Eduardo Galeano: Readings from "The Book of Embraces"

Hello, I'm going to read some short text from my new book. The book of embraces and I hope that the voice is sounding okay and it's reaching as far as that horizon there. Do you hear me? I mean in all places? If not we have no choice but anyway. I'll read most of the texts in English because I am guessed that some a good part of this people here, the public here, doesn't speak or understand

Spanish but all the Spanish speaking people here in the public understand English. So most of my reading will be in English in my very badly pronounced English and later I shall read some three or four texts in Spanish to finish my presentation here. The first text is about the function of art. Diego had never seen the sea. His father Santiago of love took him to discover it and they went south. The ocean lay beyond hikes and dunes waiting. When the child and his father finally reached the dunes after much walking the ocean

exploded before the rise and so immense was the sea and it's a sparkle that the child was struck dumb by the beauty of it and when he finally managed to speak trembling, he asked his father help me to see. This is grapes and wine. On his deathbed, a man of the vineyards spoke into Marcella's ear before dying he revealed his secret. The grape he whispered is made of wine. Marcella peresilba told me this and I thought if the grape

he's made of wine, then perhaps we are the words that tell who we are. Marcella was visiting the snow in the north and one night in Oslo she met a woman who sang and told stories. Between songs she would spin yarns, glancing at slips of paper like someone telling fortunes from crib notes. This woman from Oslo had an enormous dress dotted all over with pockets.

She would pull a slip of paper out of her pockets one by one, each with its story to tell stories tried and true of people who wished to come back to life through witchcraft. And so she raised the dead and forgotten and from the depths of her dress sprang the odyssey's and loves of the human animal for whom speech is life. This man, or woman, is pregnant with many people. People are coming out of his pores with these clay figures, the hoppy Indians of New Mexico, the picked the storyteller, the one who relates the collective

memory who fairly blossoms with little people. The function of the reader, two texts about the function of the reader. When Lucia Pilais was very small, she read a novel under the covers. She read it in fragments, night after night, hiding it under the pillow. She had stolen it from the Cedar bookshelf where her uncle kept his favorite books. As the years passed, Lucia traveled far in search of phantoms. She walked over the rocks in the Antiochia River and in search of people. She walked the streets of the violent cities.

Lucia walked a long way and in the course of her travels was always accompanied by echoes of the echoes of those distant voices. She had heard with her eyes when she was small. Lucia has never read that book again. She would no longer recognize it. It has grown so much inside her that now it is something else. Now it is hers. And the second text about the function of the reader. It was half a century since the death of César Vallejo and there were celebrations in Spain, Julio Veles organized lectures, seminars, memorial publications,

and an exhibition offering images of the poet, his land, and his time, and his people. But then Julio Veles met José Manuel Castanón and all homage seemed insignificant. José Manuel Castanón had been a captain in the Spanish War fighting for Franco. He had lost a hand in one various medals. One night, shortly after the war, the captain accidentally came up on a band book. He took a look, he read the line, one line, he read another, and he could no longer tear himself away. Captain Castanón, hero of the victorious army, sat

up all night, captivated, breathing and re-reading César Vallejo, poet of the defeated. Next morning, he resigned from the army and refused to take a single piece set a more from the Franco government. And later they put him in jail and he went into exile. This is a celebration of the human voice. Their hands were tied or handcuffed, yet their fingers danced, flew, drew words. The prisoners were hooded, but leaning back they could see a bit, just

a bit down below. Although it was forbidden to speak, they spoke with their hands. Binho Unger felt taught me the finger alphabet, which he had learned in prison without a teacher. Some of us had bad handwriting, he told me, but others were masters of calligraphy. The Uruguay and dictatorship wanted everyone to stand alone, everyone to be no one. In prisons and barracks and throughout the country, communication was a crime. Some prisoners spent more than ten years buried in solitary cells, the size of coffins, hearing nothing but clanging bars or footsteps in the corridors. Fernández Widobro and Mauricio Rosenkov survived because

they could talk to each other by tapping on the wall. And in that way, they told of dreams and memories, falling seeing an out of love and they discussed, embraced, thought, they shared beliefs and beauties, doubts and guilt and those questions that have no answer. When it's genuine, when it's born of the need to speak, no one can stop the human voice. When denied a mouth, it speaks with the hands or the eyes or the pores or anything at all,

