IN A LATIN America rampant with Magical Realists, Eduardo Galeano calls himself a Magical Marxist—“one half reason, one half passion, a third half mystery”—which may explain why, in Walking Words, after the affair of a white rose, a sprig of coriander, and a police truncheon, José is convicted of a “violation of the right of property (the father’s over his daughter and the dead man’s over his widow), disturbing the peace, and attempted priesticide.” And why Calamity Jane leaves South Dakota for a Comayagua brothel where, with a magic lasso, she ropes her very own archangel. And why in Haiti anyone telling a story before dark is disgraced: “The mountain throws a stone at his head, his mother walks on all fours.” And why a cowboy who turns himself into a jaguar finds it afterward impossible to “disenjag.” If Jesus on His Second Coming is not a happy camper (“They want me to jump without an umbrella…. A pancake from God”), it’s even worse for the bandit Fermino. While Fermino’s soul goes straight to heaven,
On earth his corpse was split in two. The body was thrown to the vultures and the head to the scientists…. Their analysis revealed a psychopathic personality evidenced by certain bulges in the skull characteristic of cold-blooded assassins from the mountains of obscure countries. [His] criminal destiny was also apparent from one ear that was nine millimeters shorter than the other, and from the pointed head and oversized jaws with large eyeteeth that continued chewing after he was dead.
Whimsy with a sting: This Magical Marxist began his vagabond life as a newspaperman, in Montevideo and again in Buenos Aires, always leaving town a step before a dictatorship got him. On that road, he became a historian. His Memory of Fire trilogy is famously anecdotal and juxtapositional, a rollercoaster and Ferris wheel. (Imagine an account of our century that leaps in a single bound from Superman to the Bay of Pigs, while keeping one eye on General Trujillo as he reviews the troops at West Point with an ivory fan, another eye on Carmen Miranda dancing for the king of Belgium with a banana, and a third on Pancho Villa reading the Arabian Nights.) Late in the 1980s, however, after completing Century of the Wind, Galeano turned to something different—still political, still literary, still anthropological, but a lot more personal.
In The Book of Embraces (1991), we heard about his thinning hair, his heart attack, and his wife, Helena, for whom at night “a line formed of dreams wishing to be dreamed, but it was not possible to dream them all.” We got gossip about such buddies as Pablo Neruda, Julio Cortázar, and Gabriel García Márquez. And, as if Latin American boom-boom had for a night cohabited with Pascal and Lichtenberg, there were eavesdroppings, aphorisms, minitexts, and footnotes on friendship, courage, muscle, wind, theology, art, silence, a snowy beach in Catalonia, and the culture of terror. “There is a division of labor in the ranks of the powerful,” Galeano explained; “The army, paramilitary organizations, and hired assassins concern themselves with social contradictions and the class struggle. Civilians are responsible for speeches.” And: “In the final analysis, it doesn’t bother anyone very much that politics be democratic so long as the economy is not.” And: “We are all mortal, until the first kiss and the second glass of wine.” He also collected graffiti. On a Bogotá wall: “Proletarians of all lands, unite!” (And, scrawled underneath in another hand: “FINAL NOTICE.”) Or, in Montevideo: “Assist the police. Torture yourself.”
Walking Words is an anthology of stories about “ghouls and fools,” derived from the urban and rural folklore of the Americas, with “windows” between chapters for the stray paradox and sneaky afflatus, and woodcut illustrations, like sarcophagus rubbings, by the Brazilian cordel artist José Francisco Borges: a kind of commonplace book of mysterious transcendence. But it could also be thought of as a line of dreams wishing to be dreamed by Helena. Besides Jesus and Calamity Jane, shoemakers, coachmen, fishermen, wine sellers, coffee grinders, and socialist-realist poets dream about tango dancers, soccer stars, and Moon People; frogs with feathers and parrots “born from grief”; St. George on a Yamaha motorcycle, warlocks on seahorses with vests of burning fat, and a Virgin at sea so busy resuscitating the drowned that “she didn’t have time for bad luck on dry land.” Often these dreamers feel awful, as if “dirty water rains inside me.” Or like a tabloid headline: “KILLED MOTHER WITHOUT GOOD CAUSE.” A cure for the blues will not come cheap: “Candido charged for his miracles in advance. He was no cheap saint. ‘What do they want?’ he’d grumble. ‘A favor from God for the price of a banana?’”
Yet always, somehow, there is levitation: “Memory eats the dead. The vulture, too. Just like memory, the vulture flies.” Besides: “We come from an egg much smaller than the head of a pin, and we live on a rock that spins around a dwarf star into which it will someday crash. But we’re made of light, as well as carbon and oxygen and shit and death and so much else.” Finally, wonderfully: “The Church says: The body is a sin. Science says: The body is a machine. Advertising says: The body is a business. The body says: I am a fiesta.” It’s oddly Rabelaisian, with a Kurtness of Vonnegut—as if magic tricks and peasant cunning were still capable of subverting the greedhead warlocks and the banal surfeit and oppressive patterning of the admass media/consumer grid. One dreams so, like Helena.