Hunter of Stories Read online

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2017 by Eduardo Galeano

  English translation copyright © 2017 by Mark Fried

  Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  Nation Books

  116 East 16th Street, 8th Floor New York, NY 10003

  http://www.publicaffairsbooks.com/nation-books

  @NationBooks

  Spanish-language edition published by Siglo XXI de España Editores, S. A., 2016.

  First English-language Edition: November 2017

  Published by Nation Books, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Nation Books is a co-publishing venture of the Nation Institute and the Perseus Books.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  Collages by Eduardo Galeano, inspired by anonymous artists of popular art and by the work of April Deniz, Ulisse Aldrovandi, William Blake, Albrecht Dürer, Theodor de Bry, Edward Topsell, Enea Vico, Pieter Brueghel the Younger, Hieronymus Bosch, J. J. Grandville, Louis Le Breton, and Jan van Eyck.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

  Names: Galeano, Eduardo, 1940–2015, author. | Fried, Mark, translator.

  Title: Hunter of stories / Eduardo Galeano ; translated by Mark Fried.

  Description: New York : Nation Books, 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017014189 (print) | LCCN 2017027554 (ebook) | ISBN 9781568589916 (ebook) | ISBN 9781568589909 (hardback)

  Subjects: | BISAC: HISTORY / Latin America / South America. | LITERARY COLLECTIONS / Caribbean & Latin American.

  Classification: LCC PQ8520.17.A4 (ebook) | LCC PQ8520.17.A4 A2 2017 (print) |

  DDC 863/.64—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017014189

  ISBNs: 978-1-56858-990-9 (hardcover); 978-1-56858-991-6 (e-book)

  E3-20171019-JV-PC

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Translator’s Note

  Note from the Editor of the Spanish Edition

  Windmills of Time Footprints

  Elegy to Travel

  Free

  Shipwrecked

  Wind

  Rice’s Journey

  Lost Breath

  Stars

  Encounters

  The New World

  Satanic Diversity

  Barbaric Customs

  Mute

  Blind

  The Monster of Buenos Aires

  Deaf

  The Mighty Zero

  Danger

  The Passion According to Cochabamba

  The Explanation

  Mother Nature Teaches

  We Were Walking Forests

  The Ceiba

  The Aruera

  Nobody Can Beat Grandpa

  The Skin of Books

  Symbols

  Labor

  Urraká’s Allies

  The Slingshot Boy

  Túpac Amaru’s Forebears

  Buenos Aires Was Born Twice

  The First Flute

  The Drum

  Old Folks’ Contest

  A Storyteller Told Me

  Samuel Ruiz Was Born Twice

  José Falcioni Died Twice

  Soil’s Journey

  Indignant Earth

  Homage

  Andresito

  The Charrúas’ Claw

  Coffee’s Journey

  Cafés with History

  Noon Splendor

  Memory’s Helping Hand

  Memory Is Not an Endangered Species

  Seeds of Identity

  Divine Offering

  Amnesia

  Monster Wanted

  Ladies and Gentlemen!

  Let’s Go Out

  Foreigner

  Aesop

  A Fable from Aesop’s Time

  If Larousse Says So…

  And Las Vegas Was Born

  Would You Mind Repeating That?

  The Golden Throne

  Illuminated Little Dictator

  Invincible Little Dictator

  The Terrorizer

  Purgatory

  Closed Doors

  Invisible

  The First Strike

  The Windbreak

  Echoes

  Was Order Restored?

