Eduardo Galeano - Voices of Time - A Life in Stories

We are made of time.

We are its feet and its voice.

The feet of time walk in our shoes.

Sooner or later, we all know, the winds of time will erase the tracks.

Passage of nothing, steps of no one? The voices of time tell of the voyage.

Oriol Vail, who works with newborns at a hospital in Barcelona, says that the first human gesture is the embrace. After coming into the world, at the beginning of their days, babies wave their arms as if seeking someone.

Other doctors, who work with people who have already lived their lives, say that the aged, at the end of their days, die trying to raise their arms.

And that’s it, that’s all, no matter how hard we strive or how many words we pile on. Everything comes down to this: between two flutterings, with no more explanation, the voyage occurs.

The professor and the journalist walk in the garden.

The professor, Jean-Marie Pelt, stops, points, and says, “Allow me to introduce you to our grandparents.”

The journalist, Jacques Girardon, crouches down and finds a ball of foam peeking out from the blades of grass.

The ball is a town of microscopic blue algae. On very humid days, the blue algae allow themselves to be seen. They look like a wad of spit. The French journalist wrinkles his nose; the origin of life isn’t what we might call attractive, but from that spittle, from that mess, come all of us who have legs or roots or wings.

Before there was a before, when the world was barely a baby, without color or sound, there was blue algae. Streaming oxygen, they gave color to the sea and the sky. Then one fine day, a day that lasted millions of years, some blue algae decided to turn green. And bit by tiny bit, the green algae begat lichens, mushrooms, mold, medusas, and all the color and sound that came later, as did we, to unsettle the sea and the land.

Other blue algae preferred to carry on as they were.

And still are.

From the distant world that was, they observe the world that is.

What they think of it we do not know.

When the sea became the sea, the land was still nothing but naked rock.

Then lichens, born of the sea, made meadows. They invaded the kingdom of stone, conquered it, turned it green.

That happened in the yesterday of yesterdays, and it is still going on. Lichens live where no one lives: on the frozen steppe, in the burning desert, on the peaks of the highest mountains.

Lichens live only as long as the marriage lasts between an alga and her son, the mushroom. If the marriage breaks up, the lichens break down.

Sometimes, fighting and disagreements lead the alga and mushroom to part. She complains that he keeps her hidden from the light. He says she makes him sick, feeding him sugar day and night.

A couple was walking across the savannah in East Africa at the beginning of the rainy season. The woman and the man still looked a lot like apes, truth be told, although they were standing upright and had no tails.

A nearby volcano, now called Sadiman, was belching ash. The rain of ash preserved the couple’s footprints, from that moment through time. Beneath their gray blanket, the tracks remained intact. Those footprints show that this Eve and that Adam had been walking side by side; at a certain point she stopped, turned away, and took a few steps on her own. Then she returned to the path they shared.

The world’s oldest human footprints left traces of doubt. A few years have gone by. The doubt remains.

It’s said that once upon a time two friends were admiring a painting. The work of art, by who knows who, was from China, a field of flowers at harvest time.

One of the friends, who knows why? fixed his gaze on a figure in the painting, one of many women with baskets gathering poppies. She wore her hair loose, flowing over her shoulders.

At last she returned his gaze, let her basket fall, held out her arms, and, who knows how, carried him off.

He let himself be taken, who knows where, and with that woman he spent nights and days, who knows how many, until a gust of wind picked him up and returned him to the room where his friend remained standing before the painting.

So brief was that eternity that the friend had not noticed his absence. And neither had he noticed that the woman, one of many women in the painting gathering poppies in their baskets, now wore her hair tied at the back of her neck.

He is one of the phantoms. That’s what the people of Sainte Elie call the handful of old men, knee-deep in the mud, grinding stones and scraping sand in the abandoned mine that doesn’t have a cemetery because even the dead don’t want to stick around.

Half a century ago, a miner from far away arrived at the port of Cayena and set out to find the promised land. In those days, Sainte Elie was a garden ripening with golden fruit, where gold fattened many a starving stranger and sent him on his way back home, if the fates so wished it.

But the fates did not so wish it. The miner from far away is still here, wearing no more than a loincloth, eating nothing, eaten by mosquitoes. In search of nothing he stirs the sand day after day, seated beside his pan, under a tree even skinnier than he that barely offers any defense against the biting sun.

Sebastião Salgado reaches the lost mine, where no one visits, and sits at the miner’s side. The gold digger has only one tooth, itself made of gold. When he speaks, the tooth shines in the night of his mouth. “My wife is very pretty,” he says.

He digs out a blurry, dog-eared picture.

“She’s waiting for me,” he says.

She is twenty.

For half a century she’s been twenty, somewhere in the world.

After dark, Avel de Alencar worked away at his forbidden task.

Hiding in an office in Brasilia, night after night, he photocopied the military’s secret archive: reports, dossiers, and files that called torture interrogation and murder confrontation.

In the three years of clandestine labor, Avel photocopied a million pages. The documents were a fairly complete confession by the military dictatorship then living out the final days of its absolute power over the lives and miracles of all Brazil.

One night, among the papers pulled from the files, Avel found a letter. The letter had been written ten years earlier, but the woman’s kiss that signed off remained intact.

From then on, he came across many letters. Alongside each one was the envelope with the destination that they had never reached.

He did not know what to do. A lot of time had passed. No one was waiting for these letters now, words from the gone and forgotten sent to places and people no longer there. They were dead letters. And yet reading them felt to Avel like trespassing on something very much alive. He could not bring himself to return the words to the prison of the files, nor could he kill them by tearing up the pages.