Talking nobodies at least once

I like books; I debate between buying them and reading them, which are two different passions. There is pleasure in buying books, contemplating their covers, feeling their pages, smelling them, reading the preface, and waiting for the day I can read it if that day comes. On the other hand, reading is pleasurable, at least for me; conversing with the writer, agreeing and disagreeing, seeing and understanding how they want to express themselves. In short, I am addicted to both pleasures, but not a full-time addict like others who boast beautiful and huge libraries in their homes. Mine is modest; I am building it with patience, but I love the process at my own pace.

My passion for reading was born as almost everything I remember to this day, at home; my parents, in general, were very countercultural, and although it was a Christian home, they always invited me to explore cultural boundaries that are not common within the church and that awakened in me a nose for unconventional authors, very much of the people, very much on the side of the marginalized, very much of the country life, left-wing if you will. In that invitation appeared a book that marked me a lot: Memoria de mis putas tristes (Memories of my Melancholy Whores) (2004), by the only Colombian Nobel Prize winner that I mention so much in my columns, Gabriel Garcia Marquez; I was a teenager when I read it and that way of writing awakened in me that hunger to read what is not read and see what is not seen. In that awakening, I discovered the world of Eduardo Galeano, an Uruguayan writer with an excellent pen that caught me with a text I want to share with you, a side quote on the margin of something I want to talk about in at least one more column. 

The nobodies, Eduardo Galeano (1940)

Fleas dream of buying themselves a dog, and nobodies dream 

of escaping poverty: that one magical day good luck will 

suddenly rain down on them- will rain down in buckets. But 

good luck doesn't even fall in a fine drizzle, no matter 

how hard the nobodies summon it, even if their left hand is 

tickling, or if they begin the new day with their right foot, or 

start the new year with a change of brooms. 

The nobodies: nobody's children, owners of nothing. The 

nobodies: the no ones, the nobodied, running like rabbits, 

dying through life, fucked every which way. er

Who don't speak languages, but dialects. 

Who don't have religions, but superstitions. 

Who don't create art, but handicrafts. 

Who don't have culture, but folklore. 

Who are not human beings, but human resources. 

Who do not have names, but numbers. 

Who do not appear in the history of the world, but in the police blotter of the local paper. 

The nobodies, who are not worth the bullet that kills them