Eduardo Galeano - Voices of Time - A Life in Stories

Thanks to the chemical industry and the art of surgery, twenty years of injection after injection, operation after operation, cleansed his appearance of African damnation. Not a single stain remained. Science had defeated nature.

By then, his skin was the color of the dead, his much mutilated nose was a splotchy slice, his eyebrows were a picture of fright, and his head sported a wig.

None of him was left. Only his name. He continued calling himself Michael Jackson.

Sonia Pie de Dandré gets up early because her job requires it and also because she likes to breathe in the newborn day when it smells like a baby.

That morning she hummed softly as she walked through Santo Domingo’s streets moist with new light, and she was among the first in line at the counter to pick up her passport. When she got it, she saw that the description included her skin color. “Brown,” the passport said.

Sonia is black and sees nothing wrong with that. She asked them to correct the error. Error?

“In this country, there are no blacks,” said the clerk, also black, who had filled out the forms.

Alexandra Schjelderup came back from the cold.

She had spent fifteen years living far away.

The first thing Alexandra did when she arrived was turn on the radio. She wanted to hear the news and the voices of her country, Panama, which owes a debt to the Indians for the tamales that make her mouth water, for the hammock where she sleeps her floating siestas, for the colors she flaunts and the memories she suppresses.

The radio was playing an ad with a phone call cutting in and out, unintelligible sounds, followed by a woman asking furiously, “Who is this Indian calling me?” A businesslike voice then advised, “If you don’t want to be mistaken for an Indian, get your Cable & Wireless cell phone now.”

The Girl Mary slept little or not at all. From the moment light peeked out from between the mountains until the end of every evening, the Girl Mary was on her knees before the altar, whispering her prayers.

At the center of the altar reigned a small brown Christ. The little Christ, darkened by incessant candle smoke, had human hair, black, from the local people. The peasants of Conlara Valley often visited that child of God, who looked so much like them.

The Girl Mary lived in poverty and filth, but every day she bathed the little Christ in springwater, covered him with flowers from the valley, and lit the tapers surrounding him. She never married. In her pretty years, she’d cared for her two deaf-mute brothers. After that, she dedicated her life to the little Christ. Her days were spent taking care of his home, and at night she watched over his sleep.

In exchange for so much, the Girl Mary never asked for a thing.

Then at the age of one hundred and three, she asked. She didn’t name the favor, but she voiced her promise. “If you come through, little Christ,” she said, “I’ll dye your hair blond.”

The doctor had no secretary, and I don’t believe he had a telephone either. His office, with neither Muzak nor carpet nor Gauguin prints on the walls, had nothing but a cot, two chairs, a table, and a diploma from the medical school.

He managed to become the most miraculous healer in Boca neighborhood. This man of science cured people without pills or herbs or anything at all. Dressed in a housecoat, he’d begin by asking, “So, what disease would you like to have?”

Two centuries ago, in the city of Salvador de Bahìa, the loftier families summoned as many doctors as they could afford to circle the deathbed.

Relatives and neighbors piled into the bedroom to listen. After examining the patient, each physician offered a lecture on the case. These were solemn speeches, and the audience commented in lively tones:

“I support that!”

“No! No!”

“Well done!”

“The doctor’s wrong!”

“Agreed!”

“What horseshit!”

Once the first round was over, the specialists took the floor again to explain their points of view.

The debate grew long. But not very long. Even the toughest of the moribund would hurry his last breath along, even if it was in bad taste to interrupt the work of Science.

In America, nobody planted coconuts. Coconuts planted themselves. The first one broke free from some tree in Malaysia, rolled across the sand, and was carried out with the current. Floating on the seven seas, the errant coconut reached the coasts of America. It liked these beaches and has offered us its healing juices ever since.

Andrea Diaz was jogging one afternoon at the edge of the Pacific when she felt she’d lost her knees. Somebody took her to the port of Quepos and gave her coconut water.

“Drink this,” he ordered.

And he explained there was no better remedy. “Adam and Eve never drank anything else, and they never caught a single disease.”

She obeyed, but she couldn’t help asking, “How do you know that?”

The man gave her a look filled with pity. “Child, it’s in the Bible. Don’t you see? There were no doctors in Paradise. Disease came after doctors.”

On the last bend in the rue Mouffetard in Paris, I found the church of Saint Médard.

I opened the door and went in. It was Sunday afternoon. The church was empty; the echoes of the last noon prayers had faded away. There was a cleaning woman sweeping up after mass, dusting saints, but nobody else.

I went through the church from stem to stern. In the dim light, I was searching for the royal ordinance from the year 1732: “By order of the King, God is prohibited from working miracles in this place.”

Carlitos Machado had told me the prohibition was carved in a stone at the entrance to this church, which was dedicated to a saint too free and easy with miracles. I looked, but I did not find.

“Oh, no sir! No! Absolutely not!” The cleaning woman, armed with a broom and wearing a helmet of curlers, grew indignant yet continued working without looking up.

“But that order of the king’s. . was it ever here?”

The cleaning woman faced me. “Was it? It was. But not anymore.”

She rested her hands on the tip of the broomstick and her chin on her hands. “That sort of thing didn’t set the right tone for the believers. You understand.”

Beside the altar in Mexican churches, ex-votos proliferate. They are images and words painted on small pieces of tin that give thanks to the Virgin of Guadalupe, because Pancho Villa’s troops raped my sister and not me;

thanks to the Blessed Child of Atocha, because I have three sisters and I’m the ugliest and I got married first,

thanks to the Little Virgin of Sorrows, because the night before last my wife took off with my buddy Anselmo and now he’s gonna pay for all the things he did to me\

thanks to the Divine Face of Acapulco, cause I kilt my husband and they dint do nothin to me.

That’s the way it was. And still is. But you also see novelties, like ex-votos that give thanks to Our Lord Jesus Christ because I crossed the river and came to the Unite Estays and I didn’t go under or get died.