Hunter of Stories

  They had him tied up, face down on the ground, and were kicking him to death, when there was a pause before the final bullet. The murderers got caught up in an argument about soccer. That was when Víctor, more dead than alive, put in his two cents. He began telling stories from my book, trading minutes of life for every story from those pages, the way Scheherazade traded a story for every one of her thousand-and-one nights.

  Hours and stories slowly unfolded.

  At last the murderers left him, tied up and trampled, but alive.

  They said, “You’re a good guy,” and they took their bullets elsewhere.

  IN VOICES OF TIME, I TOLD A STORY THAT took place in 1967 in the main soccer stadium of Colombia.

  Not a pin would fit; the stadium was raging. It was the annual classic between the two teams from Bogotá, Millonarios and Santa Fe.

  Santa Fe striker Omar Devanni fell in the penalty area in the final minute of that super match-up, and the referee whistled a penalty.

  Devanni had tripped. No one had hit him or even brushed against him. The referee was wrong, but no way could he change his mind in front of that roaring crowd.

  So Devanni took the kick for a foul that never occurred. He executed it serenely, sending the ball wide, nowhere near the net.

  His act of courage may have sealed his ruin, but it gave him the right to look himself in the eye when he faced the mirror every morning.

  A few years later, I received a letter from someone I did not know named Alejandro Amorín. He had found Devanni nowhere near soccer, running a bar somewhere in the Caribbean, and asked him about the incident. Devanni first said he couldn’t remember. Then he said it could be, who knows—maybe it just went wrong. “It came out like that, I made a lousy kick, it was by accident, these things happen in soccer…”

  As if excusing himself for acting with such dignity.

  ANOTHER STORY FROM VOICES OF TIME. Every year on a certain day in October, the telephone rings in Mirta Colángelo’s house. “Hi, Mirta. It’s Jorge Pérez. You can guess why I’m calling. Today marks sixteen years since I found that bottle. Like every year, I’m calling to celebrate.”

  Jorge had lost his job and his desire to live. He was walking off his misfortune, along the rocky shore of Puerto Rosales, when he found one of the vessels from the fleet that Mirta’s students tossed into the open sea every year. Inside each bottle was a letter.

  The one Jorge found was wet but still legible. It said: “My name is Martín. I’m eight years old. I’m looking for a friend on the paths of the water.”

  Jorge read the letter and it gave him back his life.

  MY BOOK DAYS AND NIGHTS OF LOVE AND war opens with a quote from Karl Marx: “In history, as in nature, rot is the source of life.”

  When the book was translated into German, the translator, who knew Marx’s work from A to Z, asked me where I found that sentence, because he did not recall it and could not locate it in any book.

  I searched as well, but in vain. Still, I was certain my memory had not betrayed me on that perfect synthesis of dialectical thinking. So, I told the translator: “The sentence is from Marx, but he forgot to write it down.”

  IN 1970, I SUBMITTED OPEN VEINS OF LATIN America for the Casa de las Américas prize in Cuba. I lost. According to the jury, the book was not serious. Back then, the left still thought serious works had to be boring.

  But I found a publisher and the book had the good fortune of earning high praise from several military dictatorships, which banned it. The truth is, that’s what gave the book prestige. Up to then no copies had been sold, not even to my relatives.

  The attention the book garnered from the censors gave it a boost everywhere except in my country, Uruguay, where Open Veins was allowed to circulate freely in the military’s prisons during the first six months of the dictatorship. Strange, because at that time the dictatorships of several South American countries were coordinated under the Condor Plan and had very similar, if not identical, characteristics. They banned the same things.

  The Uruguayan censors, reading the title, must have thought it was a book on anatomy, and medical texts were not forbidden.

  The error did not last long.

  JAMES CANTERO, A URUGUAYAN LIKE ME, A SOCCER player like I dreamed of being, wrote me a letter in the year 2009.