because every single one of us has something to say to the others, something that deserves to be celebrated or forgiven by others. This is a definition of art. Portinaire isn't here, said Portinaire. He poked his nose out for an instant, slammed the door and disappeared. This was in the studies, the years of communist witch hands in Brazil, and Portinaire had exiled himself in Montevideo. He painted from morning to evening and at night as well. Portinaire isn't here, he would say. At that time, communist intellectuals in Uruguay

were going to take a position on social realism and wanted their prestigious comrades' opinion. We know you're not here, they said to him, an implore, but want to give us a moment, just a little moment, and they posed the question. Portinaire said, I don't know, I don't know, I said, and then all I know is this, art is art or it's cheat. This is about the language of art. Chino Lope, chino Lope sold papers and shined shoes in Avanna to escape poverty

he went to New York. There, somebody gave him an old camera, and chino Lope had never held a camera in his hands, but they told him it was easy. You just look through here and press there. So he took to the streets and he hadn't been walking long when he heard shots. He went into a barbershop, raised the camera, looked through here and pressed there. In the barbershop, they had shot down the gangster Albert Anastasia while he was getting a shave, and that was the first photo of Chino Lope's professional life. He was paid a fortune, the photo was a coup, because Chino Lope had managed to photograph death.

But death was there, but not in the dead man, nor in the killer. Death was in the face of the barber looking on. And this is about the limits of art. It was the longest of many battles fought into Skatlang or any other part of El Salvador. It began at midnight when the first grenades fell from the hillside and lasted the whole night until the evening of the next day. The military said that Sincera was impregnable. Four times the guerrillas had attacked and four times they had failed. The fifth time, when the white flag was raised over the command post, shots fired into the air, signal the beginning of the celebrations.

Julio Ama, who fought and photographed the war, wandered through the streets. He had a rifle in his hand in a camera, also loaded and ready to shoot around his neck. He went through the dusty streets in search of the twin brothers. The twins were the only survivors of a village exterminated by the army. They were sixteen years old. They liked to fight alongside Julio and between engagements he would teach them to read and to take photographs. In the tumult of the battle, Julio had lost the twins and now could not find them among

either the living or the dead. He walked across the park and at the corner by the church, he entered the lane and there finally he found them. One of them was sitting on the ground, he's back against a wall and the other lay across his knees, bathed in blood, at their feet in the form of a cross where there are two rifles. Julio approached and perhaps said something. The living twin neither spoke nor moved. He was there and he wasn't there. His unblinking eyes stirred without seeing lost somewhere, nowhere and that tearless face

was the whole of war and the whole of pain. Julio left his rifle on the ground and gripped the camera. He advanced the film, calculated the light and distance in a flash and focused. The brothers were centered in his view, find their motionless, perfectly profiled against the wall, newly peppered with bullet holes. Julio was about to take the picture of his life but his finger refused. Julio tried and tried again and his finger refused. Then he lowered the camera without releasing the shutter and retreated in silence. The camera, Minolta,

died in another battle, drowned by the rain a year later. This is about the function of art. The preacher Miguel Brum told me that a few years ago he had visited the Indians of the Paraguayan Chaco. He was part of an evangelizing mission and the missionaries visited the chief, a chief who was considered very, very wise. The chief, a quiet, quiet, fat man, listened without blinking to the religious propaganda that they read to him, that they read to him. The chief, a quiet, fat man, listened without blinking to the religious

propaganda that they read to him in his sound language. When they finished, the missionaries awaited a reaction, but the chief took his time. Then he said, that's crutches. It's crutches hard and it scratches very well. And then he added, but it scratches where the recent any each. This is a celebration of fantasy. It happened at the entrance to the town of Ojantaitambo, near Cusco. I had detached myself

from a group of tourists and was standing alone looking at the stone ruins in the distance. Then a small boy from the neighborhood, skinny and ragged came over to ask if I would give him a pen. I couldn't give him my pen because I was using my pen to write down all sort of boring notes. But I offered to draw a little pig for him on his hand. And suddenly the world got around. And I was surrounded by a throng of little boys demanding at the top of their lungs that I draw animals on their little hands, cracked by the dirt and cold or a skin of burnt leather. One wanted a condor and one a snake. Others preferred little

parrots and owls and some ask it for a ghost or a dragon. Dragon. Dragon. Chambon. Then in the middle of this racket, in the middle of this racket, a little wave who barely cleared a yard off the ground showed me a watch drawn in black ink on his wrist. An uncle of mine who lives in Lima sent it to me. He said, and does it keep good time? I just got him. It's a bit slow here in the middle of this racket.

