Then she would appear, pedaling, face to the wind, hair flying, a singular figure among the many women leaving work. Joaquín was blind to the others.
He never missed that date arranged with no one, and her bicycle never stopped.
Joaquín never knew her name.
Many years later he was walking the streets of Oporto, far from his home in Alicante, a different map, a different language, a different country, when he heard once again that unmistakable factory siren, the ugly screech that thirty-two years before had announced the grandest moment of every day.
He stood on the corner and waited.
No one came by.
No one was there.
The siren got it wrong.
It was May Day.
Marriage Problems
Once upon a time the moon and the sun lived together, getting along quite well, until the sun caught the moon kissing the morning star in a passionate embrace.
The sun slapped the moon. According to the Mapuche Indians, the scars of that blow are still visible on her face. What’s more, her silver tears gave birth to the art of silversmithing.
The sun and the moon never lived together again. When the sun comes out, the moon sets. When the moon appears, the sun hides.
Family Problems
Roberto Bouton, a rural physician, collected many voices in the countryside of Uruguay.
Here is the goodbye to life of a woodcutter, shepherd, and handyman named Canuto:
Look, doctor. It just so happens that I married a widow with a grown daughter, and my father went and fell in love with that daughter and married her, and so my father became my son-in-law and my daughter through marriage became my stepmother.
And my wife and I had a son, who was the brother-in-law of my father and therefore my uncle. And later on my daughter had a son who became my brother and also my grandson.
Are you following me, doctor? All this is a little complicated, I know, but to sum it up I ended up being both the husband and the grandson of my wife. And so it went, doctor, until one awful day when I realized: I am my own grandfather!
You see? An insufferable state of affairs. I’m telling you because you’re a doctor and you’ll understand.
The Revelation
The telephone rang.
The accent was unmistakable, but I did not recognize the voice.
A long time had passed. I knew nothing of this friend who had remained in Montevideo when I went into exile.
“Come,” I said, and I told him the times the trains ran along the Catalan coast to Calella de la Costa.
Walking to the station, I brought to mind a few of the adventures we had shared.
My friend had not changed much. His frank laugh was the same, and so was he.
We went for a stroll down a few of the town’s streets.
He said nothing, then grimaced and said, “What an ugly place!”
We walked on in silence.
It was the first time I had heard anyone say that. It may have also been the first time I realized it was true.
That hurt.
And because it hurt, I discovered that I loved the town where I lived.
The Taxi Driver
Some years back I was in Stockholm for the first time.
And for the first time I took a Swedish taxi.
When we arrived at our destination, the driver got out of the car the way one might descend from a horse-drawn carriage, opened the door for me, charged me for the trip and, with every possible courtesy, gave me my change and bid me farewell with a brief salute.
It was very cold, as it usually is there, and I confess that such useless self-sacrifice seemed unjust.
That night I mentioned it to my friends.
Isn’t there a socialist government in Sweden? What’s with these servant-like customs from the days of lords and lackeys?
They fell silent.
Then, with saintly patience, they explained that the taxi driver was obeying a law passed by the socialists to protect the workers.
To collect his fare, the driver must get out of his car. Thus, without realizing it, he gets some exercise. Those few steps in the street help improve circulation, stretch muscles, and activate the lungs.
Since the law came into effect, health problems among taxi drivers had declined drastically.
The Newborn
On the last day of April of the year 2013, Galulú Guagnini was born in Caracas.
Her father, Rodofo, explained: “She came to teach us everything anew.”
Aphrodite
Not long ago Catalina and Felipe discovered the sea, and nobody could wrest them from the water. They spent their days playing in the waves, their toys, shovels, and pails abandoned on the sand.
One night I told them: “Once upon a time there was a woman named Aphrodite. She was born from the foam. It seems to me you were too.”
The following morning, I heard screams coming from the waves.
It was them, shouting at the foam: “Mama!”
Lilossary
Things said by Miss Lila Rodríguez when she was between six and seven years old:
“Why can’t you see Martians in the sky?”
“Does a baby have toys when he’s in his mother’s belly?”
“I’m in danger! Two ants are watching me!”
“Of all the letters, my favorite is U, because it laughs.”
“Why did you turn on the light, Mommy? Why did you turn out the darkness?”
“I want to chew on my earlobe, but I can’t!”
“Know what? I always want to be where I’m not.”
“When I grow up, I’m not going to have children because they bust your balls.”
“Do I want those cookies for tomorrow? Of course. The future’s hungry.”
“Santa Claus exists because I want him to exist.”
The Inventor
Manuel Rosaldo started school not long before he invented his injection.