  I had never met him.

  He told me he had something for me.

  And he gave it to me.

  It was a book of mine, an old edition of Open Veins.

  A captain from the Salvadoran army had given it to him some years before.

  The book then traveled half the world, accompanying James in his soccer wanderings.

  “It sought you out,” he told me when he handed it over. “It was hoping to find you.”

  The book was mortally wounded: a bullet hole went from the front cover right through the back.

  The captain had found the book in the knapsack of a dead guerrilla, one among many who died in the battle of Chalatenango at the end of 1984.

  Nothing else was in the knapsack.

  The captain could not say why he took the book or why he saved it. Neither could James explain, even to himself, why he carried it around from country to country.

  The fact is, after wandering for a quarter of a century, the book reached my hands.

  And in my hands it sits.

  Nothing else remains of that boy without a name.

  This book shot through is his body.

  IN MIRRORS, I RECOUNTED STORIES THAT were little known or entirely unknown.

  One of them took place in Spain in 1942. Francisco Franco’s military putsch, known as the National Uprising though it was no more than a vulgar coup d’état, had annihilated the Spanish Republic.

  The dictatorship triumphantly announced that a prisoner, Matilde Landa, was to publicly repudiate her satanic ideas and would receive the holy sacrament of baptism in prison.

  The ceremony could not begin without the guest of honor, but Matilde had disappeared.

  The dignitaries, gathered in the prison yard, realized she was on the roof when she threw herself off. Her body hit the ground and exploded like a bomb.

  The show went on. The bishop baptized the bits of her that remained.

  Mirrors was at the printers when I received a letter from the publisher’s copy editor, who had finished her hunt for errors.

  She wanted to know where I had found the information for that story. All of it was correct, but she only knew about it from what her relatives had told her.

  Matilde Landa was her aunt.

  MY GRANDDAUGHTER CATALINA WAS TEN. We were walking along a street in Buenos Aires when someone came up and asked me to sign a book. I can’t remember which one.

  We continued on, the two of us, quietly arm in arm, until Catalina shook her head and offered this encouraging remark: “I don’t know why they make such a fuss. Not even I read you.”

  SOME TIME AGO I WAS IN A SCHOOL IN SALTA, in the north of Argentina, reading stories to the children.

  Afterward, the teacher asked them to write me letters about the reading.

  One of the letters counseled: “Keep writing. You’ll improve.”

  THE STORY THAT OPENS THE BOOK OF EMBRACES tells of a man from the town of Neguá, on the coast of Colombia, who managed to travel up to the heavens.

  Upon his return he said he had contemplated human life from on high, and that we are a sea of flames. There are big flames, little flames, flames of all colors. There are people who burn serenely, never feeling the wind, and people who burn crazily, filling the air with sparks. Some silly flames give off neither light nor heat, but others burn with so much yearning for life that you cannot look at them without averting your eyes, and whoever goes near them catches fire.

  That story is often read in the schools of my country.

  One afternoon I was taking a walk in Rodó Park, at the edge of the river-sea of Montevideo, when suddenly I found myself surrounded by an uproarious crowd of children,
dressed in their school uniforms, the girls with big blue ribbons in their hair.

  The children screamed, “It’s the lord of the flames! The lord of the flames!”

  That afternoon, that gang of kids gave me the only title of nobility I’ve ever received.

  MAY DAY IS THE MOST WIDELY CELEBRATED OF all holidays.

  The entire world stands still to pay homage to the workers hanged long ago in Chicago for the crime of refusing to work more than eight hours a day.

  On my first trip to the United States, I was surprised to learn that May 1st was a day like any other. Not even the city of Chicago, where the tragedy occurred, seemed to notice. In The Book of Embraces I confessed that such willful forgetting pained me.

  Much later I received a letter from Diana Berek and Lew Rosenbaum of Chicago.