In the middle of 1984, I traveled to the river plate. It was 11 years since I'd seen Montevideo and eight years since I'd seen Buenos Aires. And I had worked out of Montevideo because I don't like being a prisoner and out of Buenos Aires because I don't like being dead. So by 1984, the Argentine military dictatorship had gone, leaving behind it an indelible trace

of blood and filth. And Uruguayan military dictatorship was on its way out. I had just arrived in Buenos Aires and had not notified my friends because I wanted the reunions to occur spontaneously. Journalists from Dutch television who had accompanied me on the trip was interviewing me in front of the door of what had been my house. The journalist asked me what had happened to a picture that I used to have hanging in my house, a picture of a harbor, a Montevidian port for arriving and not for leaving a harbor for saying hello and not goodbye. And I began to answer him with my eyes, fix it on the red eye of his camera. I told him I did not know where that picture had ended up or where it's painter,

my Uruguayan friend Emilio, negro Emilio Casablanca had ended up. I had lost the picture and Emilio in the fog, as I had many other people and things from those years of terror and loneliness. As I spoke, I noticed shadow that passed behind the camera and stood to one side waiting. When I had finished and the cameras red eye went out, I moved my head and saw him. In that city of 13 million inhabitants, the negro Emilio had arrived on the corner by pure chance or whatever it's called and was in that particular place at that particular moment. We embraced and danced around and after much embracing Emilio told me that two

weeks ago he had started dreaming that I came back night after night and now he couldn't believe it and he didn't believe it. That night he called me on the telephone at the hotel to ask if I wasn't a dream or hallucination to ask me if I was I. It was a Sunday evening in April. After a week of hard work, I was drinking beer in a pub in Amsterdam. I was with an alias who had helped me with saintly passions as I traveled around Holland. I was feeling well and yet I don't know why a bit sad and I started to talk about Erskine

Colwell's novels. It all began with a dumb joke. Embarrassed by my constant creeps to the bathroom between beers, I blurted out that the beer road leads to the bathroom as surely as Tobacco Road leads to the estuary and I thought I was being very witty, genial, but an alias who had not read Tobacco Road did not even smile and so I explained the joke to her which is a worst thing one can do in such a situation and that was how I got to talking about Colwell in his horrors of the United States South and there was no holding me back. It had been 20 years since I last talked about him. I had not talked about Colwell since

the times when I hang out with Horacio Petit in the cafés and bars of Montevideo, drinking wine and novels. And now as I spoke as the unstoppable torrent gossed from my mouth, I could see Colwell. I saw him in the shadow of his fraid, straw hat, rocking on the veranda, happy about the attacks by the morality leaks and the literary critics chewing tobacco and dreaming up new ideosis and misadventures for his miserable characters. And evening turned to night and I don't know how long I spent talking of Colwell and drinking beer. And the next morning I read the news in the papers. The novelist Erskine Colwell died

yesterday in his home in the south of the United States. This is about a grandmother and a grandfather. Bertage Ensens grandmother died cursing. She had lived her whole life on tiptoe. On tiptoe as if apologizing for being a bother. Dedicated to serving her husband and her brud, brud, brud, brud, brud, brud, brud, brud, shame, shame, I'll begin again. But then why brud and in blood? They're sure it's brud? Brud. Strange rules in this system.

I really can't understand it sometimes. Bertage Ensens grandmother died cursing. She had lived her whole life on tiptoe as if apologizing for being a bother. Dedicated to serving her husband and her brud of five children, she was an exemplary wife, a self-abnegating mother, a silent pillar of virtue. Not a single complaint had ever passed her lips let alone curses. But when illness struck her down, she called her husband, sat him down beside her in bed and let loose. No one suspected that she had that drunken sailor's vocabulary.

She was a long time dying and for more than a month the grandmother vomited from her bed and an ending torrent of insults and blasphemies from the depths of her being. Even her voice had changed. This woman who had never smoked or drank anything but milk or water became a whiskey-voiced whore. In talking like a whore she died and there was general relief in the family and throughout the neighborhood. She died where she was born in the town of dragore in the coast of Denmark. Her name was Inge. She had a pretty gypsy face and like to dress in red and sail in the sun. Grandfather. A man named Amando born in the town of Salitre

on the coast of Fecuador presented me with the story of his grandfather. The great grandchildren took turns looking after him. They had put a padlock and chain on the door because that was the cause of his ailments. I have the rheumatism of a castrated cat. At the age of a hundred, don't second would take advantage of any girl'sness to mount his horse bear back and slip out in search of girlfriends. No one knew as much about women and horses. He had populated the town of Salitre and its surroundings since becoming a father for

