Eduardo Galeano - Voices of Time - A Life in Stories

J. D. Salinger told this story in his famous novel.

Forty years later, Adolfo Gilly was walking beside the lake in Central Park. There was no ice. It was an autumn day around noon, and a teacher was reading that very passage aloud.

His students were seated in a circle, listening.

Then a flock of ducks came swimming over. The ducks stayed there, hugging the shore, while the teacher carried on reading about them.

Afterward the teacher departed, followed by his students. As did the ducks.

Three centuries ago the river shook off the French. Later the English couldn’t catch it either. It refused to stay put. Whenever an explorer mapped its course, the river would decamp that very night and flow elsewhere.

In 1830 the river was caught. The city of Chicago was nailed to its banks to keep it from ever fleeing again. Then at the end of the nineteenth century the city tamed it with walls of cement, forcing the water to flow backward.

One morning in the spring of 1992, after the river had behaved itself for a very long time, the city woke up to wet feet, a nasty surprise. The subway dripped, and basements did too. Having slipped its leash, the river was not to be stopped. It seeped through the walls first in drops, then spurts, then in a surging flood that drowned the streets.

After several days of rebellion the renegade was subdued.

To this day, the city sleeps with one eye open.

Pedro Saad walked on the frozen waters of the Volga River. He was in the heart of Russia on a very cold winter afternoon. He was alone, but had company as he walked; he could feel through the thick soles of his boots the lively vibration of the river beneath the ice.

The streets were floral arrangements, the churches bonbon delights, the palaces gifts in a toy shop.

But beautiful Antigua, capital of Guatemala, lived with its heart in its mouth: the angry quaking earth condemned the city to perpetual anguish. What it didn’t squander on tears, it spent on sighs.

In 1773 the land bucked like never before. The river leaped its banks, washing away people and houses. The flood’s survivors had to flee and found another city far away.

The river that flooded was, and is, called Penastivo, Pensive.

For assistance we turn to gods, devils, and the stars in the sky. We don’t consult snails.

But thanks to snails the Shipibo Indians avoid drowning whenever the Ucayali River wakes up in a bad mood and rolls its whitecapped waters inland over everything in its path.

Snails give warning. Before each calamity, they lay their eggs on tree trunks above the line where the water will crest. And they never get it wrong.

Weary of so much disobedience and sin, God decided to wipe from the face of the earth the flesh he had created with his own hand. Humans and beasts and serpents and even the birds in the sky were to be obliterated.

When the sage Johannes Stoeffler announced the exact date of the second great flood, the fourth of February, 1524, Count von Igleheim simply shrugged. Then God himself came to him in his dreams, beard of lightning, voice of thunder, and declared, “You will drown.”

Count von Igleheim, who knew the entire Bible by heart, leaped from his bed and called together the best carpenters in the region. Before you could say amen, an enormous ark, three stories tall, made of resinous wood and caulked inside and out, was floating on the Rhine. The count went on board with his family and all his servants and abundant supplies. He took along a male and female of every species of all the beasts of the land and the air. And he waited.

On the chosen day it rained. Not much, more like a drizzle, but the first drops were enough to spark panic and a crazed mass of people rushed the pier and swarmed over the ark.

The count tried to fight them off and was thrown into the river, where he drowned.

On the sandbar at Guaratiba seagulls laugh raucously. The boats are unloading fish and fish stories.

One of the fishermen, Claudionor da Silva, scratches his head and sighs with regret. He’d managed to catch a good-sized porgy, but the fish pointed with his fin and said, “a bigger one’s coming.” Claudionor believed him and let him go.

Another, Jorge Antunes, is sporting new threads. He’d been lost at sea for several days when a huge wave carried off his drinking water and left him naked, he resigned himself to dying of sun and thirst. But then he managed to net a shark, and in the beast’s belly he found an ice-cold can of Coke, a hat, a pair of pants, and a brand-new shirt.

Reinaldo Alves laughs with all his false teeth. Not to belittle such good fortune, he protests, but really I’m the lucky one. Far from the coast, he sneezed and his dentures flew overboard. He dove in after them and searched everywhere, but came up emptyhanded. A couple of days later, he hauled in a flounder, and lo and behold the fish was wearing them.

At the hour when the day bids adieu, fishermen on the Gulf of California prepare their nets.

When that old magician the sun casts its final glow, their canoes slide between the little islands that line the coast. There, they await the moon.

Shrimp spend the day hidden in the depths, hugging the mud or the sand. As soon as the moon comes out, the shrimp rise. Moonlight calls to them, and they answer. Then the fishermen take the nets folded on their shoulders and toss them. The nets open as they fall, broad wings in the air, and capture their prey.

Seeking the moon, the shrimp meet their doom.

From the looks of them, no one would imagine that these whiskery creatures harbored such a poetic bent. But from the taste of them, any human would swear to it.

She was born with the name of Langland, a three-masted ironhulled schooner that carried saltpeter from Chile and guano from Peru over to Europe.

When she reached the age of twenty, her name was changed to Maria Madre, and her luck turned. She continued sailing across the sea, but misfortune pursued her and things went from bad to worse.

At the turn of the twentieth century, miserable from disrepair, the ship ran aground in the port of Paysandu and remained a prisoner there for the next forty years due to a mysterious and complicated legal battle over an unfulfilled contract.

In 1942, she was relaunched. And again she changed names. Now called Clara, she put to sea with a thousand tons of salt.

In a little while, as Clara was leaving the River Plate, a great cigar-shaped cloud rose over the horizon. A bad omen. The wind off the pampas bore down on the ship, smashed her to bits, and drove what was left of her ashore. Clara died on a beach called Las Delicias at the foot of a house. It was the summer home of Lorenzo Marcenaro, the very man who had baptized her the third time back on the dock at Paysandu.

Since then, no ship dares to change her name in these southern waters. The sea is free, but its daughters are not.

Rafael Alberti has been in the world for almost a century, yet today he contemplates the Bay of Cadiz as if for the first time.