1600: Potosí The Eighth Wonder of the World
Prophecies
Ballad of Cuzco
1600: Mexico City Carriages
1601: Valladolid Quevedo
1602: Recife First Expedition Against Palmares
1603: Rome The Four Parts of the World
1603: Santiago de Chile The Pack
1605: Lima The Night of the Last Judgment
1607: Seville The Strawberry
1608: Puerto Príncipe Silvestre de Balboa
1608: Seville Mateo Alemán
1608: Córdoba The Inca Garcilaso
1609: Santiago de Chile How to Behave at the Table
1611: Yarutini The Idol-Exterminator
1612: San Pedro de Omapacha The Beaten Beats
1613: London Shakespeare
1614: Lima Minutes of the Lima Town Council: Theater Censorship Is Born
1614: Lima Indian Dances Banned in Peru
1615: Lima Guamán Poma
1616: Madrid Cervantes
1616: Potosí Portraits of a Procession
1616: Santiago Papasquiaro Is the Masters’ God the Slaves’ God?
1617: London Whiffs of Virginia in the London Fog
1618: Lima Small World
1618: Luanda Embarcation
1618: Lima Too Dark
1620: Madrid The Devil’s Dances Come from America
1622: Seville Rats
1624: Lima People for Sale
1624: Lima Black Flogs Black
1624: Lima The Devil at Work
1624: Seville Last Chapter of the “Life of the Scoundrel”
1624: Mexico City A River of Anger
1625: Mexico City How Do You Like Our City?
1625: Samayac Indian Dances Banned in Guatemala
1626: Potosí A Wrathful God
1628: Chiapas Chocolate and the Bishop
1628: Madrid Blue Blood for Sale
Song About the Indies Hand, Sung in Spain
1629: Las Cangrejeras Bascuñán
1629: Banks of the Bío-Bío River Putapichun
1629: Banks of River Imperial Maulicán
1629: Repocura Region To Say Good-Bye
1630: Motocintle They Won’t Betray Their Dead
1630: Lima María, Queen of the Boards
1631: Old Guatemala A Musical Evening at the Concepción Convent
Popular Couplets of the Bashful Lover
1633: Pinola Gloria in Excelsis Deo
1634: Madrid Who Was Hiding Under Your Wife’s Cradle?
1636: Quito The Third Half
1637: Mouth of the River Sucre Dieguillo
1637: Massachusetts Bay “God is an Englishman,”
1637: Mystic Fort From the Will of John Underhill, Puritan of Connecticut, Concerning a Massacre of Pequot Indians
1639: Lima Martín de Porres
1639: San Miguel de Tucumán From a Denunciation of the Bishop of Tucumán, Sent to the Inquisition Tribunal in Lima
1639: Potosí Testament of a Businessman
The Indians Say:
1640: Sāo Salvador de Bahia Vieira
1641: Lima Avila
1641: Mbororé The Missions
1641: Madrid Eternity Against History
1644: Jamestown Opechancanough
1645: Quito Mariana de Jesús
1645: Potosí Story of Estefanía, Sinful Woman of Potosí (Abbreviation of Chronicle by Bartolomé Arzáns de Orsúa y Vela)
1647: Santiago de Chile Chilean Indians’ Game Banned
1648: Olinda Prime Cannon Fodder
1649: Ste. Marie des Hurons The Language of Dreams
An Iroquois Story
Song About the Song of the Iroquois
1650: Mexico City The Conquerors and the Conquered
From the Náhuatl Song on the Transience of Life
1654: Oaxaca Medicine and Witchcraft
1655: San Miguel de Nepantla Juana at Four
1656: Santiago de la Vega Gage
1658: San Miguel de Nepantla Juana at Seven
Juana Dreams
1663: Old Guatemala Enter the Printing Press
1663: The Banks of the Paraíba River Freedom
Song of Palmares
1663: Serra da Barriga Palmares
1665: Madrid Charles II
1666: New Amsterdam New York
1666: London The White Servants
1666: Tortuga Island The Pirates’ Devotions
1667: Mexico City Juana at Sixteen
1668: Tortuga Island The Dogs
1669: Town of Gibraltar All the Wealth of the World
