Bookplanet: Eduardo Galeano's latest, a memoir

The Latin American Orwell
Review of Voices of Time: A Life In Stories by Eduardo Galeano
By ANDREW NIKIFORUK

I don't remember now when I first discovered Eduardo Galeano, but I distinctly remember the encounter. It involved a book, of course. Our dangerous liaison even had a title: The Open Veins of Latin America. It showed how a bloody-minded staples economy spawned a bloody-minded history in Latin America -- and, to be truthful, our very own Canadian idiosyncrasies, though we'd never admit it. But damn, it read like a vampire thriller. The prose leaped off the page as fresh and hot as a Uruguayan asado served with a glass of clerico. I didn't know that journalists could write like that. Galeano was Orwell doing a tango.

Well, that was at least 30 years ago. Since then, I have repeatedly met Galeano, a born raconteur and political cartoonist, at the bookstore. And each time it has been a revelation: a journalism that embraced life by artfully combining history, reportage, fiction, myths, recipes and political analysis. His masterpiece, Memories of Fire , actually told the whole history of the New World with a series of earthly vignettes that defied all genres and became a genre of its own. (I confess: I didn't want the trilogy to end.) Then came a book about the beautiful game, Soccer in Sun and Shadow. If you had World Cup fever and you must know, Galeano's favourite player is the Brazilian Ronaldinho. Why? Ronaldinho has not lost the joy of playing even when he's losing.

Nor has Galeano lost the joy of telling stories or remembering irrepressible truths. Whenever cornered by the pestering media, he freely admits that he is a writer obsessed with remembering in a culture obsessed with forgetting. And that doesn't bother him one bit either, because "the books write me." His latest, Voices of Time: A Life in Stories is simply another gem, a lovely memoir to savour, to read aloud, to drink with. It weaves across time and space, continents and people, like some magical tapestry made by a thousand simple hands.

As Galeano, the school dropout, might remind you (over a drink, of course), the Latin origin of "text" is really "textile." So, he begins his unique weaving with the track-erasing winds of time and the makers of all things: blue algae. And he ends with an avian orchestra. "Do birds announce the morning? Or by singing do they create it?"

In between, he writes of people searching for love, justice or the memories of their childhood in bombed-out homes. The poor, he notes, seem to be made of indefatigable cloth. An 18-year-old slum dweller called the Screw admits to strangling a chicken that didn't belong him because he was starving: "It was self-defence," he tells the judge, straight-faced. An 87-year-old fellow named Pedro, from the far-flung village of El Gran Tunal, parks his burro and himself in Mexico City to protest the government's flight from justice. He stays for a year, proving that the poor are not invisible. How dare we lose hope?

Galeano meets a doctor who meets Dona Maximiliana, who, day in and day out, asks for her pulse to be taken. The pulse is strong. "It took him years to realize she was asking for someone to touch her." He visits the most successful fashion firm in Bogota: It makes armoured clothing. He marvels at the scene of a train collision at London's Paddington Station: "Not a moan could be heard. Nothing broke the silence except the ringing of cell phones, calling and calling and calling, from the pockets of the dead."

Sometimes Galeano asks us to think of history that might have been. What if Queen Isabella had denied Christopher Columbus a visa? What if Hernan Cortes didn't have his working papers in order? What if Pedro de Valdivia, the butcher of Chile, never made it to the New World because of his police record. What if aboriginals sent back the Mayflower pilgrims because, well, their immigration quotas were full. What if?

And then there is this matter of bird and fish, beetle and hare. Like Aesop, Galeano knows that an animal can tell a story like no other. He hopes that someday a shark just might pen a novel about how bad people really taste. Isn't it amazing that humans learned how to build homes from birds and how to weave blankets from spiders and how to sail from the wind, he asks. "How did we learn our evil ways? From whom did we learn to torment our neighbours and subdue the Earth?" He knows that salmon, who always return home to give birth and then die, are telling us something: "For millions of years they've believed that you can return, that round trips are not a lie."

There are notes on the imperial blunders of the ailing U.S. empire: "The only weapons of mass destruction were the speeches that made them up," he says, and just what do you do when your leaders contaminate language the way oil pollutes water? And what of the murder of memory at the Baghdad museum, where "the first fables, the first stories, the first written laws in the world were pillaged."

So this is a book about being human; our large failings and our smaller victories; our unspoken fears and our bloated desires; and the problem with global government, global markets and global thinking. It is also about miracles. You probably remember the summer of 1996, when Jose Luis Chilavert, the Paraguayan goalkeeper, shot from the centre of the field and, by God, dropped the ball into the opposing team's net. But did you know that while the ball travelled to the heavens, it hit an angel? Chilavert swears it. But nobody checked the ball for bloodstains. "And so we lost a chance to find out if angels are like us, if only in that way."

With Galeano's tapestry in hand, maybe we won't miss the next opportunity to do the right thing.

(Contributing reviewer Andrew Nikiforuk is a Calgary-based journalist. His book Pandemonium, an irreverent look at the globalization of disease and other man-made trouble, will be published in September.)