  Nests United

  The Other School

  The Activist

  The Seamstress

  The Dangerous Woman

  Look Who’s Looking

  Admirable Heroes, Unwanted Guests

  Leeches

  Hallelujah

  The Virgin Mary Privatized

  The Welcome

  The Gates of Paradise

  A Visit to Hell

  My Face, Your Face

  Masks

  This Shoe

  The Doctor

  Peace upon the Water

  Once upon a Time, There Was a River

  Once upon a Time, There Was a Sea

  We’ll Have to Change Planets

  A Nation Called Garbage

  Sorcerers’ Apprentices

  Autoism

  A Riddle

  The Price of Devoutness

  Prophecies

  Magicians

  Very Brief Synthesis of Contemporary History

  Diagnosis of Civilization

  Report on the Health of Our Times

  Wisdom/1

  Wisdom/2

  What the River Told Me

  The Hero

  The Chronicler

  A Lawsuit

  A Most Prestigious Account

  The Silent One

  The Storyteller

  The Singer

  The Musician

  The Poet

  The Defective Woman

  The Baptism

  The Kidnapped Woman

  The Lady with the Magnifying Glass

  The Idol

  The First Female Referee

  Another Interloper

  Bless You, Dalmiro

  The Right to Plunder

  I Swear

  Wars of the Future

  Calumnies

  War Against War

  Soccer Revolution

  Let’s Have Another Cup

  The Barefoot Idol

  I Confess

  The Ball as Tool

  Sly but Honest

  Depraved

  Jailed

  Banned

  Beloved, Behated

  Bless You Laughter, Always

  The Weaver

  The Hatter

  Textiles and Time

  The Carpenter

  The Discoverer

  The Light Rider

  The Sculptor

  The Cook

  The Fireman

  Artists

  The Deceased

  Papa Goes to the Stadium

  Lost Steps

  Absent Without Leave

  The Offering

  The Other Stars

  Kings of the Cemetery

  Last Wish

  Trigger Music

  Colors

  Bodies That Sing

  The Body Is a Sin

  Holy Family
>
  First Flush of Youth

  Pleasure, a Masculine Privilege

  Virtuous Men

  Punishments

  Bésame Mucho

  The Disobedient Woman

  Gastronomic Chronicle

  Two Guilty Women

  The Cursed Woman

  Love Story

  Fleas

  Spiders

  That Neck

  Those Eyes

  That Blessed Sound

  Marriage Problems

  Family Problems

  The Revelation

  The Taxi Driver

  The Newborn

  Aphrodite

  Lilossary

  The Inventor

  A Children’s Dictionary

  Back in My Childhood

  The Vocation

  That Question

  Rain

  Clouds

  The Strange River

  Paths of Fire

  The Moon

  The Sea

  Stories Tell the Tale

  For the Record An Utterly Complete Autobiography

  A Few Things About the Author

  Why I Write/1

  God’s Little Angel

  Why I Write/2

  Silence, Please

  The Craft of Writing

  Why I Write/3

  I Crave, I Covet, I Yearn Living Out of Curiosity

  Last Door

  Nightmare

  At the End of Each Day

  At the End of Each Night

  To Live, to Die

  I Crave, I Covet, I Yearn

  About the Author

  This book is dedicated to the compañeros who helped me along the way: Alfredo López Austin, Mark Fried, Lino Bessonart, Carlos Díaz, Pedro Daniel Weinberg, and other friends. Always and above all, this book is dedicated to Helena Villagra.

  Translator’s Note

  HUNTER OF STORIES WAS WRITTEN DURING THE LAST THREE years of Eduardo Galeano’s life, most of it a few hours every day sitting quietly alone, pad and pen in hand, as he traveled across Latin America, Europe, and the United States for public appearances. A consummate performer, Eduardo drew energy from his readers even as the drudgery of travel exhausted him.

  I last saw him in 2013 on his final visit to New York City, when he was already being treated for an aggressive return of the cancer that had cost him half a lung a decade before. Though he did not look well, his spirit was undiminished. He excitedly recounted what he had recently seen or heard, tales that confirmed his habitual optimism about the human condition and his eternal pessimism about the course of civilization.

  When an early draft of the book arrived on my desk at the beginning of 2014, sprinkled as it was with reflections on death, I realized how quickly his health was failing. By then, Eduardo had given up his itinerant lifestyle and was closeted at his home in Montevideo. He continued to rework and expand Hunter of Stories for much of that year, and I imagine his compulsive attention to detail and his delight in writing helped keep his mind off his illness.

  Eduardo must have felt some urgency to tell the stories he had collected or imagined and to share the insights from a life fully lived. Yet the book retains his familiar tone of calm and delighted reflection, even when contemplating the prospect of leaving behind the world he critiqued so trenchantly and loved so dearly.

  Mark Fried

  Note from the Editor of the Spanish Edition

  EDUARDO GALEANO DIED ON APRIL 13, 2015. WE HAD signed off on the final details of Hunter of Stories the previous summer, including the cover image, the monster of Buenos Aires, which, as was his wont, he chose. He had spent 2012 and 2013 working on the book. Given that his state of health was not good, we decided to delay publication in order to protect him from the many tasks involved in any book launch.

  During his last months he continued rewriting and polishing his texts, again and again, something that had always given him pleasure. He also began a new book, which he wanted to call Scribblings, a few stories of which he completed. After his death, when it was possible to move ahead with publishing Hunter of Stories, we reread the stories in that unfinished work and felt that a number of them had so much in common with those of Hunter of Stories that they should be incorporated into this volume. Some twenty of these “scribblings” are included here.

