Galeano and Corta'zar

"When I die, old lady, take my clay if you can and fashion a mug with this refrain. If you thirst for me drink; And if it stops at the brink, that will be kisses fromyour old man." -G

"Hermenegildo Bustos, Indian of this town of Purisima del Rinco'a. I was born on 13 April 1832 and I painted my portrait to see if I oculd on 19 June 1891." -G

"1496. La Concepcion. Sacrilege.
Bartholomew Columbus, Christopher's brother and lieutenant, attends an incineration of human flesh.
Six men play the leads in the grand opening of Haiti's incineration. The smoke makes everyone cough. The six men are burning as punishment and as a lesson; They have buried the images of Christ and the Virgin that Fray Ramon Pane' left with them for protection and consolation. Fray Ramon taught them to pray on their knees, to say the Ave Maria and Paternoster and to invoke the name of Jesus in the face of temptation, injury and death.
No one has asked them why they buried the images. They were hoping that the new gods would fertilize their fields of corn, cassava, boniato, and beans.
The fire adds warmth to the humid, sticky heat that foreshadows heavy rain." -G

"It isn't that they're questions are particularly abstruse (a horrible word, thinks Lucas, who tends to heft them in the palm of his hand and familiarize himself with them or reject them depending on the color, the smell, or the touch." -C

"...obsessed by something that his intelligence was not equal to comprehending, but which floats slowly into his music, caresses his skin, perhaps is readying for an unpredictable leap which we will never understand." -C