1669: Maracaibo The Broken Padlock
1670: Lima “Mourn for us,”
1670: San Juan Atitlán An Intruder on the Altar
1670: Masaya “The Idiot”
1670: Cuzco Old Moley
1671: Panama City On Punctuality in Appointments
1672: London The White Man’s Burden
Mandingo People’s Song of the Bird of Love
1674: Port Royal Morgan
1674: Potosí Claudia the Witch
1674: Yorktown The Olympian Steeds
1676: Valley of Connecticut The Ax of Battle
1676: Plymouth Metacom
1677: Old Road Town Death Here, Rebirth There
1677: Pôrto Calvo The Captain Promises Lands, Slaves, and Honors
1678: Recife Ganga Zumba
Yoruba Spell Against the Enemy
1680: Santa Fe, New Mexico Red Cross and White Cross
1681: Mexico City Juana at Thirty
1681: Mexico City Sigüenza y Góngora
1682: Accra All Europe Is Selling Human Flesh
1682: Remedios By Order of Satan
1682: Remedios But They Stay On
1682: Remedios By Order of God
1688: Havana By Order of the King
1691: Remedios Still They Don’t Move
1691: Mexico City Juana at Forty
1691: Placentia Adario, Chief of the Huron Indians, Speaks to Baron de Lahontan, French Colonizer in Newfoundland
1692: Salem Village The Witches of Salem
1692: Cuápulo Nationalization of Colonial Art
1693: Mexico City Juana at Forty-Two
1693: Santa Fe, New Mexico Thirteen Years of Independence
Song of the New Mexican Indians to the Portrait That Escapes from the Sand
1694: Macacos The Last Expedition Against Palmares
Lament of the Azande People
1695: Serra Dois Irmāos Zumbí
1695: São Salvador de Bahia The Capital of Brazil
1696: Regla Black Virgin, Black Goddess
1697: Cap Français Ducasse
1699: Madrid Bewitched
1699: Macouba A Practical Demonstration
1700: Ouro Prêto All Brazil to the South
1700: St. Thomas Island The Man Who Makes Things Talk
Bantu People’s Song of the Fire
1700: Madrid Penumbra of Autumn
The Sources
Index
Preface
I was a wretched history student. History classes were like visits to the waxworks or the Region of the Dead. The past was lifeless, hollow, dumb. They taught us about the past so that we should resign ourselves with drained consciences to the present: not to make history, which was already made, but to accept it. Poor History had stopped breathing: betrayed in academic texts, lied about in classrooms, drowned in dates, they had imprisoned her in museums and buried her, with floral wreaths, beneath statuary bronze and monumental marble.
Perhaps Memory of Fire can help give her back breath, liberty, and the word.
Through the centuries, Latin America has been despoiled of gold and silver, nitrates and rubber, copper and oil: its memory has also been usurped. From the outset it has been condemned to amnesia by those who have prevented it from being. Official Latin American history boils down to a military parade of bigwigs in uniforms fresh from the dry-cleaners. I am not a historian. I am a writer who would l
ike to contribute to the rescue of the kidnapped memory of all America, but above all of Latin America, that despised and beloved land: I would like to talk to her, share her secrets, ask her of what difficult clays she was born, from what acts of love and violation she comes.
I don’t know to what literary form this voice of voices belongs. Memory of Fire is not an anthology, clearly not; but I don’t know if it is a novel or essay or epic poem or testament or chronicle or … Deciding robs me of no sleep. I do not believe in the frontiers that, according to literature’s customs officers, separate the forms.