It stuck you in the rear but worked on your head. A single injection was sufficient to stuff your brain with all the knowledge humanity has accumulated in thousands upon thousands of years of discovering the world’s secrets.
The invention was great for the child inventor, since it meant he could spend his life on vacation, and it also turned out to be undeniably useful for parents and teachers, since they did not have to waste time teaching students who had already learned everything via injection.
As occurred with humanity’s other great inventions, no one took this pedagogical revolution seriously.
A Children’s Dictionary
Here are the voices of children defining words in the schools of Antioquia, Colombia, as collected by Javier Naranjo and other teachers:
Mouth: “God made it for chewing, but we use it for talking.”
Rain: “It’s Jesus, when he pees.”
Devil: “He’s the biggest double-talker.”
Distance: “It’s when somebody leaves someone.”
Spirit: “It’s the second body, which lives on after death.”
War: “When people kill for a piece of land or a piece of peace.”
Church: “Where people go to forgive God.”
Moon: “It’s the one that gives us night.”
Universe: “House of the stars.”
Back in My Childhood
It was January 5th, eve of Epiphany.
I left a letter in my shoe and next to it a few handfuls of grass and glasses of water for the camels, who were going to be exhausted when they arrived from the Orient.
All night long I did not shut my eyes. Every so often I heard the hooves of the camels loaded down with enormous bundles, and caught sight of the shadows of the three kings.
As soon as the sun peeked above the horizon, I leapt up and ran to find the toys the kings had left for me.
A few months later I started school for the first time.
At recess one of my classmates was kind enough to inform me, “Dummy. Don’t you know t
he three kings are your parents?”
I had trouble responding. When I came to my senses, I was blind with fury. I pushed him up against the wall and punched him until he cried.
The principal sent me home.
After I was pardoned and could return, no one ever raised that dangerous topic with me again.
The Vocation
His name is Rama and he works in Tenali, a village in the south of India.
He was a small child when he discovered his vocation.
It happened in the temple of the goddess Kali.
Bowing at the goddess’s feet, little Rama sang the hymn to her but could not keep from laughing.
The goddess was not pleased.
She has a thousand faces, and from her thousand mouths she demanded an explanation.
The child confessed: “I have only one nose. It’s complicated enough to blow it when I get a cold. How do you manage with a thousand?”
The goddess condemned him to eternal laughter. And that is how he makes his living.
That Question
The Uruguayan dictatorship had the Majfud family cornered. They suffered prison and torture and humiliations, and were dispossessed of everything they had.
One morning the children were playing in an old cart when a gunshot rang out. They were some distance away, but the sound traveled across the fields of Tacuarembó and they knew, who knows how or why, that the report came from the bed of their most beloved aunt, Marta.
Ever since that morning, Nolo, the youngest in the family, has wondered out loud: “Why be born, if we have to die?”
Jorge, his older brother, tries to help him.
He searches for an answer.
The years flow on, the way trees slide past the windows of a train, and Jorge is still searching for the answer.
Rain
Among all the world’s music and all heaven’s too, my favorite is the concerto for solo rain.
Every time it plays on the skylight of my house, I listen as if I were at Mass.
Clouds
At night, when no one sees them, clouds descend to the river.
They lean against it and pick up the water that later on they will spread on the land.
Sometimes, in the midst of this task, a few clouds fall in and the river carries them off.
When morning comes, you can see the fallen clouds go by.
They drift on the waters, slow boats made of cotton, staring at the sky.
The Strange River
They were children from far upcountry, who had never been to the beach at Piriápolis or any other beach, and had never seen the sea.
The most they dared was to get their feet wet, and none went into the waves.
To conquer his fear, the smartest among them explained: “It’s a river with only one bank.”
Paths of Fire
In the most ancient of ancient times, flowers had no petals and the pampa was filled not with gauchos but with dinosaurs.
A long time later came fire.
Ever since, fire saves us from darkness and cold. And while it fulfills its earthly duties, it sends smoke up to the sky, to the home of the gods.
As I was told in Michoacán, smoke is the food of the gods.
Or could it be that the gods smoke?
The Moon
The moon was dying to visit the earth.
After much hesitation, she let herself float down.
She intended to stay for only a short while, but when she began her ascent she got caught in the crown of a tree.
Convinced she would never free herself from that prison of branches, she felt horribly alone. Lucky for her, a wolf turned up from the depths of the forest and spent the night playing with her, caressing her with his snout, tickling her on her white belly, telling her jokes that were not all bad.
Just before dawn, the wolf helped free her from the branches and the moon took off for the sky.
But she did not go alone: she stole the wolf’s shadow, so he would never forget the night they shared.
That’s why the wolf howls.
