Hunter of Stories Read online

  As are we.

  The Price of Devoutness

  Twenty-five thousand elephants are murdered every year, crushed with ax-blows or shot from helicopters, their tusks turned into objects of religious veneration.

  Ivory for making heavenly angels and earthly saints commands a very high price.

  From slaughtered elephants come the most lavish sculptures of the Holy Virgin and Child, the sacred Child who symbolizes Goodness and Piety, while the most moving images of Jesus on the Cross are carved from the tusks of the massacred beasts.

  Prophecies

  Who was it that a century ago best described today’s global power structure?

  Not a philosopher, not a sociologist, not a political scientist either.

  It was a child named Little Nemo, whose adventures were published in the New York Herald way back in 1905, as drawn by Winsor McCay.

  Little Nemo dreamed about the future.

  In one of his most unerring dreams, he traveled to Mars.

  That unfortunate planet was in the hands of a businessman who had crushed his competitors and exercised an absolute monopoly.

  The Martians seemed stupid, because they said little and breathed little.

  Little Nemo knew why: the boss of Mars had seized ownership of words and the air.

  They were the keys to life, the sources of power.

  Magicians

  In the year 2014 the International Monetary Fund issued an infallible prescription to save the world from economic crisis: lower the minimum wage.

  Experts at the IMF had discovered that reducing the minimum wage would create more jobs for young people, who would earn less but then make up the difference by working more.

  We all should be thankful for such generous minds. However, days keep going by, years too, and their ingenious recipe has yet to be brought to bear on a global scale.

  Very Brief Synthesis of Contemporary History

  For several centuries subjects have donned the garb of citizens, and monarchies have preferred to call themselves republics.

  Local dictatorships, claiming to be democracies, open their doors to the steamroller of the global market. In this kingdom of the free, we are all united as one. But are we one, or are we no one? Buyers or bought? Sellers or sold? Spies or spied upon?

  We live imprisoned behind invisible bars, betrayed by machines that feign obedience but spread lies with cybernetic impunity.

  Machines rule in homes, factories, offices, farms, and mines, and also on city streets, where we pedestrians are but a nuisance. Machines also rule in wars, where they do as much of the killing as warriors in uniform, or more.

  Diagnosis of Civilization

  Somewhere in some jungle, someone commented: “Civilized people are so strange. They all have watches and none of them has any time.”

  Report on the Health of Our Times

  Medical science calls the malady suffered by more than a few tourists “Jerusalem syndrome.”

  Certain visitors to the holy city, the ceremonial hub of three religions, experience a sudden divine revelation: they become characters in the Bible and from a perch on any chair or public bench they declaim sermons, dictated by God, which reveal the eternal punishments that await the disobedient in the flames of hell.

  Far from Jerusalem, a similar malady often afflicts occupants of the White House and presidents elsewhere, who proceed to exterminate sinners on direct orders from heaven.

  Wisdom/1

  I remember her; I can see her still: Pepe Barrientos’s mom, rocking in her rocking chair, surrounded by greenery at her bungalow in the neighborhood of Buceo.

  Her eyes, sunk in dusky skin crisscrossed by a thousand wrinkles, lit up mischievously when Pepe and I loudly complained about so-called friends in the neighborhood or at work, who thought they deserved to go farther than anyone else, and feigned a hug just to elbow their way ahead.

  The old woman, who spoke little and said much, gave her verdict: “Pity the poor souls who spend their lives comparing themselves to others.”

  Wisdom/2

  Incite Pereyra works at the Argentino Hotel in Piriápolis. While Helena and I are having breakfast and reading the paper, he comes over, coffee pot in hand. He talks as if he were old and wise, but he’s young and clever: “For the latest news, there’s nothing like an old newspaper. People say silent movies couldn’t speak. How stupid can you get. They didn’t speak because silence was better.”

  What the River Told Me

  Back around 1860-something, the forces of order strung Gauchito Gil up by the feet and slit his throat.

  Ever since, in Corrientes and other provinces of Argentina’s North, shrines honor his memory. People come to ask for his help getting through their hard lives and warding off death.

  Gauchito Gil, sanctified by his devotees, was condemned for crimes invented by the lords of land and war. The only crime he really committed was desertion: he refused to join the ranks of Argentinean, Brazilian, and Uruguayan troops that invaded Paraguay and in five years left no home standing and no adult male alive.

  “I am not going to kill my Paraguayan brothers,” said Gauchito Gil, and that was the last thing he said.

  The Hero

  Orlando Fals Borda told me this sad story, which occurred in Colombia during the Thousand Days’ War.

  As the twentieth century was being born, General José María Ferreira was battling the enemy near the Magdalena River. In an astute maneuver, the general marched in the opposite direction of his troops and took refuge in the hollow of a ceiba tree, the only tree standing in the immense emptiness.

  Curled up into a ball, he waited.

