In the mountains of Cajamarca, amid the peaks that took the longest to awaken and arise when the world was born, there are many figures painted by artists without names.
Those colorful tattoos on rock faces have survived for thousands of years, despite the ravages of weather.
The paintings are or aren’t, according to the time of day. Some catch fire when the day begins and go out by noon. Others change shape and color throughout the long march of the sun from dawn to dark. Still others appear only with dusk.
The paintings were created by human hand, but they are also works of light, the light that time sends day after day, and they are at her beck and call. She, the light, that other artist, queen and lady, conceals them and unveils them as and when she wishes.
The Challenge
The largest birds in the world fly not in the sky but in the ground.
They were sketched by the ancient inhabitants of Nazca, who knew how to summon marvels from the bare desert.
Seen from the ground, the lines say nothing. They are but long canals of stone and dust, which vanish in the distance on that high plain of dust and stone.
Seen from the air, those wrinkles in the desert form gigantic birds with outstretched wings.
The drawings are two or two and a half thousand years old. Airplanes, as far as we know, did not exist. For whom were they made? For whose eyes? Experts disagree.
I think, I wonder, could those perfect lines, which glisten in the dry air, have been born so the heavens could see them?
The heavens offer us their splendid designs, etched with stars or clouds, and it’s only right that we show our appreciation. The earth is not incapable. Perhaps that is what those people who turned the desert into a masterpiece wished to say: that the earth, too, can draw the way the heavens draw, and can fly without ever leaving the ground, on the wings of the birds it creates.
Day Is Born
He’s always first. When the end of night approaches, silence is broken by the one out of tune. The one out of tune, the bird who never tires, awakens the master singers. And before first light, all the birds in the world begin their serenade at the window, sailing over the flowers, over their reflections.
A few sing for love of the art. Others broadcast news or recount gossip or tell jokes or give speeches or proclaim delight. But all of them, artists, reporters, gossips, wags, cranks, and crazies, join in a single orchestral overture.
Do birds announce the morning? Or, by singing, do they create it?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
EDUARDO GALEANO is one of Latin America’s most admired writers, as well as a distinguished journalist and historian. The winner of the first Lannan Foundation Cultural Freedom Prize in 1998, he is the author of Upside Down, the Memory of Fire trilogy (for which he won the 1989 American Book Award), Open Veins of Latin America, and many other works. He lives in Montevideo, Uruguay.
EDUARDO GALEANO is one of Latin America’s foremost writers, as well as a distinguished journalist and historian. The winner of the first Lannan Foundation Cultural Freedom Prize in 1998, he is the author of Upside Down, the Memory of Fire trilogy (for which he won the 1989 American Book Award), Open Veins of Latin America, and many other works. He lives in Montevideo, Uruguay.
PRAISE FOR EDUARDO GALEANO’S
“This catalog of crimes and absurdities has both the acidity of Jonathan Swift and his dark humor. Who else can make the skeletons dance the way Galeano does?”
— The New Yorker
“Full of empathy, candor, unsettling connections…Galeano is serious but far from deadly….From the Internet to Interpol, from the vapidity of television to auto-itis, nothing is safe from his committed deconstructions.”
— The New York Times Book Review
“Galeano uses his craft to invade the reader’s mind, to persuade him or her to surrender to the charm of his writing and the power of his idealism.”
— Isabel Allende, author of My Invented Country