the first time at 13. The grandfather confessed to having had some 300 women, although everyone knew he had over 400, but one of them, Blankita, had been the most womanly woman of them all. It had been 30 years since Blankita died and he still invoked her name every day at dusk. So the grandson who told me this story would hide and spy upon the secret ceremony on the balcony illuminated by the dying light. The grandfather would open an antique powder box around box with pink angels on the lid and bring the powder path to his nose. I believe I know you. He would murmur inhaling the faint perfume of the powder. I believe I know

you. And he would rock himself very gently, murmuring as he dosed off in the rocking chair. Every evening the grandfather would perform his homage to the woman he loved the most. And once a week he would betray her. He was unfaithful with a fat lady who prepared extremely complicated dishes on television. The grandfather owner of the first and only television in the town of Salitre would never miss the program. He would bathe and shower and dress entirely in white as if for a party putting on his best hat, patent leather boots,

best with golden buttons and silk necktie and would sit right in front of the screen. While the fat lady whipped her cream and wielded her ladle explaining the keys to some unique exclusive incomparable flavor, the grandfather would lear at her and blow her furtive kisses. His bank savings book pocketed out of the breast pocket of his suit. The grandfather placed the book that way as if carelessly. So the fat lady would see he was now poor raga muffin. Going to read some text in Spanish to finish the reading and later we are going

to the book so about two writers to begin with this Spanish part. Onetti and Arguedas, two of my favorite writers in Latin America. This is this one is about Onetti. I didn't have 20 years and I was playing at the store sighing at the nights of the world. I wanted to paint and I couldn't. I wanted to write and I didn't know. Sometimes I wrote a story and sometimes I took it to Juan Carlos Sonetti.

He was always in bed, for beauty, for sadness, surrounded by pyramids of puchos, after a wall of empty bottles. I felt in the obligation of emitting very intelligent phrases. Onetti and Arguedas, the teacher looked at me and I didn't have the mouth more than to you. I wanted to smoke and drink, slow, dreamy, drunk, drunk, drunk, drunk. And perhaps I heard some fruit of its prolonged meditations about the national and international situation. The thing was, he said, the day that the militias and women learned to read, he felt his right. I expected him to tell me that those little stories were undoubtedly great.

But he fell, and to the gloomy sum, he stimulated me like that. He looked at me and said, if all of them had been in Tacuarembo, he would have come to be the director of the People's people. Arguedas, I was returning to Montevideo to the Cabo de Un Viaje, where I didn't remember, but I remember that in the plane I had read the smile from above and the smile from below, the final novel of José María Arguedas. Arguedas had started to write, and he gave to life the day he decided to kill himself, and the novel was his long and desperate testament. I read and believed him, from the first page I believed, although I didn't

know that man, I believed him as if he were my always friend. In the sun, Arguedas had dedicated Onetti the highest logic that a writer could bring to another writer. He had written that he was in Santiago de Chile, but in reality he wanted to be in Montevideo to meet Onetti and appreciate the hand that he wrote. In Onetti's house, he commented, he didn't know. The novel was published, he hadn't arrived yet, Montevideo. He commented and Onetti was stuck. It was very little that Arguedas had left the head of a ballast. We had been together for a long time, for minutes or years in silence. After I said something,

I asked something, and Onetti didn't answer, and then I left my eyes and saw him and saw him. This is a lot of news. The Monos confound in Algato Félix with Tarsan,

Popeye devora sus latas infalibles, Bertas Injerman Gime Versos in the Teatro Solis, the great engineer of Geniol, cuts the refrios. From a moment to another Mussolini, it's going to invade Ethiopia, the British fleet is concentrated in the canal of Suez. The page, the page, the day after day, in the 1935, is going to fill the eyes of the Pepe Barriens in the National Library. The Pepe is looking for, I don't know if he stays in the collection of the Uruguay diary, the train of a tango, the baptism of a home or something like that, and all the time it feels that this is not the first time. It feels like I've seen what is now being seen, that it has already passed here.