  Bullets meant for him whizzed by and he began to mumble prayers, begging, “Ceiba, ceiba, do not abandon me,” until suddenly he lost control of his body. Then he muttered, “If blood smells like shit, I’m wounded.”

  At least only the ceiba heard him.

  She knows to keep a secret.

  The Chronicler

  On August 18, 1947, in the neighborhood of San Severiano in Cádiz, a stockpile of torpedoes exploded.

  Juan Martínez, nicknamed the Parakeet, told the story of that calamity as only someone from Cádiz could: “Two sailors were standing watch at the gate. They ended up like cigarette paper stuck to the wall.”

  “A little kid did somersaults in the air and landed without a stitch on.”

  “It was nuts. If you didn’t feel like shooting yourself, you wanted to hang yourself; everybody was so afraid they were shitting themselves.”

  “I was about to have a drink, but the neck of the bottle slumped over and was pointing at the ground.”

  “On the bridge the explosion blew the head off a donkey and the rest of him kept on walking.”

  “What saved us were the city walls. They sent the blast straight up to the heavens. I saw stars racing to get out of the way.”

  But ten days later, in the ring at Linares, the famed bullfighter Manolete was gored to death. And in Cádiz no one spoke another word about the catastrophic explosion.

  A Lawsuit

  In July of the year 2004 the town of San Roque in Cádiz split in two: half sided with the cow, which was private property, and half backed the donkey, which belonged to the town.

  A citizen had brought suit alleging that the donkey had pursued the cow with dishonest intent. The cow, fleeing such advances, had stepped off a cliff and fallen to her death. The donkey’s lawyer alleged the cow had provoked his client by going into the field utterly naked, its teats in full view.

  The lawyer of the deceased cow demanded compensation, insisting his client had been the victim of sexual harassment.

  Other lawyers stuck their judicial noses into the matter. In the process, the late cow and the donkey sank into oblivion.

  A Most Prestigious Account

  Julius Caesar was a war correspondent who covered his own campaigns.

  For posterity he wrote a very meticulous account of his successes.

  Comm
entaries on the Gallic War is his best-known work. In time, that paean to the military merits of the author, who never considered the sacrifices of his uncomplaining and tireless soldiers, became a classic.

  Julius Caesar, emperor and god, chronicler of himself, used his considerable literary talent to pay homage to an invasion that killed a million Gauls and condemned the survivors to slavery.

  The Silent One

  In Spanish they call him the Barber, though he does not do shaves or haircuts.

  He lives in the depths of a tropical sea and never leaves it.

  His shop, guarded by anemones and colorful sponges, sits beside a coral reef.

  Waiting in a long line are fish, filthy with bacteria, parasites, and fungus.

  He cleans them in utter silence.

  The bluespine unicornfish is the only barber in the world who doesn’t talk. Not a word, ever.

  The Storyteller

  The Alligator of Sanare was born in a tiny settlement near Barquisimeto, home of the many ghosts that kept him company as a child.

  He speaks of them in his stories:

  the spirit that made bats sing,

  the man-eating goblin who lived in a calabash,

  the five devils that cured cases of fright,

  the warlock who would twist your neck around so you could only walk backward,

  the ghoul that knocked over mountains by lassoing them with a rope,

  the wizard who hunted pigeons so high in the sky they took years to fall to earth,

  and the one that used a winged jacket to fly from town to town, until the Yacambú River stole it because it was tired of flowing and wanted to fly.

  The Singer

  Ever since that day long ago, when he was born in a sandhill in Oruro, the armadillo wanted to sing.

  At the first drops of rain, he set out on his short sluggish legs to the edge of the pond to listen to the frogs singing happily.

  The armadillo did his best to join in. Frogs, crickets, and birds all mocked his growling voice.

  And so it went, until the day the wizard Sebastián Mamani offered him the divine gift of song, if he, in return, would hand over the shell on his back.

  That was how the shell, liberated from the body, became a musical instrument.

  Through it, the armadillo, which also answers to the name quirquincho, began to sing. And sing he does.

  The Musician

  In Kanchi, holy city of the Tamils of India, lived and dreamed the most off-key flutist in the world.

  He was paid very well to play very poorly.

  In the service of the gods, his flute tormented the devils.

  The inhabitants of Kanchi kept him chained to a tree so he would not run away. From Kerala, Mysore, and other places fabulous offers rained down.

  Everyone wanted the master of the impenetrable art of being awful.

  The Poet

  She was called Phillis because that was the name of the ship she came on, and Wheatley because it was the name of the merchant who bought her.

  She was born in Senegal in 1753.

  In Boston, slave traders put her up for sale: “Seven years old! She’ll make a great brood mare!”

  Naked, she was poked and prodded by many hands.

  At the age of thirteen, she was already writing poems in a language not her own.

  No one believed she was the author.

  At the age of twenty, Phillis was interrogated by a tribunal of eighteen illustrious gentlemen in frocks and powdered wigs. She had to recite texts by Virgil and Milton, plus several passages from the Bible, and she had to prove that her own poems were original.