  They had never celebrated the holiday, but in the year 2006, along with the largest crowd they had ever witnessed, they paid homage to the workers sent to the gallows long ago for their bravery.

  In the letter, Diana and Lew told me they finally understood the discomfort I described in The Book of Embraces.

  “Chicago embraces you,” the letter said.

  MARIE-DOMINIQUE PERROT TAUGHT AT A high school in Geneva.

  She wrote to me that in the middle of 1995 a fire razed the school, leaving nothing but a pile of smoking ruins. The next day one of the teachers defied the order to stay clear and returned from the skeleton of the building with a half-burned book. It was badly singed, but the title was legible, more or less: Mémoire du feu.

  The French edition of the first volume of Memory of Fire was the only object that survived the flames.

  In her letter, the teacher remarked, “It is as if the fire wanted to sign its work.” She added, “This reminds me of what Jean Cocteau said when asked what he would save if his house were burning. He answered, ‘The fire.’”

  IN THE DIFFICULT TASK OF SAYING A LOT WITH a little, two people have helped me enormously and mercilessly: Helena Villagra and Fernando Rodríguez.

  Fernando was like a wild plant, having grown up poor with little or no formal education, but his nose for superfluous words was first-rate.

  When I wrote the second volume of Memory of Fire, I faced the challenge of telling in a few words the story of Camila O’Gorman and the priest Ladislao Gutiérrez, protagonists of a scandal that swept the city of Buenos Aires off its feet in the middle of the nineteenth century and culminated in their both being shot by a firing squad for the crime of love.

  It is not easy to write of love without clouding it in words.

  Fernando, who was living in my house at the time, rejected everything. “There are still a lot of stones in the lentils,” he said and said again, as he continued crossing out stones until only a single line remained.

  Then, at last, Fernando gave in.

  The line said: “They were two by an error that the night corrected.”

  MY TRILOGY MEMORY OF FIRE WAS BORN from a poem by Constantine Cavafy. Reading the great Greek poet of Alexandria, I took his challenge to heart: Why not see the universe through a keyhole? Why not write the big story of the past by telling the little one? In Cavafy’s poem, the victory of Mark Antony in Greece is told from the point of view of a poor merchant on his donkey, trying to sell something, and no one pays him any mind.

  IN MY WANDERINGS AS A STORYTELLER, I WAS giving a reading in the Galician city of Ourense one night.

  A man in the back row glared at me, brow furrowed, eyes unblinking: a farmer’s face, tanned by long days of labor, angry enough to want to kiss.

  After the reading, he approached slowly, eyes fixed, as if he intended to kill me. But he did not kill me.

  He said, “It must be so hard to write so simply.”

  Having delivered the most insightful review I ever received, he turned on his heel and left without saying goodbye.

  I WROTE MIRRORS FROM A DREAM.

  Usually my dreams are embarrassingly mediocre: missing a flight, waiting in line, unfamiliar cities, falling from the tenth floor…

  My wife Helena has prodigious dreams. Breakfast time is truly painful because the dreams she recounts contrast so starkly with my own, in which I argue with an official who does not speak a language I understand, or I simply miss yet another flight.

  She says, “Oh, so you missed the plane.… I dreamed about an airplane last night too. I dreamed the two of us were waiting in an incredibly long line to board. Every passenger had a pillow under his arm. The pillows had to go through a machine that read their dreams from the night before. The dreams were in the pillows, and the machine was a detector of dangerous dreams.”

  Modestly, she adds, “I believe it had something to do with public security.”

  I take a sip of café con leche, exile myself to the bathroom for half an hour, try to rouse my spirits and hold my head high, but it isn’t easy.

  However, one night I had a pretty good dream, the one that gave rise to Mirrors. In the dream I got into a taxi and said, “Take me to the French Revolution, take me to where Olympe de Gouges is on her way to the guillotine.”

