Unconventional Wisdom of a Historical Author

South American writer Eduardo Galeano is telling the story of a two-timing 98-year-old man who couldn’t quit cheating--even on the edge of death.

The old man with the wandering heart lived in a coastal town in Ecuador, Galeano says. In his younger days, he had been a notorious rake and once had confessed to having affairs with 300 women, a number his relatives considered a serious underestimate and perhaps an effort to seem less sinful in the eyes of God. In late old age, however, the man ostentatiously clung to the memory of a favorite lover named Dolores.

“Each evening,” Galeano explains, “this old, old man took a talcum powder box--this old-fashioned box with a powder puff and nice roses and blue designs of flowers, a very delicate, delicate box. And then he took the powder puff and feeling it with his nose, he would say, ‘I’m sure we know each other, I’m sure we know each other.’

“But when night fell each evening, he betrayed the memory of his beloved Dolores because he was watching television, which had recently come to that town. He fell in love with the woman who read the news. So each evening he was preparing himself with his best clothes--you know a flower here, and a tie, and a hat, of course, the best hat he had. Like he was going to a feast or a great appointment.

“And he was watching television, watching her and trying to seduce her. So in order to seduce her, he was showing her his account in the bank. From the pocket here, like this, just a little, not too much, but showing a little so that the girl in the television screen would notice that he was quite wealthy.”

As he tells the story, Galeano’s hands dart from the imaginary lapel where the old man pinned his flower to the pants pocket where he tucked his precious bank statement. When Galeano moves on to other topics, his hands continue to dance in the air, as if invisible but tangible objects are scattered all around.

Ahead of Dictators

A small man adept at staying a jump ahead of Latin American dictatorships, Galeano says the story illustrates his brand of “reality,” the fabulous gems of human experience that lie waiting to be discovered practically everywhere. “Reality is telling you beautiful things to remember and to write,” he adds, noting that one of the old man’s grandsons told him this story because he took the time to hear it.

To a listener, the tale is absurd, touching and tinged with longing and hope. It also betrays a technological innocence like many of the anecdotes in “Memory of Fire,” Galeano’s ambitious, idiosyncratic history of North and South America, whose third volume has just been published in this country. (For instance, Galeano reports that Indians who first saw white men using paper called it the “skin of God” because it could bring messages from far away.)

Eloquent English

Speaking in English that is eloquent but obviously not his first language, Galeano adds, “Reality is always speaking and we are not prepared to hear her voices because we are trained by the dominant culture to be absolutely passive and deaf and (to keep) our eyes covered with curtains. . . So I think if there is any justification for the profession of writing, it would be to help to unmask reality, to reveal the world as it is, as it was (and) as it may be if we change it.”

This particular day Galeano, 48 and a native of Uruguay, is on his first visit to Los Angeles, the final leg of a national tour marking the publication of “Century of the Wind” (Pantheon). The last volume of the trilogy covers the 20th Century, including the ouster of Argentina’s military junta and the continuing war in Nicaragua.

“Memory of Fire” has earned Galeano critical acclaim and elevated him to the rank of Latin American authors such as novelists Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Isabel Allende and Mario Vargas Llosa, who have reached global audiences with their work.

At the same time, however, Galeano’s trilogy is something of a puzzle. In Sweden, for example, “Memory of Fire” is classified as history, but in the United States, it is labeled fiction.

The reason for this is apparently because “Memory of Fire” stands in a class by itself. Although Galeano says each of the thousands of incidents charted in the volumes is carefully researched and historically accurate, “Memory of Fire” is totally unorthodox.

Instead of conventional narratives, the books consist of chronologically arranged anecdotes of no more than a few hundred words. Each anecdote, which is footnoted, relates an incident--such as the time in 1908 that the Colombian goverment decreed that Indians did not exist--and is juxtaposed with another incident occurring at the same time in another place. Locales vary widely, stretching from Tierra del Fuego to Hollywood and Washington. Al Capone puts in an appearance wearing a bulletproof vest while addressing an anti-communist rally in Chicago. So does Salvador Allende, the Chilean leader killed in a U.S.-backed military coup in 1973. The result is like a mosaic or an impressionistic painting with each dot contributing to the big picture.