  Seated in a chair, she endured her long examination. Finally, the tribunal relented: she was a woman, she was black, and she was a poet.

  The Defective Woman

  In Montevideo at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Captain José Bonifacio Toledo paid three hundred pesos for an eighteen-year-old black woman named Marta.

  She was well-behaved, “free of vices and defects,” according to the man who sold her, but a few days later the buyer demanded his money back. Marta did indeed have one defect, the worst of all: she fled at the first opportunity, leaving no trace of her footsteps.

  After many escapes, her new owner put her in chains, imprisoning her wrists and ankles in iron cuffs.

  The defective woman did not complain. In silence, she accepted her punishment.

  A few days later, she vanished.

  In the cell were four iron rings and a long chain, all intact.

  Nothing was ever heard of her again.

  The Baptism

  American physician Samuel Cartwright christened the mental disorder that drove slaves to take flight.

  This form of insanity had no remedy, but thanks to the doctor’s good will, at least it had a name: drapetomania.

  The Kidnapped Woman

  In the middle of the year 1911, the Mona Lisa disappeared from the Louvre.

  When it resurfaced after a two-year search, it was evident that the experience had not diminished the most mysterious smile in the world; being stolen only enhanced its prestige.

  The Lady with the Magnifying Glass

  She was a novelist and an archaeologist.

  Whether unraveling a baffling crime or excavating ruins thousands of years old, Agatha Christie faced the same challenges.

  The titles of her books are telling: Murder in Mesopotamia, They Came to Baghdad, Death on the Nile, Murder on the Orient Express…

  Perhaps she suspected the ancient civilizations of hiding the thievery that stoked their rise. Perhaps curiosity drove her to chase down hidden clues, to trace the footprints covered in lies. Detective Hercule Poirot, her invention, lent her his magnifying glass.

  The Idol

  When she retired from the movies, the whole world was widowed.

  She was born with a different name, and she was rightly dubbed the Divine One, the Swedish Sphinx, the Viking Venus for her frosty beauty.

  Half a century after her goodbye, Justo Jorge Padrón, a Spanish poet who spoke Swedish with a Canary Islands accent, was looking at the display in a record store window in Stockholm when he spotted the reflection of a tall and haughty woman wrapped in white fur standing behind him.

  He turned and saw her raised chin, her large dark glasses. He told himself yes, told himself no, she was, she wasn’t, she might be, and out of curiosity he asked, “Excuse me, madam, but… aren’t you Greta Garbo?”

  “I was,” she said.

  And with the unhurried bearing of a queen, she moved off.

  The First Female Referee

  Her name is Léa Campos and she is Brazilian. Once she was a beauty queen in Minas Gerais and still she is the only woman to have refereed professional soccer in the stadiums of either Europe or the Americas.

  Even though she had her license, diploma and all, after four years of courses and exams, the whistles of protest from indignant machos in the terraces resounded louder than her own.

  The referee was always a he, not a she. But the male monopoly ended in 1967, when Léa became commander-in-chief on the field, and twenty-two men were obliged to obey her orders and submit to her punishments.

  Several higher-ups in Brazilian soccer were quick to denounce the sacrilege. A few threatened to resign, while others invoked dubious scientific evidence to demonstrate that a woman’s inferior bone structure could never withstand such an arduous task.

  Another Interloper

  John was Jane? A woman occupied Saint Peter’s throne for two years, one month and four days?

  Some say that beginning in the year 855, the pope who led the Vatican was really a popess. Was she? Was she not? Historical fact or only legend? Why does this possibility still provoke the indignation of the Church? Why does it still scandalize the public?

  Other religions have gods and goddesses, priestesses as well as priests. Might that be why some view those religions as mere superstition?

  I would say, well, what do
I know? But I wonder: don’t the single men perched at the pinnacle of Churchly power get bored?

  Bless You, Dalmiro

  I have the good luck to live on a street named for an artist, the Uruguayan musician Dalmiro Costa. A miracle, given that nearly all Montevideo’s streets bear the names of military officers, politicians, and appalling figures from world history.

  The Right to Plunder

  In the year 2003 a veteran Iraqi journalist named Samir visited several museums in Europe.

  He found marvelous texts in Babylonian, heroes and gods sculpted in the hills of Nineveh, winged lions that had flown in Assyria…

  Someone approached him, offered to help: “Shall I call a doctor?”

  Squatting, Samir buried his face in his hands and swallowed his tears.

  He mumbled, “No, please. I’m all right.”

  Later on, he explained: “It hurts to see how much they have stolen and to know how much they will steal.”

  Two months later, US troops launched their invasion. The National Museum in Baghdad was sacked. One hundred seventy thousand works were reported lost.

  I Swear

  In 2014, for the thousandth time, the United Nations solemnly promised to hold a referendum to allow the people of Western Sahara to choose between independence and remaining as booty stolen by Morocco.