The Memory of Fire Trilogy: Genesis, Faces and Masks, and Century of the Wind

by Eduardo Galeano

  Day

  The crow, which now dominates the totem of the Haida nation, was the grandson of that great divine chief who made the world.

  When the crow wept asking for the moon, which hung from the wall of tree trunks, his grandfather gave it to him. The crow threw it into the sky through the chimney opening and started crying again, wishing for the stars. When he got them he spread them around the moon.

  Then he wept and hopped about and screamed until his grandfather gave him the carved wooden box in which he kept daylight. The great divine chief forbade him to take the box out of the house. He had decided that the world should live in the dark.

  The crow played with the box, pretending to be satisfied, but out of the corner of his eye he watched the guards who were watching him.

  When they weren’t looking, he fled with the box in his claw. The point of the claw split passing through the chimney, and his feathers were burned and stayed black from then on.

  The crow arrived at some islands off the northern coast. He heard human voices and asked for food. They wouldn’t give him any. He threatened to break the wooden box.

  “I’ve got daylight in here,” he warned, “and if it escapes, the sky will never put out its light. No one will be able to sleep, nor to keep secrets, and everybody will know who is people, who is bird, and who is beast of the forest.”

  They laughed. The crow broke open the box, and light burst forth in the universe.

  (87)

  Night

  The sun never stopped shining and the Cashinahua Indians didn’t know the sweetness of rest.

  Badly in need of peace, exhausted by so much light, they borrowed night from the mouse.

  It got dark, but the mouse’s night was hardly long enough for a bite of food and a smoke in front of the fire. The people had just settled down in their hammocks when morning came.

  So then they tried out the tapir’s night. With the tapir’s night they could sleep soundly and they enjoyed the long and much-deserved rest. But when they awoke, so much time had passed that undergrowth from the hills had invaded their lands and destroyed their houses.

  After a big search they settled for the night of the armadillo. They borrowed it from him and never gave it back.

  Deprived of night, the armadillo sleeps during the daytime.

  (59)

  The Stars

  By playing the flute love is declared, or the return of the hunters announced. With the strains of the flute, the Waiwai Indians summon their guests. For the Tukanos, the flute weeps; for the Kalinas it talks, because it’s the trumpet that shouts.

  On the banks of the Negro River, the flute confirms the power of the men. Flutes are sacred and hidden, and any woman who approaches deserves death.

  In very remote times, when the women had the sacred flutes, men toted firewood and water and prepared the cassava bread. As the men tell it, the sun got indignant at the sight of women running the world, so he dropped into the forest and fertilized a virgin by slipping leaf juices between her legs. Thus was born Jurupari.

  Jurupari stole the sacred flutes and gave them to the men. He taught the men to hide them and defend them and to celebrate ritual feasts without women. He also told them the secrets they were to transmit to their male children.

  When Jurupari’s mother found where the sacred flutes were hidden, he condemned her to death; and with the bits that remained of her he made the stars of the sky.

  (91 and 112)

  The Milky Way

  No bigger than a worm, he ate the hearts of birds. His father was the best hunter of the Moseten people.

  Soon he was a serpent as big as an arm. He kept asking for more hearts. The hunter spent the whole day in the forest killing for his son.

  When the serpent got too big for the shack, the forest had been emptied of birds. The father, an expert bowman, brought him jaguars’ hearts.

  The serpent devoured them and grew. Then there were no more jaguars in the forest.

  “I want human hearts,” said the serpent.

  The hunter emptied his village and its vicinity of people, until one day in a far-off village he was spotted on a tree branch and killed.

  Driven by hunger and nostalgia, the serpent went to look for him.

  He coiled his body around the guilty village so that no one could escape. While the men let fly all their arrows against this giant ring that had laid siege to them, the serpent rescued his father’s body and grew upward. There he can still be seen undulating, bristling with luminous arrows, across the night sky.

  (174)

  The Evening Star

  The moon, stooping mother, asked her son, “I don’t know where your father is. Find him and give him word of me.”

  The son took off in search of the brightest of all lights. He didn’t find him at noontime, when the sun of the Tarascan people drinks his wine and dances with his women to the beat of drums. He didn’t find him on the horizons and in the regions of the dead. The sun wasn’t in any of his four houses.

  The evening star is still hunting his father across the sky. He always arrives too early or too late.

  (55)

  Language

  The First Father of the Guaranís rose in darkness lit by reflections from his own heart and created flames and thin mist. He created love and had nobody to give it to. He created language and had no one to listen to him.

