Eduardo Galeano - Voices of Time - A Life in Stories

This isn’t up to me, the doctor thought. Let God decide.

But God paid no heed.

Whatever he did, he was going to commit a crime. If he did nothing, he’d commit two.

No time to dither. The newborns were slipping away.

The doctor closed his eyes. One baby was condemned to die; the other was condemned to live.

A ferocious storm was pelting Buenos Aires.

The father yanked the baby from his mother’s arms, carried him to the roof, and raised him high and naked in the freezing rain. Amid flashes of lightning, he cried out, “My son, may the waters of heaven bless you!”

No one knows just how, but the newborn managed to keep from dying of pneumonia.

He also escaped the name Sunday Rest. His father, a poor anarchist and poet eternally pursued by creditors and the police, had chosen the name in homage to the workers’ latest victory, but the civil registry refused. So he got together with his friends, also poor anarchists and poets eternally pursued by creditors and the police, to discuss the matter. They decided the boy would lead a literary life and that he deserved the name Catulo, after the Roman poet Catullus.

At the civil registry, they added an accent to CÀtulo Castillo, who went on to write “La ultima curda” and other tangos of the sort people listen to standing up, hat in hand.

The town of Stubby Hill never had a hill, stubby or otherwise. But Javier Zeballos remembers from his childhood that it had three constables, three judges, and three doctors.

One of the doctors, who lived downtown, was the needle on the compass. Javier’s mother would give her son directions: “From Dr. Galarza’s house, go down two blocks.” Or, “That’s up the street from Dr. Galarza’s.” Or, “Go to the drugstore around the corner from Dr. Galarza.”

And off Javier would march. Whenever he went, under sun or moon, Dr. Galarza was always seated on the porch, yerba mate gourd in hand, responding politely to his neighbors’ greetings: “Good morning, Doctor.” “Good afternoon, Doctor.” “Good evening, Doctor.”

Javier was a grown man when it occurred to him to ask why Dr. Galarza had no office or clinic. That’s when he found out. The man was no doctor; he was Doctor. Given name, Doctor; family name, Galarza.

His father yearned for a son with a diploma and didn’t think the baby could be trusted.

Face of a happy ant, butt of a frog, legs of a chicken: Sally had her first birthday.

The event was celebrated in a big way. Her mother, Beatriz Monegal, spread over the floor an enormous embroidered floral tablecloth, whose origin could not be divulged, and lit the small candle on the cake from the Sandwich Emporium for which she would never pay.

In one amen the cake was gone and the dancing began. Meanwhile, the birthday girl slept deeply, wrapped in clean starched clothes in a shopping basket.

At a quarter to three in the morning, not a drop left in the jugs of wine, Beatriz snapped her last photographs, switched off the radio, shooed everyone out, and hurriedly picked up all her things.

At three on the dot came the wail of a police siren. Beatriz had moved into that big house a couple of months before, along with her many children and her most recent love, a muscular man good at kicking down doors. When the police arrived to serve the eviction notice, Beatriz was already off on a new pilgrimage.

She paraded down the middle of the street, hauling a cart crammed with little children and rags, followed by her man and her older children. She was on the lookout for another house, and laughing a laugh that cracked the silence of the Montevideo night.

A recent arrival in the world was sleeping naked in his crib.

His sister, Ivonne Galeano, took one look and ran out. She knocked on her girlfriends’ doors and finger to lips invited them to the show. They abandoned their dolls half dressed, half combed, and holding hands, standing on tiptoe, they peeked inside the crib. None of them flushed with envy or blanched with fear. Stifling giggles, they cried, “Look what this nutcase brought along to pee with!”

The morning Diego Lopez turned four, joy was leaping in his breast, a flea jumping on a frog hopping on a kangaroo bouncing on a pogo stick, while the streets flew on the wind and wind battered the windows. Diego hugged his grandma Gloria and whispered a secret order in her ear: “We’re going into the wind.”

And he pulled her from the house.

Somewhere in Pennsylvania, Anne Merak works as an assistant to the sun.

She’s been in that line of work for as long as she can recall. At the end of every night, Anne raises her arms and pushes the sun up into the sky. Lowering her arms at day’s end she puts the sun down to bed on the horizon.

She was very small when she started this job, and she’s never missed a shift.

Half a century ago, she was declared insane. Since then Anne has gone through several institutions, been treated by numerous psychiatrists, and swallowed innumerable pills.

They never managed to cure her.

Thank heavens.

When the moon blocks the sun, the Kayapó people shoot flaming arrows into the sky to return to the sun its lost light. The Bari people play drums to make the sun reappear. The Aymaras cry, scream, and beg the sun not to abandon them.

At the end of ‘94, there was panic in Potosi. Night fell in the middle of the morning, the sky suddenly black and starry. In that dead-cold, end-of-time world, Indians cried, dogs howled, birds hid, and in one amen the flowers wilted.

Helena Villagra was there. When the eclipse ended, she felt something missing from her ear. An earring, a little silver sun. She searched for it on the ground for a long time, even though she knew she would never find that little sun.

Back when she was a child, Helena pretended to be sleeping and then slipped out of bed.

She dressed all in white, as if it were Sunday, and without a sound snuck out to the patio to discover the mysteries of the Tucuman night.

Her parents slept, her sisters as well.

She wanted to see how the night changed and how the moon and stars moved. Someone had told her that the heavenly bodies shifted and sometimes fell, and that as the night advanced they changed color.

That night of nights, Helena watched without blinking. Her neck ached, her eyes hurt. She rubbed her eyes and looked again. She looked and kept on looking, but the sky did not change and the moon and the stars remained firmly in their places.

Dawn awakened her. Helena shed a tear.

Later, she consoled herself with the thought that night doesn’t like anyone spying on its secrets.

The gibbous moon impregnates the earth, so the felled tree may live on in its wood.

The full moon sends lunatics, dreamers, women, and the sea into a frenzy.

The green moon kills the crops.

The yellow moon comes laden with storm.

The red moon brings war and plague.

The black moon, no moon at all, leaves the world sad and the sky mute.

Taking her first steps, Catalina Alvarez Insua raised her arms to the moonless sky and called, “Moon, come!”