When his days came to an end, a large group of us waited for him at the cemetery gate. Hector was to be buried on the hill above Buceo Beach. We’d been there quite a while on that gray and windy day, when several cemetery workers turned up carrying a casket but without flowers or mourners. A number of us who had been waiting for Hector formed a cortege behind them and went in.
By mistake? Did we follow the wrong casket? Who knows? It would have been just like Hector to offer his friends to the one who was all alone.
The Door
Carlos Fasano spent six years conversing with a mouse and with the door of cell number 282.
The mouse wasn’t very faithful, scurrying in and out at will, but the door was always there.
Later on, the prison was turned into a shopping center. From lock-up to buy-up; its cells no longer held people but Armani suits, Dior perfumes, and Panasonic VCRs.
The doors ended up in a junkyard.
There, Carlos found his door. It had no number, but he recognized it straightaway. Those were the gashes he’d made with his spoon. Those were the old stains in the wood, maps of secret countries he traveled to during each of the long days he spent in confinement.
Now the door stands in the open, at the top of a hill, where closing is forbidden.
Memory
He fought, was wounded, got caught.
After the torture chamber, he was pretty much dead when a military court decided he should die altogether.
He knew he was alone. What remained of him had been forgotten by his comrades.
Utterly forsaken, he waited for death to finish the job.
In the solitude of his cell, he talked to the wall.
But the end of the war got there before death did, and he was set free.
In the streets of San Salvador, he continued talking to walls, and he punched them with his fists and hit them with his head because they would not answer.
He ended up in an asylum. There, they kept him tied to a bed. He no longer spoke, not even to the walls.
Norma, who years before had been his friend, went to see him. They untied him. She gave him an apple. Without a word, he gazed at the apple in his hands, that red and luminous world, and soon began slicing it with his teeth. Then he got up and handed out the pieces, bed by bed, to all the rest.
That’s how Norma learned: “Luis is crazy, but he’s still Luis.”
Tik
In the summer of 1972, Carlos Lenkersdorf heard this word for the first time.
He had been invited to an assembly of Tzetzal Indians in the town of Bachajón, and he did not understand a thing. He was unfamiliar with the language, and to him the heated discussion sounded like crazy rain.
The word tik came through the downpour. Everyone said it, repeated it—tik, tik, tik—and its pitter-patter rose above the torrent of voices. It was an assembly in the key of tik.
Carlos had been around, and he knew that in all languages / is the word used most often. Tik, the word that shines at the heart of the sayings and doings of these Mayan communities, means “we.”
The Hummingbird
In certain villages lost in the Andes, those with long memories recall the time the sky sat on the world.
The sky was so low that people went about stooped over and couldn’t straighten up without banging their heads. Birds would take off and crash into the roof at the first flap of their wings. The eagle and the condor charged with all their might, but the sky paid no heed.
The crush ended when a tiny dancing bolt of lightning flashed through the little air that remained. It was the hummingbird, and he stuck the sky’s behind with his needlelike beak. He kept stabbing away, obliging it to rise higher and higher until it reached the heights where it now stands.
The eagle and the condor symbolize strength and flight. But it was the smallest of the birds that liberated the earth from the weight of the sky.
Sex Symbol
The flea doesn’t flaunt. He doesn’t erect masts, towers, obelisks, or skyscrapers. Nor does he churn out rifles, cannons, or missiles.
The he-flea, lover of the she-flea, has no need for faux phalli. He’s got the real thing. It extends a full third of the length of his body, a size bested by none in the entire animal kingdom. And to top it off, it’s covered in down.
For thousands of years, the bullies and butchers of the human species have kept this humiliating fact secret.
The Lion and the Hyena
The lion, emblem of bravery and nobility, invigorates anthems, dignifies flags, and stands guard over castles and cities. The hyena, symbol of cowardice and cruelty, neither invigorates nor dignifies nor guards anything. Leo the lion offers his name to kings and plebeians, but no one has ever been named Hyena.
The lion is a carnivorous mammal of the Feline family. The male specializes in roaring. His females hunt deer, zebras, and other defenseless or distracted beasts, while the male awaits his dinner. When the meal is ready, the male eats first. Whatever is left is for the females. Then, if anything at all remains, the cubs eat. If nothing is left, they do without.
The hyena, a carnivorous mammal of the Hyaenidae family, has other habits. He is a gentleman who brings the food and eats last, after the children and ladies have served themselves.
To praise, we say, “He’s a lion.” And to insult, “He’s a hyena.” The hyena laughs. I wonder why.
The Bat
He got his bad reputation from Count Dracula.
Batman tried to improve his image, but the bat still arouses more terror than gratitude.
This symbol of the kingdom of darkness does not fly through the night in search of human necks. In real life, the bat does us the favor of fighting malaria by hunting a thousand mosquitoes an hour and is kind enough to help farmers by devouring harmful pests.
Despite our calumnies, this efficient pesticide does not give us cancer or charge so much as a cent for his services.
The Shark
In movies and books, the cunning and bloodthirsty monster navigates the seven seas with jaws spread wide to reveal his teeth of a thousand knives. He dreams of us and licks his lips.
Outside movies and books, the shark fails to show the slightest interest in human flesh. Rarely does he attack us, and then only in self-defense or by mistake. When a nearsighted shark confuses one of us with a dolphin or a seal, he takes a bite and spits it out. We’re a lot of bones and not much meat, and our not-much-meat tastes awful.
We are the dangerous ones, and sharks know it. But sharks don’t make films or write novels.
The Rooster
The famous rooster of Moron was neither a herald nor a symbol of the new day.
He was, so they say, the judge or the tax collector or the king’s envoy. Gallo, meaning “rooster,” was his name, and he’d strut about town proclaiming, “Wherever this cock crows, everyone else shuts up.”
Adulator and humiliator, he licked up and spit down.
For years the silenced remained silent, until one fine day they attacked the ornate little town hall from which he perpetrated his abuse. They caught the malefactor, tore off his clothes, and chased him naked through the streets under a shower of stones.
This happened, so they say, some five centuries ago in the Spanish city of Morón de la Frontera, where visitors can still observe the defeathered fowl in full flight, sculpted in bronze. It’s a warning: tread carefully, you who are drunk with power or even a little tipsy; you too could end up plucked and squawking and driven from the city.