Two weeks ago, violence surged further into the Western world than it has in years. The fear of injury, death, loss and repression coursed through our media, terrible images from a place like our home of a people like our tribe, suffering. In a moment of guilt we realized we hadn’t thought about the victims of our world’s wars, hadn’t said a prayer for our soldiers or those caught in the crossfire, not for a while.
We’ve seen the backlash, the fear manifest in inhumanity, our people shrinking towards hate and exclusion. These have been weeks when our world seems to sag under its own weight. Imagined last moments play through and through and through.
It’s been a good time to walk with friends, in rain-washed streets, to remind ourselves how far humanity extends beyond its limitations. To remind ourselves who we have been, what has been done in our names, who people think we are and who we wish to be. And to read and to think and consider other lives.
This last week I read El libro de los abrazos, The Book of Embraces (1991). It’s a book of short stories, essays and illustrations by the Uruguayan author and journalist, Eduardo Galeano. Galeano was born in 1940 in Montevideo, lived in exile in Argentina and Spain between 1973 and 1984, and was the author of several books including The Open Veins of Latin America. Here I have translated two pieces from El libro de los abrazos that reminded me of the storms our parents weathered and brought me back, mostly, to myself.
El cielo y el infierno
Llegué a Bluefields, en la costa de Nicaragua, al día siguiente de un ataque de la contra. Había muchos muertos y heridos. Yo estaba en el hospital cuando uno de los sobrevivientes del tiroteo, un muchacho, despertó de la anestesia: despertó sin brazos, miró al médico y le pidió:
–Máteme.
Me quedé con un nudo en el estómago.
Esa noche, noche atróz, el aire hervía de calor. Yo me eché en una terraza, solo, cara al cielo. No lejos de allí, sonaba fuerte la música. A pesar de la guerra, a pesar de todo, el pueblo de Bluefields estaba celebrando la fiesta tradicional de Palo de Mayo. El gentío bailaba, jubiloso, en torno del árbol ceremonial. Pero yo, tendido en la terraza, no quería escuchar la música ni quería escuchar nada, y estaba tratando de no sentir, de no recordar, de no pensar: en nada, en nada de nada. Y en eso estaba, espantando sonidos y tristezas y mosquitos, con los ojos clavados en la alta noche, cuando un niño de Bluefields, que yo no conocía, se echó a mi lado y se puso a mirar al cielo, como yo, en silencio.
Entonces cayó una estrella fugaz. Yo podía haber pedido un deseo; pero ni se me ocurrió.
Y el niño me explicó:
—¿Sabes por qué se caen las estrellas? Es culpa de Dios. Es Dios, que las pega mal. Él pega las estrellas con agua de arroz.
Amanecí bailando.
Translation (Mine): Heaven and Hell
I arrived in Bluefields, on the coast of Nicaragua, the day after a Contra attack. There were many dead and injured. I was at the hospital when a survivor of the attack, a kid, woke from anesthesia: he woke without arms, looked at the doctor and said:
“Kill me.”
I left with a knot in my stomach.
That night, that terrible night, the air boiled through the town. I found a roof and lay there, alone, face to the sky. Not far away, loud music played. Despite the war, despite everything, the town of Bluefields was celebrating the festival of the Palo de Mayo. The people danced, rejoicing, around the ceremonial tree. But I, lying prone there on that roof, didn’t want to hear music or anything else, and I was trying not to feel, not to remember, not to think: about anything, about nothing. And there I was, fighting off sounds and sorrows and mosquitoes, with my eyes fixed on the far-off sky, when a local child, unknown to me, lay down at my side to stare at the sky. We kept the same silence.
A shooting star fell. I could have made a wish; but it never even crossed my mind.
And the child said to me:
“Do you know why the stars fall? It’s God’s fault. It’s God, who doesn’t stick them up properly. He sticks them up with rice water.”
I woke up dancing.
El desafío
No lograron convertirnos en ellos —me escribió el Cacho El Kadri.
Corrían ya los últimos tiempos de las dictaduras militares en Argentina y Uruguay. Habíamos comido miedo al desayuno, miedo al almuerzo y a la cena, miedo; pero no habían logrado convertirnos en ellos.
Defiance
They couldn’t make us into them. Cacho El Kadri told me, in a letter.
It was in the final days of the military dictatorships in Argentina and Uruguay. We had eaten fear for breakfast, fear for lunch, and for dinner, fear; but they hadn’t been able to make us into them.
360 by bike 