I was asked to write a foreword for the reissue of Eduardo Galeano’s Days and Nights of Love and War. Who was I to introduce Galeano? Galeano is celebrated across the Americas and beyond. Twice exiled, from his homeland Uruguay and then from Argentina because of his political writing, he wrote Days and Nights while living as a refugee in Spain. Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez gave a copy of Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America to President Barack Obama, no doubt to have the United States see history from the point of view of the other America, and that woke everyone up who hadn’t heard of Galeano before. After wrestling with the task, I finally realized the best way to get past my writer’s block was to create vignettes inspired by Galeano’s own favorite form. In the same year that I wrote this introduction, 1999, the Lannan Foundation awarded Galeano the Prize for Cultural Freedom in recognition of “extraordinary and courageous work [that] celebrates the human right to freedom of imagination, inquiry and expression.”
While this book was in production, Galeano passed away, on April 13, 2015.
I have been in the company of the man I consider my teacher only a handful of times and always too briefly. In Boston we shared a stage. It was an old theater, like the one where Lincoln was shot. There was no microphone, or if there was, it didn’t work. I had to shout to be heard. I read as if I were angry. It was the only way. In the back of my head, it occurs to me the writer Eduardo Galeano is in the audience listening to me. This thought makes my blood freeze.
In the spring of ’91 while teaching in Albuquerque, I was asked if I would escort you for the day. You wanted to go to Acoma and needed a driver; you don’t drive. I don’t like to drive, but if you had asked me to drive you home to Montevideo, Uruguay, I would’ve said yes. It was a straight shot west to that mythical city high up on a mesa. Poor Eduardo! I chattered like a monkey the entire trip. You must’ve been exhausted. It’s not half as tiring to talk as it is to listen.
I believe certain people, events, and books come to you when they must, at their precise moment in history. You arrived sent by “Saint Coincidence,” as the poet Joy Harjo calls it. Saint Coincidence led me first to your book Memory of Fire in ’87. That was the year I wanted to die and did die, but Divine Providence resurrected me.
Once before I’d met you at a book signing, but that was only briefly. The line meandered as sluggishly as the Rio Grande. When you finally came into view, I saw why. You talked to everyone. Every one. Not chatter, but dialogue. Next to your name you drew little pictures of a pig and a daisy. You hugged people; some you even kissed!
Back then I made the mistake, as only the naive can, of confusing the books with the author. When I met you again this year, I’m happy to report I was wiser.
The book is the sum of our highest potential. Writers, alas, are the rough drafts.
This time we spend the day driving around my city on a scavenger hunt of sorts, for various items you were asked to take back home to Montevideo. One of them makes me laugh—a collapsible piñata, one that squashes down for easy transport and later can be opened and filled. You’re certain we can find one if we only look. I haven’t the heart to tell you there is no such thing except in the minds of poets and inventors.
When I read your work what I find remarkable is my inability to classify what I’m reading. Is this history? And if so, it seems to me to be the best kind, full of gossip, full of story. Your books read like fable, fairy tale, myth, poem, diary, journal, but certainly not the dull lines of historical writing. And then I understand. You’re an acrobat, Eduardo. You’re a storyteller.
You have a list of things to buy. We go to my favorite vintage shop where you buy nothing and you watch me buy everything. We stop at a supermarket to buy you cans of jalapeños to take home. Band-Aids and fluorescent Post-it notes catch your eye, and these we buy too. We run to find CDs for your children, tequila for your agent, and a tailor to have your jeans hemmed. We eat breakfast tacos at Taquería No Que No.
By your own admission you call yourself a chronicler, but this doesn’t say exactly what you do, what you give to writers like me. We’ve traded stories of how overwhelming it is to write, and it’s a great relief to hear someone else say how strenuous it is to compose a sentence, a short paragraph, to rewrite it thirty, forty times. It gives me ánimo to hear about how each book becomes more difficult for you. Because with each book your standards are raised.
Carranza’s Meat Market is where we stop next for barbacoa Tex-Mex. It amuses you because of the railroad across the street. “What poetic justice,” you say. “Mexican president Carranza was plagued by the Zapatistas bombing the railroads, and now here are the railroads across the street plaguing his descendants.”
I think, when I look at you, how did you do it, remain human, after everything? What is left after so many goodbyes, after everything? After much pain, much fear? I’m not a writer in exile. I’ve never been exiled from anything, except maybe a bar or two.
I can’t imagine being in exile.
I look and can’t find you in the books you write. You do a Sally Rand fan dance. I find you only in this book—Days and Nights of Love and War. Only here do I catch glimpses of you refracted in the mirror of other faces, dreams, stories of other dreamers, stories of other storytellers.
You write: “I’ve known few people who have survived the tests of pain and violence—a rare feat—with their capacity for tenderness intact.”
