Eduardo Galeano
in Peuples/Popoli/Peoples/Pueblos n. 5 (November 1984)
I had just arrived, I hadn’t been in Buenos Aires for eight years. Nobody knew. Only the friend who was accompanying me on that first morning. We went in search of my café, the Café Ramos, and we didn’t find it, or rather we found it but it was no longer there. And then we went to the house where I had lived, on Montevideo Street, for the pure pleasure of looking at it from the pavement. And that’s what I was doing, a secret ceremony, when my friend asked me what had become of a painting that was hanging above my bed in my room.
The painting was a port, a Montevidean port to arrive, not to leave; and I was telling my friend that I didn’t know where that painting had gone, perhaps lost like so many other things, and I was telling him that I didn’t know what would become of the life of the painter, Emilio, so much a brother, and then, while I was talking about Emilio, I turned around and saw him: Emilio was walking, as if called, towards the exact place, that corner among the thousands of corners of the immense city, and at that exact moment.
And I said to myself: “I’m back without having left”.
The never
I missed people, friends who are no longer in Buenos Aires or anywhere else, they disappeared. The military’s holy inquisition, the exorcism of blood against the stubborn devil of popular rebellion, made them disappear.
And I missed places. The Bachin was no longer where it used to be and a heap of stones was waiting for me in place of the old market where the Basques are no longer there; and I knew that there would be no more caracú fountains or early mornings in El Tropezón.
Inheritance
I found the national currency reduced to a mirage. With a million peso note I paid for the newspaper and the guy at the kiosk didn’t faint.
In the newspaper I read that the interest rate had just gone up by half a point in the United States, just half a point, no big deal, and that humble half a point increased Argentina’s foreign debt by 250 million dollars. Bad news, I thought, for the millions of workers who have to pay it. Excellent news, on the other hand, for the minority who keep in American banks the profits ripped off from the country in all these years and who still dedicate their days and sleepless nights to speculation.
To halve wages, the dictatorship had to multiply the debt by six. Without one thing, the other was not possible. It is a lot of expensive fuel for the terror machine. And in the meantime, dollars were flying. Just as in Chile, just as in Uruguay: the masters outside lend you what the masters inside steal from you; and then you have to pay for the club that beats you and the luxury that humiliates you. Robin Hood in reverse, King Midas in negative: a system that steals from the poor to give to the rich and turns everything it touches into rubbish. To fight to change it, is not what the good oxygen of democracy deserves and demands, so that this good oxygen remains and becomes more? Who believes this, is suspected of being a terrorist or an idiot? Who says this is attacking democracy and good taste?
The time tunnel
Friends from thirty years ago, from when I first wore long trousers to street demonstrations, were waiting for me in Montevideo. I hadn’t seen them for eleven years, and since then it had rained a lot of ash on Uruguay. Torture had become a custom, solidarity a crime and denunciation a virtue; lies and mistrust had become daily necessities, and fear and silence a way of life. But as soon as I saw them I knew that these old friends were still capable of indignation and astonishment and childish enthusiasm, and that they were now of all ages at once.
I looked for some plants from my childhood, which were pure grass, and I found them covered with cement. The Uruguayan dictatorship, which dreams of a still world, loves cement. And it rightly hates young people.
The boys look out over a devastated country, where finding a job is a feat and surviving is a miracle, but they do not stand idly by and watch the national misfortune. The system wanted to castrate them, and they are the most fertile. It wanted to silence them, and they are the most decisive. Those who banned water failed because they could not, because no one can, ban thirst.
in: Peuples/Popoli/Peoples/Pueblos n. 5 (November 1984)