Galeano says he is “so happy being unclassifiable.” Shrugging, he indicates that he doesn’t care how his work is labeled so long as it achieves his purpose.

“What’s the difference?” he asks. “I am telling it (the history of the Western Hemisphere) in such a way that an event could happen again while I’m telling it. To make it happen twice, that’s the recovery of the past as a source of life.”

The idea for “Memory of Fire” came to him while he was in exile in Spain, Galeano says. A journalist by profession, he fled from his native Uruguay to Argentina in 1973 and to Spain after the Argentine armed forces began their “dirty war” against dissidents, leftists and those suspected of such leanings.

“I left Uruguay because I don’t like to be a prisoner and I was obliged to leave Argentina because I don’t like to be a corpse,” he says. He returned to Uruguay 3 1/2 years ago after a change in government.

Life Is More Predictable

Nowadays, Galeano’s life is much more settled and predictable. “I have a house in Montevideo,” he says. “I travel a lot and I write a lot. Mainly I live a lot. I enjoy eating and drinking and making love and being with friends and walking. I walk a lot. The sea front (in Montevideo), I walk some days two, three hours. It’s my best way of writing. I receive images and ideas and emotions and I struggle with words, looking for words. I am always pulling little pieces of paper from my pocket to make notes.”

(Galeano’s agent, Susan Bergholz, says he has seldom discussed his private life in the five years she has known him. He is married to Helen Villagra, to whom he has dedicated most of his books, and has children from a previous marriage, the agent says.)

Unlike many current or former exiles, Galeano is not bitter or vengeful about his uprooting. If he had not had been exiled, he would not have had access to the Spanish and other European archives on the history of the New World that were crucial to the first two installments of “Memory of Fire,” he says.

Relying on Friends, Memories

For the final volume, however, he has relied much more on modern accounts and the reports of friends and other living witnesses to events, Galeano says.

Not least, he has dredged his own memory, particularly for episodes on Hollywood, especially the comic Buster Keaton whom Galeano admires fervently for “his talent, his humor, his melancholy.”

Although his first trip here is a hurried affair, Galeano says he was “very moved” to finally visit “the true place, the main source of myth in our time.” He adds, “We are all children of Hollywood in a certain sense, all of us. As a writer I was absolutely influenced by movies and Hollywood stars and Hollywood myths.”

While he admires aspects of the United States, Galeano’s general views about this country and other nations of the Northern Hemisphere probably would not be welcome in the Reagan White House.

“No richness is innocent and each freedom, each humiliation, each poverty, each horror has its own roots deep into human history,” he says. “The world is organized now in such unjust ways that the rich countries think about themselves as the result of a gift from God. They were chosen by God to be rich and free.”

But Galeano, who has been described as a Marxist, says he is much more interested in how the past may help shape the future than in being angry about historical injustice.

Facing a New Reality

“All together from north to south, America is facing the challenge of building a new America, a different, new reality,” he explains. “What I discovered when I was working on the three volumes of ‘Memory of Fire’ is that this new America may also be the oldest one because the oldest traditions of these lands are speaking in voices that are useful to build a different future to open new doors.”

The oldest traditions in America are those of the Indians who lived by “traditions of community, that is life and work centered on solidarity and not on greed or egoism,” he says.

As he was writing, Galeano says, “The only way of feeling myself identifying with history was through this work of recovering memory as a key to open doors--not looking back but looking forward, not as an act of nostalgia but as an act of hope.” Writing “Memory of Fire” “confirmed that history may be alive,” he says. “That’s why I wrote it in the present tense--like Benjamin Franklin is waiting for a green light just at the corner now.”

After a moment of reflection, Galeano concludes, “This is perhaps the main thing I would say that I confirmed all through the nine years I was working on ‘Memory of Fire’--that history may be a prophet.”