Copyright
Copyright © 2017 by Eduardo Galeano
English translation copyright © 2017 by Mark Fried
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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.
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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
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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.
In 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.
The reason was straightforward: the Indians were ignorant.