of those who left with him, none arrived. Some were caught by the police; others were eaten by the sands or the sea. But he managed to reach Barcelona. Along with other survivors of other odysseys, he spends the night in Plaza Catalonia. He lies on the stone ground, face to the sky.

He looks for his stars. They aren’t here.

He longs for sleep, but city lights never go out. Here night is also day.

Stubby spent years behind the bar. He served drinks; sometimes he concocted new ones. He kept his mouth shut; sometimes he listened. He knew the quirks of all the regulars who came, night after night, to wet their whistles.

There was one guy who always showed up at the same time, eight o’clock on the dot, and ordered two glasses of dry white wine. He asked for two at once, and he drank them both, a sip from one glass, a sip from the other. In no hurry and in silence, he drained his two glasses, paid up, and took his leave.

Stubby had a rule: he never asked. But one night the fellow detected the curiosity in Stubby’s eyes and, with a certain nonchalance, told the story. His closest friend, his lifelong buddy, had moved away. Tired of just scraping by, he’d left Uruguay behind and now lived in Canada.

“He’s doing very well there.”

Then, “I don’t know if he’s doing very well.”

And then he clammed up.

Ever since his friend went away, the two of them met every night at eight on the dot Montevideo time, he in this bar, his friend in a bar there, and they had a drink together.

So it went, night after night.

Until the time the man came in, punctual as always, and ordered only one glass. He drank it slowly, silently, perhaps a bit more slowly and silently than usual, down to the last drop of that lone glass.

And when he paid the bill and got up to leave, Stubby did what he never does: he touched him. He stretched his arm across the bar and touched him. “My condolences,” he said.

Leonardo Rosiello came back from the northern reaches of the world. The trip from Stockholm to Montevideo did not go smoothly, there were problems with the connecting flights, and Leonardo arrived late at night when no one was expecting him.

At his parents’ door he hesitated. “Shall I wake them or not?”

For years he had been living far away, a time of exile, the blind years under military dictatorship, and he was dying to see his family. But he decided it would be better to wait.

He set off down the street, the street of his childhood, and he was sure the pavement recognized his footsteps. His head filled up with old stories and bad jokes, and everything seemed fresh and delightful. It was a freezing winter night, the city cloaked in frost, but he savored the cold as if it were the tropics.

It took Leonardo a long while to realize he was carrying a suitcase, and that the suitcase weighed more than a tombstone. So he crossed the street, cut through an empty lot, and sat himself down on his suitcase, back to a wall.

The cold would not let him sleep. When he stood up, he could see in the moonlight that the wall was covered in scars: symbols and words, hearts pierced by arrows, vows of true love and angry oaths at love lost, even insults (“Maria has cellulitis”).

Leonardo was also able to make out a few words that were nearly worn away, words that asked: “So where were you? What did you talk about? Who did you talk to?”