Map of the World
I was trying to decipher the racket of birdcalls in the trees at Stanford University when an elderly professor approached. The professor, learned in some scientific specialty, had a lot to say bottled up inside. In his field, he knew everything while I knew nothing, but he was friendly, spoke softly, and it was a pleasure to listen to him.
At some point, his curiosity got the better of him, and he asked me what country I was from. I answered, and from his startled eyes I could tell the name Uruguay was not too familiar. I was used to that, and the professor made some polite comment about the traditional dress in my country. It was obvious he was confusing Uruguay with Guatemala, which by some miracle was in the headlines at the time. I returned the favor by becoming Guatemalan on the spot, and without poking fun I said something or other about the tumultuous history of Central America.
“Central America,” he said.
I wanted to believe he understood. Just in case, I didn’t ask.
How well I know that many of his compatriots believe that Central America is Kansas City.
Distances
Rafael Gallo, lord of the rings, had just finished a tough fight in the plaza at Albacete, where he won the ears and tail as trophies.
While taking off his suit of lights, the bullfighter declared, “We’re going back to Seville right now.”
His assistant explained they couldn’t, it was too late. “Seville is so far away…”
Rafael leaped up, shaking his cape in his fist. “Ho-o-old it right there!”
Like a bolt of angry lightning, he set things straight. “Seville is just where it ought to be. It’s this place that’s far away.”
Geography
In Chicago, everybody’s black. In New York, the midwinter sun bakes stones till they melt. In Brooklyn, anyone who reaches the age of thirty deserves a statue. The finest homes in Miami are built of trash. Hollywood is run by the rats.
Chicago, New York, Brooklyn, Miami, and Hollywood — these are the names of some of the barrios of Cite Soleil, the most abject slum in the capital of Haiti.
The Geographer
“Lake Titicaca, you’ve heard of it?”
“I have.”
“Lake Titicaca used to be here.”
“Where?”
“Right here.”
And he waved his arm at the endless parched terrain.
We were in the Tamarugal Desert, a landscape of bone-dry gravel extending from horizon to horizon, interrupted only once in a great while by the passing of a lizard. But who was I to contradict an expert?
My scientific curiosity was aroused. And the fellow was kind enough to explain how the lake had come to move so far away.
“I’m not sure when it happened. Before I was born. The herons took it.”
One long raw winter, the lake froze without warning, and the herons’ legs got stuck in the ice. After flapping their wings as hard as they could for many days and nights, the trapped birds finally managed to take off, but the lake went with them. Across the skies they flew carrying the frozen lake. When it melted, it fell to earth. And that’s how it ended up way over there.
I studied the clouds. I must have looked skeptical because the man asked rather testily, “So, if there are flying saucers, why not flying lakes? Huh?”
The Albatross
He lives in the wind. Always in flight, in the wind he sleeps.
He doesn’t get winded or worn. And he’s lived long; at the age of sixty he’s still circling and circling the earth.
The wind warns him of storms and points the way to the coast. He never gets lost or forgets where he was born. But neither the earth nor the sea are his. On land he waddles on stubby legs, and in the water he soon grows bored.
When the wind deserts him, he waits. Now and then the wind might tarry, but it always returns. It seeks him out, calls to him, carries him off. And he lets himself go, lets himself fly, his great wings hovering in the air.
The Sun Walker
Gustavo de Mello called me from the border. “Come on up,” he said.
Don Felix was there. He was just getting in or just leaving, you could never tell which.
Neither could you tell his age. While we were putting away a bottle of red wine, he confessed he was ninety. Gustavo said he’d subtracted a year or two, but Felix Payrallo Carbajal had no birth certificate. “I never had any ID so I couldn’t lose it,” he told me while he lit another cigarette and blew a few smoke rings.
With no papers and no clothes beyond what he wore, he walked from country to country, from town to town, the length of the century and the breadth of the world.
Don Felix left sundials in his wake. Unlike most Uruguayans, who can’t wait to retire, he still made his living that way. He built gnomons, clocks without mechanisms, and sold them in town squares. Not to tell time, a custom he considered discourteous, but for the simple pleasure of keeping the sun company on its earthly travels.
When we met in the city of Rivera, Don Felix was just starting to feel at home. That had him worried. The temptation to stay was an order to leave. “New, new, new!” he shrieked, banging the table with his childlike hands.
There, as everywhere else, he was just passing through. He came in order to leave. He arrived from a hundred countries and two hundred sundials, and he departed whenever he fell in love, fleeing the danger of setting down roots in any bed or abode.
For leaving, he preferred dawn. When the sun rose, he’d be on his way. As soon as the doors opened at the train or bus station, Don Felix would put the few bills he’d managed to save on the counter and say: “As far as this will take me.”
The Port
Grandma Raquel was blind when she died. But in Helena’s dream, sometime later, Grandma could see.
In the dream, Grandma was no longer old nor a handful of tired bones. She was brand new, a four-year-old girl at the end of a voyage across the sea from far-off Bessarabia, one immigrant among many. On deck, Grandma asked Helena to pick her up, because the ship was docking and she wanted to see the port of Buenos Aires.
And in the dream, hoisted in her granddaughter’s arms, blind Grandma saw the port of the country where she was to live the rest of her life.
Immigrants a Century Ago
A lock of hair
a key that’s lost its door
a pipe that’s lost its mouth
a name embroidered on a handkerchief
a portrait in an oval frame
a blanket that used to be shared
and other things, big and small, lay wrapped among the clothes in the pilgrims’ luggage. Not much room in a suitcase, but every suitcase contained a world. Beat up and bent out of shape, held together by rope or rusty latches, each one was alike but unlike any other.
The men and women, like their suitcases, were shunted from line to line, and like them they crowded together, in a heap, waiting. They came from tiny villages invisible on the map. At the end of the long crossing they had disembarked at Ellis Island, only a stone’s throw from the Statue of Liberty, which, had arrived not long before they had, at the port of New York.
The island worked like a sieve. The gatekeepers of the Promised Land interrogated and classified the immigrants, listened to their hearts and lungs, studied their eyelids, mouths, and toes, weighed them, measured their blood pressure, temperature, height, and intelligence.