Before, it has passed here by these pages, the Maneu La Mojada in a Tisalcura, the Golden Dolor of Garganta, a life of 150 miles from Montevideo coast, a dance of doubtful reputation, murdered by Manese, Mussolini pronunciates its ultimate, the war is coming, the war is coming, a huge title, and yes, the Pepe has seen it, yes, yes, that photo, the archer in Plena Paloma crossing the page, the Pelotaso of the Basque Sea, doubling the hands, those letters, perhaps in the childhood, thinking, and surprised by such a long journey of memory, because in 1935,

more than half a century, he had six years. And then, suddenly, the fear touches him, the unites, the fear, the anger, and he has the certainty that he must go, and he has the certainty that he will stay. So, yes, could he change from day to day, or could he just walk away if the door is out, but still, the Pepe is called, he can't go, he can't stop, and he wants to miss, with a gesture of great figure, and he has already signed the peace between Paraguay and Bolivia, but he does not end up solving the problem of prisoners, and a storm, a boat in the canal of the Mancha, and there is the killer of the Bailarina, who turned out to be his lover, and who took eight cents in the bag at the time of his detention,

in the middle of Hintrod, he is guaranteed against the asthma, and immediately the hand of the Pepe, who ends up returning the page, is paralyzed, and a photo hits the face, a photo of six columns, the truck, turned and bent, the immense photo of the truck and around the truck, an enchantment of curious, looking at the photographer, looking at the Pepe, looking at the curious, looking at the Pepe, looking at the eyes, blind eyes, before the photo of the truck, where his father died, was placed by a spectacular shock, that moves to the bar of Teja, in Montevideo, in the middle of the 18th of September, in 1935, to finish two texts,

a celebration of friendship, and a celebration of courage. The celebration of friendship, says so. Juan Jelman told me that a lady had been beaten to pieces, in a glass of Paris, against a whole brigade of municipal workers. The workers were getting married to Palomas, when she emerged from an incredible, strong, a museum car, from which they ran into Manivela, and blending her paraguas into the attack. She was fooled, and her paraguas ran into the streets, where Palomas had been trapped. And then, while Palomas went to the bar, the lady learned her paraguas against the workers. And the workers did not have more to protect themselves,

as they could with arms. And Valbusiaban protestes, that she did not go, more respect, Mrs. Galfavor, we are working, they are superior orders, Mrs. Why don't you get to the call? Call me that, Mrs. What did I tell you? She went crazy to the woman, when the lady was indignant, she got tired of it, and she went to the bar, to take the train, the workers demanded an explanation. And after a long silence, she said, my son died. And the workers said, they lied to her a lot, but they did not have the blame. They also said, that morning there was a lot to do, you understand? My son died. He repeated that, and the workers said,

yes, yes, but they were winning the bank, there are millions of Palomas, all over Paris, Palomas are the ruin of this city, creatinos, they humiliated the lady, and far away from the workers, far away from everything, they said, my son died, and became Paloma. The workers fell, and they had a long time thinking, and finally, showing the Palomas, they walked through the skies, and the roofs, and the workers proposed. Sir, why don't you take your son and let us work in peace? And she went to the black shadow. Ah, no!

That's right, right? She looked through the workers, as if they were living, and very serenely said, I don't know which of the Palomas is my son. And if his wife neither would I do it, because I have the right to separate from his friends. And finally, to finish a celebration of the courage that is bad in these times. Sergio Buscovic tells me the last days of José Toa.

He was suicide, the general pinoché. The government can't guarantee the immortality of no one. He wrote a journalist of the official press. He was flattered by the nerves, he declared the general leak. The Chinese general hated it. Toa had been a defense minister of the agenda government and knew the secrets. He had it in a concentration camp in the island of Dawson, south of the south. The prisoners were convicted of forced labor. Under the rain, the prisoners were caught in stone, they were killed, they were killed, they were forced and they were shot at the pubes. Toa,

who gave me a 90. He was weighing 50 kilos. In the interrogations he was shot at a chair and he woke up. He didn't have strength to talk. But his smile was official. His smile was above the poor people of the world. He had been in the barracad for a day, and it was the last day that he got up. He was very cold, but there was sun. Someone got him a hot coffee and the black hat was for him, a piece of wood, one of those old things he liked so much. The legs were bent and each step was bent on the knees.

But Toa, Bailo was so. Bailo was with a cow. Just like the two flags. The cow and him. He was strolling the ball against his face and something heavy. Very close to his eyes. Very clear. Until a round fell to the ground and he could not get up. And never again. And never again. And never again. And never again. And never again. So now we should go

to the bookstore. I don't know why I said because it doesn't work. But it's incredible because if one thinks the microphone works, it doesn't work. We have the new book for the new crisis in both English and Spanish outside as well. It's other books in the English and Spanish. And we can invite you all to help me make sure