He’s begging the moon to return his stolen shadow.
The moon plays deaf.
The Sea
For hours or maybe years, Helena had been sitting by the sea that began at her feet and penetrated her eyes and lungs.
To leave it made her sad.
To never have to leave it, she put little wheels on the sea and took it with her, as if it were her shadow. Because the sea, like her, was made of sun and salt.
Stories Tell the Tale
CARLOS BONAVITA ALWAYS TOLD ME, “IF what they say about making the road as you walk is true, then you must be the Minister of Public Works.”
My feet like to drift down Montevideo’s waterfront on the banks of the River Plate. In 1656 Antonio de León Pinelo wrote from Madrid that this was one of the four rivers of Eden. I think he exaggerated a little, truth be told, though back in my childhood, or at least in my memory, its waters were transparent.
Years have passed and the waters of this river as wide as the sea are limpid no more, but I continue walking its shores, while inside me walks the land as it was when I was born, what you might call the walked walker.
I walk and inside me words also walk, seeking out other words to tell the stories they want to tell. These words travel without haste, like the wandering souls that flit about the world and like the shooting stars that sometimes drift slowly down in the heavens of the South.
The words beat a steady rhythm as they walk. By coincidence the other day I heard that in Turkish “to walk” (yürümek) and “heart” (yürek) come from the same root.
QUITE A FEW YEARS AGO NOW, DURING MY time in exile on the coast of Catalonia, I got an encouraging nudge from a girl eight or nine years old, who, unless I’m remembering wrong, was named Soledad.
I was having a few drinks with her parents, also exiles, when she called me over and asked, “So, what do you do?”
“Me? I write books.”
“You write books?”
“Well… yes.”
“I don’t like books,” she declared.
And since she had me against the ropes, she hit me again: “Books sit still. I like songs because songs fly.”
Ever since my encounter with that angel sent by God, I have attempted to sing. It’s never worked, not even in the shower. Every time, the neighbors scream, “Get that dog to stop barking!”
I DO NOT KNOW JORGE VENTOCILLA. RATHER, I should say I do not know him personally, but my books are his friends and, through them, I am too.
When Mirrors was published, Jorge decided that the book, unknown in Panama, should circulate from hand to hand.
His savings did not amount to much, but in a fit of insanity he spent them all on copies of Mirrors, and he set the books loose in cafés, stores, barbershops, kiosks, wherever, each inscribed with a warning:
“This free book is a traveling book. You read it and pass it on to someone else.”
And on they go.
I DID NOT HAVE THE GOOD LUCK TO MEET scheherazade, and neither did I learn the art of storytelling in the palaces of Baghdad.
My universities were the old cafés of Montevideo.
Nameless storytellers taught me all I know.
During the little formal schooling I had, since I did not get past the first year of high school, I was terrible at history. But in those cafés I discovered that the past could become the present, and that memories could be recounted in such a way that they would stop being yesterday and become right now.
My teachers were exemplary liars who met in cafés to recover the times they had lost.
At these friendly get-togethers, where I snuck a place for myself, I heard one of the best stories that’s ever come my way. It happened at the beginning of the twentieth century during the cowboy war on the plains of my country, but the teller told the story so grippingly we were all exactly where he said he had been.
Following a battle, he had walked through a fi
eld sowed with dead bodies.
Among the dead was a beautiful young man who was, or at least appeared to be, an angel.
On his forehead he wore a white band stained red with blood.
On it was written: “For the fatherland and for her.”
The bullet had pierced the word “her.”
ONE OF MY TEACHERS IN THE ART OF NARRATION was named Rolendio Martínez.
I don’t think he knew how to read or write.
When I met him, he was nearly a hundred years old, and he liked to say: “I’m beyond age. I don’t have birthdays anymore and I don’t wear a watch.”
He recalled his friends from times long past, affectionately but without any gloss: “Yes, that one was good. Good. But no more than good.”
And to speak of the war, he began by clarifying: “I’m not some old widower walking around with his head on backward. I see it clear as could be.”
The images were burned into him in childhood.
A few horsemen had passed like wind before his eyes, child’s eyes. One had his throat slit, the wound from ear to ear, the spurt of blood an endless gush: “The poor guy had lost his horse and he was throwing punches, stumbling along, with no idea he was dead.”
I WROTE SOCCER IN SUN AND SHADOW TO convert the pagans. I wanted to help fans of reading lose their fear of soccer, and fans of soccer lose their fear of books. I never imagined anything else.
But according to Víctor Quintana, a congressman in Mexico, the book saved his life. In the middle of 1997, he was kidnapped by professional assassins, hired to punish him for exposing dirty deals.