  The driver took me. I wanted to see Olympe at the very moment she stood under the blade, to hear her say these lovely words: “If we women are good enough to be on the scaffold, we’re good enough to be on the judge’s bench.”

  I was still with the taxi driver, so I said, “Now take me to Brazil, to Congonhas do Campo. I want to see Aleijadinho sculpting his prophets.”

  And off we went. By the way, what a fabulous paradox: Aleijadinho, the least attractive man in Brazil, created the loveliest colonial art in the Americas. The ugliest guy crafted the finest beauty.

  I wanted to see all of it, to witness it personally. The taxi driver obeyed my every instruction and in the dream I continued traveling all over a world without borders in time or space. From that dream came my book. I knew I could write it because I had already dreamed it.

  ON ANOTHER STORYTELLING NIGHT I READ to a roomful of Mexican university students.

  A passage in Voices of Time is about the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, shot by firing squad and his works banned during Franco’s long dictatorship. It recounts how a troupe from Uruguay dared to put on one of his plays in Madrid, the first after many years of involuntary silence. At the end of the play, the Spanish audience did not applaud. Or, better put, they applauded with their feet, stamping on the floor. The actors were stunned; they had no clue what it meant.

  Had they done such a bad job? Did they deserve such a protest?

  A long time later in Montevideo, when China Zorrilla, a member of that subversive troupe, told me about it, I thought it couldn’t have happened like that. But then it occurred to me that the stamping might have been for the author, executed for being red and gay and peculiar. Maybe it was a way of saying to him, “You should know, Federico, just how alive you are.”

  When I retold this story at the university in Mexico, something occurred that had never happened in my many other retellings across Andalusia and elsewhere: the students applauded with their feet, six thousand feet stamping on the floor with all their heart and soul. They extended both my story and what my story told, as if we were all in a theater in Madrid some years before. The same thundering on the earth, the same way of saying, “You should know, Federico, just how alive you are.”

  AT ANOTHER READING IN ATHENS, TO STUDENTS at the Polytech, I was accompanied by a dog named Kanelos.

  He curled up at my feet onstage. I did not know him, but somehow he found the patience to listen, eyes alert, from beginning to end. Kanelos was a dog’s dog, a street dog, rude, wild, who never missed a student demonstration and was always on the front lines facing off with the police.

  Seven years later, in 2010, the fury of the Greeks exploded. Students led the protests against the exterminators who were forcing Greece to pay for the sins of Wall Street. In pictures, at the head of the clamor, amid tear gas and smoke, was a dog I recognized. It was Kanelos. But my Greek f
riends told me Kanelos had died a year and a half before.

  I told them they were mistaken. That dog looking for a fight, that unpresentable tramp, was indeed Kanelos. If now he was named Lukanikos, it was to fool the enemy.

  A FEW YEARS BEFORE SALVADOR ALLENDE BECAME president of Chile, I had the good fortune to accompany him on a trip south.

  I had never seen snow. Drinking good wine, we made one toast after another while the snow fell softly, in slow cotton balls, on the other side of the window.

  That night, in Punta Arenas, Allende showed me the speech he was going to give at a campaign rally.

  The following day, between cheers from the crowd, he used a sentence that was not in the version I had read.

  Maybe it was an involuntary prophecy.

  Who knows?

  Allende said: “It is worth dying for all the things without which it is not worth living.”

  MANY YEARS AGO, I LEARNED A LOT FROM working with Carlos Quijano at the weekly Marcha.

  I will never forget the afternoon, in the middle of an election campaign, when we were listening to political speeches on the radio.

  They promised a lot, said little, meant practically nothing.

  Don Carlos listened and remained silent. Then he murmured, “The only sin that cannot be forgiven is the sin against hope.”

  CHILDREN OF THE DAYS TAKES THE FORM OF a calendar. A story sprouts from every page. Or put another way, each day has a story to tell.

  Sonia Breccia read it looking for her true birthday: not the day she was born, but the day she wished to be born.