  Eduardo was always a sober man, perhaps paying homage to the Welsh genes he so often denied, and he would rarely complain about his illness or his pains, even during his final days. A handful of the new texts seems to outline what he thought or imagined regarding death. They are so strong and beautiful that we took the liberty of adding a new section to the original manuscript and giving it the title of the poem he had chosen for the book’s ending, which in fact ends the book: “I Crave, I Covet, I Yearn.”

  Besides these additions, we followed all of his indications, which, as usual, were obsessively and kindly detailed.

  It is not easy to write the final word on this project, which benefited from the valuable commentaries and observations of Daniel Weinberg and the professionalism of Gabriela Vigo and the rest of the Siglo XXI team during the long editing process, all of whom must have been particularly motivated by the affection they felt and still feel for Eduardo.

  I thank Helena Villagra for her priceless assistance in giving Hunter of Stories its final shape. Editing this book was a pleasant task, a reencounter with a beloved writer, and at the same time it was unavoidably difficult.

  Carlos E. Díaz

  Windmills of Time

  Footprints

  Wind smooths over the tracks of gulls.

  Rain washes away human steps.

  Sun bleaches the scars of time.

  Storytellers seek the footprints of lost memory, love and pain that cannot be seen but are never erased.

  Elegy to Travel

  In the pages of A Thousand and One Nights, this advice appears:

  “Get going, friend! Drop everything and get going! Of what use is an arrow if it never flies from the bow? How good would the melodious lute sound if it were still a piece of wood?”

  Free

  By day, the sun guides them. By night, the stars.

  Paying no fare, they travel without passports and without forms for customs or immigration.

  Birds are the only free beings in this world inhabited by prisoners. They fly from pole to pole, powered by food alone, on the route they choose and at the hour they wish, without ever asking permission of officials who believe they own the heavens.

  Shipwrecked

  The world is on the move.

  On board are more shipwrecked souls than successful seafarers.

  Thousands of desperate people die en route, before they can complete the crossing to the promised land, where even the poor are rich and everyone lives in Hollywood.

  The illusions of any who manage to arrive do not last long.

  Wind

  It spreads seeds, guides clouds, tests sailors.

  Sometimes it cleanses the air; sometimes it dirties it.

  Sometimes it brings close what was far off and sometimes it scatters what was close by.

  Invisible and untouchable, it caresses or strikes, whispers or roars.

  Some think it says, “I blow wherever I wish.”

  But no one really understands.

  Does it announce what is to come?

  Weather forecasters in China are known as “mirrors of the wind.”

  Rice’s Journey

  In Asia rice is cultivated with meticulous care. At harvest the stalks are gently cut and gathered into bunches, so that evil winds do not carry off its soul.

  The people of Sichuan remember the fiercest flood that has ever been or will be: it occurred in ancient times and it drowned the rice, body and soul.

  Only a dog survived.

  After the flood finally turned and the angry waters began to abate, he managed to reach shore, swimming hard.

  The dog had a grain of rice stuck to his tail.

  I
n that grain lay the soul.

  Lost Breath

  Before the before, when time was not yet time and the world was not yet the world, we were all gods.

  Brahma, the Hindu god, could not bear the competition, so he stole our divine breath and concealed it in a secret hiding place.

  Ever since, we have lived in search of our lost breath. We seek it in the depths of the sea and on the highest peaks.

  From his great distance, Brahma smiles.

  Stars

  On the banks of the Platte River the Pawnee Indians speak of the origin.

  Not even once had the paths of the evening star and the morning star crossed.

  They wanted to meet.

  The moon agreed to guide them to a rendezvous, but halfway there she threw them into the abyss, then spent several nights chuckling at her joke.

  The stars were not discouraged. Desire gave them the strength to scale the precipice back up to the high heavens.

  There, far above, they embraced so passionately that no one could tell which was which.

  And from that incomparable coupling we wanderers of the world arose.

  Encounters

  Tezcatlipoca, Mexican god of the night, sent his son to sing alongside the crocodile musicians of heaven.

  The sun was against it, but the black god, the outlawed beauty, paid no heed and brought together the voices of heaven and earth.

  Thus were united silence and sound, chants and music, night and day, darkness and color. And thus they all learned to live together.

  The New World

  Ulysses, driven by the wind, might have been the first Greek to see the ocean.

  I can only imagine his astonishment when his ship passed through the Strait of Gibraltar and before his eyes lay that immense expanse, guarded by the ever-open maws of monsters.

  It would not have crossed the mariner’s mind that beyond those salty waters and roaring winds lay a mystery even more immense and still without a name.

  Satanic Diversity

  In Peru, in the middle of the seventeenth century, the priest Bernabé Cobo finished writing his History of the New World.

  Cobo set out in that voluminous work the reason why indigenous America had so many gods and such diverse versions of the origins of its peoples.