Adonis Diaries

Voices of the time: In very short stories by Eduardo Galeano

1) It is in a course of intensive care, at a Buenos Aires hospital, that Ruben Omar Sosa studied the case of the patient Maximiliana. This case would be the most important lesson that Ruben learned in his medical career.

Every day, and at every encounter with Ruben, Maximiliana would ask him to take her pulse.  Ruben would hold Maximiliana wrist for a couple of seconds, just faking of taking her pulse, and say: “Your pulse is 78. Excellent”   Maximiliana would instantly forget that Ruben has taken her pulse and repeat the demand, and Ruben would oblige.  Ruben got convinced that Maximiliana is a mental case.

It was years later that it dawned on Ruben that Maximiliana wanted someone to touch her.

2) Trees of golden fruits.  Black hands collect the white grains in large green leaves.  The grains are spread in the sun to ferment and acquire the color of copper.

The cocoa grains are dispatched to European and US factories for treatment.  Cadbury, Mars, Nestle, Hershey…sell the chocolate bars to supermarkets around the world.  For every dollar of chocolate sold, less than 4 cents are paid to African villages that little hands gathered the cocoa, grain by grain.

I was covering Ghana as correspondent to a European daily and I visited one of the cocoa plantations.  I was eating a chocolate bar and the kids were curious how it tasted.

They loved chocolate: It never crossed their mind that they were in the chocolate business.  They have never tasted chocolate.

3) Muhammad Ashraf never set foot in school. Up before dawn, he has been working since the age of 6.  Muhammad is 11 year-old, cutting, perforating, patching, and sewing soccer balls.

Soccer balls are produced in the Pakistani village of Umarkot and seen in every soccer field around the world.  Muhammad also has to glue a sticker that read “This soccer ball was not made by kids”

4) It is 1984 in the prison of Lurigancho at Lima (Chili).  Luis Nino is inspecting the prison for the count of a human rights organization.  Luis is crossing sick prisoners, vomiting blood, agonizing, open wounds, with fever…Luis meets the chief medical staff and ask why the physicians are not making any routine health rounds…

The physician replies: “We, physicians, intervene at the calls of nurses…”  And where are the nurses? The chief retorts: “The budget for the prison didn’t allocate funds for nurses…”

5) It is 1964.  US capitalism propaganda are frightening the citizens of Chili of the Communist hydra, its seven mouths ready to devour them.  Salvador Allende lost the election that year and explained: “In the poor quarter of Providencia, a maid hid a suitcase of her cloths and utensils in the garden of her employer. She had never owned any land or houses, and her comprehension of private properties was very limited”

6) A few months after 9/11 attack on twin Towers, Ariel Sharon PM of Israel entered the Palestinian refugee camp of Jennine in the West Bank (under Israel occupation forces) that crowded ten of thousands of civilians. Israel pounded the cordoned-off camp with canons, and tanks overran live bodies.

This genocide opened a crater in the camp deeper and larger than Twin Towers, and killed many folds the number of victims in Twin Towers.  The Towers went down within an hour, the civilians in the camp had to suffer genocide for an entire week. Where was this global information network?

Can anyone claim he witnessed or saw what happened in Jenine?

(This same Sharon who committed the genocide in the Palestinian camps of Sabra and Chatila in Beirut (1982).  Instead of facing international court for crimes against humanity, Sharon was elected Prime Minister of Israel, to repeat his series of genocides he committed in his life.  When Sharon went into coma in 2005, and still is, hideous voices proclaimed “Here goes the last Prophet of Israel”)

Note: Eduardo Galeano is an author and poet from Urugway