I did not want to write an objective work—neither wanted to nor could. There is nothing neutral about this historical narration. Unable to distance myself, I take sides: I confess it and am not sorry. However, each fragment of this huge mosaic is based on a solid documentary foundation. What is told here has happened, although I tell it in my style and manner.
This Book
is the first of a trilogy. It is divided into two parts. In one, indigenous creation myths raise the curtain on pre-Columbian America. In the other, the history of America unfolds from the end of the fifteenth century to the year 1700. The second volume of Memory of Fire will cover the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The third volume will reach up to our times.
The numbers in parentheses at the foot of each text indicate the principal works consulted by the author in search of information and reference points. The documentary sources are listed at the end.
The heading on each historical episode shows the year and place of its occurrence.
Literal transcriptions appear in italics. The author has modernized the spelling of the ancient sources cited.
FIRST VOICES
The dry grass will set fire
to the damp grass
—African proverb brought
to the Americas by slaves
The Creation
The woman and the man dreamed that God was dreaming about them.
God was singing and clacking his maracas as he dreamed his dream in a cloud of tobacco smoke, feeling happy but shaken by doubt and mystery.
The Makiritare Indians know that if God dreams about eating, he gives fertility and food. If God dreams about life, he is born and gives birth.
In their dream about God’s dream, the woman and the man were inside a great shining egg, singing and dancing and kicking up a fuss because they were crazy to be born. In God’s dream happiness was stronger than doubt and mystery. So dreaming, God created them with a song:
“I break this egg and the woman is born and the man is born. And together they will live and die. But they will be born again. They will be born and die again and be born again. They will never stop being born, because death is a lie.”
(51)*
* This number indicates the source consulted by the author, as listed at the end of the book.
Time
For the Maya, time was born and had a name when the sky didn’t exist and the earth had not yet awakened.
The days set out from the east and started walking.
The first day produced from its entrails the sky and the earth.
The second day made the stairway for the rain to run down.
The cycles of the sea and the land, and the multitude of things, were the work of the third day.
The fourth day willed the earth and the sky to tilt so that they could meet.
The fifth day decided that everyone had to work.
The first light emanated from the sixth day.
In places where there was nothing, the seventh day put soil; the eighth plunged its hands and feet in the soil.
The ninth day created the nether worlds; the tenth earmarked for them those who had poison in their souls.
Inside the sun, the eleventh day modeled stone and tree.
It was the twelfth that made the wind. Wind blew, and it was called spirit because there was no death in it.
The thirteenth day moistened the earth and kneaded the mud into a body like ours.
Thus it is remembered in Yucatán.
(208)
The Sun and the Moon
The first sun, the watery sun, was carried off by the flood. All that lived in the world became fish.
The second sun was devoured by tigers.
The third was demolished by a fiery rain that set people ablaze.
The fourth sun, the wind sun, was wiped out by storm. People turned into monkeys and spread throughout the hills.
The gods became thoughtful and got together in Teotihuacán.
“Who will take on the job of dawning?”
The Lord of the Shells, famous for his strength and beauty, stepped forward. “I’ll be the sun,” he said.
“Who else?”
Silence.
Everybody looked at the Small Syphilitic God, the ugliest and wretchedest of all gods, and said, “You.”
The Lord of the Shells and the Small Syphilitic God withdrew to the hills that are now the pyramids of the sun and the moon. There they fasted and meditated.
Afterward the gods piled up firewood, made a bonfire, and called to them.
The Small Syphilitic God ran up and threw himself into the flames. He immediately emerged, incandescent, in the sky.
The Lord of the Shells looked at the bonfire with a frown, moved forward, backward, hesitated, made a couple of turns. As he could not decide, they had to push him. After a long delay he rose into the sky. The gods were furious and beat him about the face with a rabbit, again and again, until they extinguished his glow. Thus, the arrogant Lord of the Shells became the moon. The stains on the moon are the scars from that beating.
