Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano passed away in 2015 and has been on my to-read list since. His books have remained elusive, seemingly banished from all Chicago bookstores. Eventually, I took advantage of the deus ex machina of Bookshop and ordered two books of his last fall, primarily because I wanted to read Soccer in Sun and Shadow ahead of the World Cup (required reading for any soccer fans or frauds like myself). Last week, I started reading the other book I’d ordered, the Book of Embraces. Here he wrote (as translated by Cedric Belfarge):
Chicago is full of factories. There are even factories right in the center of the city, around the world’s tallest building. Chicago is full of factories. Chicago is full of workers.
Arriving in the Haymarket district, I ask my friends to show me the place where the workers whom the whole world salutes every May 1st were hanged in 1886.
‘It must be around here,’ they tell me. But nobody knows where.
No statue has been erected in memory of the martyrs of Chicago in the city of Chicago. Not a statue, not a monolith, not a bronze plaque. Nothing.