You don’t talk about yourself, Eduardo. You talk about my house, my dogs, the book I’m writing, and sometimes for a wisp of a moment you mention you. But only by inference. On our way to run errands you say, “I didn’t expect so many trees and hills here. San Antonio is very pleasant. It looks like a good town to walk in.” “Oh, do you like to walk?” “I walk all the time,” you say. “Blocks and blocks.” And I try to imagine you walking through the streets of Montevideo, through Buenos Aires, through Calella de la Costa, Spain, where you’ve written this book.
I imagine you walking through all the cities where you’ve lived exiled from your last life. I imagine you drinking in bars and eating as you do here with me, con gusto. I gather from sharing beer and food with you a little of who you are. I see you riding trains and buses. The waiter fills your glass with beer, a woman hands you change. People talk to you without knowing who you are. People like to talk to you because you like to listen. You are a writer, you are a witness.
You once told me a writer can write of life only if they’ve experienced death. You weren’t talking about yourself, but I thought of you and your first death at nineteen chronicled in Days and Nights of Love and War. Your body was already in the morgue, until someone, “Saint Coincidence” perhaps, chanced to notice you were still breathing. Since this death and the subsequent deaths and resurrections, you write with life. One way to conquer death.
Your memory startles me. Your attention to detail. You quote poems as easily as you do history. On the ride to Acoma your face furrows into Xs when you grill me about a short story of mine. “What did you mean here: ‘I believe love is always eternal. Even if eternity is only five minutes’?” And I explain myself. “Ah,” you say, “is that it?” Silence. Then you add, “You love like a man.”
Love resuscitates the living dead, don’t you think? For others, it’s laughter. For writers, the pen is our savior. For some the needle, I suppose, or the bottle, or perhaps that rare elixir: poetry. I don’t know how it is for others, for those without words, I mean. I can only imagine. For me, there are the writers like you, who remind me why I write.
“And what about love, Eduardo?”
“Love? The Brazilian poet Vinícius de Moraes says it best. No es infinito pero es infinito en cuanto dura. It’s not infinite, but it’s infinite while it lasts.”
I make you write this down for me, and you do, adding your signature pig.
We walk into a shop full of piñatas. Hundreds of piñatas. Piñatas shaped like superheroes and cartoons, like soldiers and like Chihuahuas, but no collapsible piñatas. At least you and I are in agreement. These piñatas are bien feas, truly ugly. The best kind is the old-fashioned piñata. The one shaped like a star.
You teach me to remain faithful to the word. To revere the syllable as a poet does, to remain attentive to writing as if one’s life, several lives, depended upon it.
This is what I want. To believe one can write to change the world.
To change the world.
I do not believe, Eduardo, you are as you claim an atheist. You believe in “Saint Coincidence,” the power of love, and in brujos: that religion called superstition by the uncoverted and spirituality by the devout. In short, you believe in humanity.
On that first visit to Albuquerque you had a hard time reading the English translations of your work. With one vignette in particular, you’re obsessed with the English translation, how it doesn’t ring as true as the original Spanish. “We have to revise it,” you plead. You make me sit down with you at the Albuquerque airport and get to work. You insist. The little furrows on your forehead don’t disappear until we’ve gone over the vignette and revised and revised and revised.
After hearing you speak, we don’t sleep for days. Some of us want to write like you. Some of us want to be you. Our crush is laughable. Television producers, journalists, university professors, cashiers, lesbian lawyers, dentists, opera singers, students, writers, retired schoolteachers, nurses, gay painters, and straight architects. We are in love with your words, with the deep voice saying them, with the way you speak English, the way you speak Spanish.
Admiration is a love potion.
In Days and Nights of Love and War, you write, “I have known the machinery of terror from the inside and that exile has not always been easy. I could celebrate that at the end of so much sorrow and so much death, I still keep alive my capacity for astonishment at marvelous things, and my capacity for indignation at infamy, and that I continue to believe the advice of the poet who told me not to take seriously anything that does not make me laugh.”
A table full of San Antonio artists and poets have come to the Liberty Bar to have an encore of Eduardo after his reading. A penniless painter pulls like a rabbit from a hat a gift he’s made for you that evening. He had to run home to make it.
It’s a collapsible piñata!
You’re overjoyed! You laugh like a child. Greedy and grateful.
You write: “I thought I knew some good stories to tell other people, and I discovered, or confirmed, that I had to write. I had often been convinced that this solitary trade wasn’t worthwhile if you compare it, for example, to political activism or adventure. I had written and published a lot, but I hadn’t the guts to dig down inside and open up and give of myself. Writing was dangerous, like making love the way one should.”
Eduardo, I love your books because you write like a woman.