But the resplendent sun didn’t move. The obsidian hawk flew toward the Small Syphilitic God. “Why don’t you get going?”
The despised, purulent, humpbacked, crippled one answered, “Because I need blood and power.”
This fifth sun, the sun that moves, gave light to the Toltecs and gives it to the Aztecs. He has claws and feeds on human hearts.
(108)
The Clouds
Cloud let fall a drop of rain on the body of a woman. After nine months, she had twins.
When they grew up, they wanted to know who their father was.
“Tomorrow morning early,” she said, “look toward the east. You’ll see him there, up in the sky like a tower.”
Across earth and sky, the twins went in search of their father.
Cloud was incredulous and demanded, “Show me that you are my children.”
One of the twins sent a flash of lightning to the earth. The other, a thunderclap. As Cloud was still doubtful, they crossed a flood and came out safe.
Then Cloud made a place for them by his side, among his many brothers and nephews.
(174)
The Wind
When God made the first of the Wawenock Indians, some bits of clay remained on the earth. With these bits Gluskabe made himself.
From on high, God asked in astonishment, “Well, where did you come from?”
“I’m miraculous,” said Gluskabe. “Nobody made me.”
God stood beside him and reached out his hand toward the universe. “Look at my work,” he challenged. “If you’re miraculous, show me things you have invented.”
“I can make wind, if you like.” And Gluskabe blew at the top of his lungs.
The wind was born and immediately died.
“I can make wind,” Gluskabe admitted shamefacedly, “but I can’t make it stay.”
Then God blew, so powerfully that Gluskabe fell down and lost all his hair.
(174)
The Rain
In the region of the great northern lakes, a little girl suddenly discovered she was alive. The wonders of the world opened her eyes and she took off at random.
Following the trail of the Menomenee nation’s hunters and woodcutters, she came to a big log cabin. There lived ten brothers, birds of the thunder, who offered her shelter and food.
One bad morning, when sh
e was fetching water from the creek, a hairy snake caught her and carried her into the depths of a rocky mountain. The snakes were about to eat her up when the little girl sang.
From far away, the thunder birds heard the call. They attacked the rocky mountain with lightning, rescued the prisoner, and killed the snakes.
The thunder birds left the little girl in the fork of a tree.
“You’ll live here,” they told her. “We’ll come every time you sing.”
Whenever the little green tree frog sings from his tree, the thunderclaps gather and it rains upon the world.
(113)
The Rainbow
The forest dwarfs had caught Yobuënahuaboshka in an ambush and cut off his head.
The head bumped its way back to the land of the Cashinahuas.
Although it had learned to jump and balance gracefully, nobody wanted a head without a body.
“Mother, brothers, countrymen,” it said with a sigh, “Why do you reject me? Why are you ashamed of me?”
To stop the complaints and get rid of the head, the mother proposed that it should change itself into something, but the head refused to change into what already existed. The head thought, dreamed, figured. The moon didn’t exist. The rainbow didn’t exist.
It asked for seven little balls of thread of all colors.
It took aim and threw the balls into the sky one after the other. The balls got hooked up beyond the clouds; the threads gently unraveled toward the earth.
Before going up, the head warned: “Whoever doesn’t recognize me will be punished. When you see me up there, say: ‘There’s the high and handsome Yobuënahuaboshka!’”
Then it plaited the seven hanging threads together and climbed up the rope to the sky.
That night a white gash appeared for the first time among the stars. A girl raised her eyes and asked in astonishment: “What’s that?”
Immediately a red parrot swooped upon her, gave a sudden twirl, and pricked her between the legs with his sharp-pointed tail. The girl bled. From that moment, women bleed when the moon says so.
Next morning the cord of seven colors blazed in the sky.
A man pointed his finger at it. “Look, look! How extraordinary!” He said it and fell down.
And that was the first time that someone died.
(59)
The Memory of Fire Trilogy: Genesis, Faces and Masks, and Century of the Wind Page 5