  Then he recommended to the gods that they should construct the world and take charge of fire, mist, rain, and wind. And he turned over to them the music and words of the sacred hymn so that they would give life to women and to men.

  So love became communion, language took on life, and the First Father redeemed his solitude. Now he accompanies men and women who sing as they go:

  We’re walking this earth,

  We’re walking this shining earth.

  (40 and 192)

  Fire

  The nights were icy because the gods had taken away fire. The cold cut into the flesh and words of men. Shivering, they implored with broken voices; the gods turned a deaf ear.

  Once, they gave fire back and the men danced for joy, chanting hymns of gratitude. But soon the gods sent rain and hail and put out the bonfires.

  The gods spoke and demanded: to deserve fire, men must cut open their chests with obsidian daggers and surrender their hearts.

  The Quiché Indians offered the blood of their prisoners and saved themselves from the cold.

  The Cakchiquels didn’t accept the bargain. The Cakchiquels, cousins of the Quichés and likewise descended from the Mayas, slipped away on feathered feet through the smoke, stole the fire, and hid it in their mountain caves.

  (188)

  The Forest

  In a dream, the Father of the Uitoto Indians glimpsed a shining mist. The mist was alive with mosses and lichens and resonant with winds, birds, and snakes. The Father could catch the mist, and he held it with the thread of his breath. He pulled it out of the dream and mixed it with earth.

  Several times he spat on the misty earth. In the foamy mash the forest rose up, trees unfolded their enormous crowns, fruit and flowers erupted. On the moistened earth the grasshopper, the monkey, the tapir, the wild boar, the armadillo, the deer, the jaguar, and the anteater took shape and voice. Into the air soared the golden eagle, the macaw, the vulture, the hummingbird, the white heron, the duck, and the bat.

  The wasp arrived in a great hurry. He left toads and men without tails and then rested.

  (174)

  The Cedar

  The First Father conjured the world to birth with the tip of his wand and covered it with down.

  Out of the down rose the cedar, the sacred tree from which flows the word. Then the First Father told the Mby’a-guaranís to hollow out the trunk and listen to what it had in it. He said that whoever could listen to the cedar, the casket of words, would know where to establish his hearth. Whoever couldn’t would return to despised dust.

  (192)

  The Guaiacum Tree
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  A young woman of the Nivakle people was going in search of water when she came upon a leafy tree, Nasuk, the guaiacum, and felt its call. She embraced its firm trunk, pressing her whole body against it, and dug her nails into its bark. The tree bled.

  Leaving it, she said, “How I wish, Nasuk, that you were a man!”

  And the guaiacum turned into a man and ran after her. When he found her, he showed her his scratched shoulder and stretched out by her side.

  (192)

  Colors

  White were once the feathers of birds, and white the skin of animals.

  Blue now are those that bathed in a lake into which no river emptied and from which none was born. Red, those that dipped in the lake of blood shed by a child of the Kadiueu tribe. Earth-color, those that rolled in the mud, and ashen those that sought warmth in extinguished campfires. Green, those that rubbed their bodies in the foliage, white those that stayed still.

  (174)

  Love

  In the Amazonian jungle, the first woman and the first man looked at each other with curiosity. It was odd what they had between their legs.

  “Did they cut yours off?” asked the man.

  “No,” she said, “I’ve always been like that.”

  He examined her close up. He scratched his head. There was an open wound there. He said: “Better not eat any cassava or bananas or any fruit that splits when it ripens. I’ll cure you. Get in the hammock and rest.”

  She obeyed. Patiently she swallowed herb teas and let him rub on pomades and unguents. She had to grit her teeth to keep from laughing when he said to her, “Don’t worry.”

  She enjoyed the game, although she was beginning to tire of fasting in a hammock. The memory of fruit made her mouth water.

  One evening the man came running through the glade. He jumped with excitement and cried, “I found it!”

  He had just seen the male monkey curing the female monkey in the arm of a tree.

  “That’s how it’s done,” said the man, approaching the woman.

  When the long embrace ended, a dense aroma of flowers and fruit filled the air. From the bodies lying together came unheard of vapors and glowings, and it was all so beautiful that the suns and the gods died of embarrassment.

  (59)

  The Rivers and the Sea

  There was no water in the forest of the Chocos. God knew that the ant had it and asked her for some. She didn’t want to listen. God tightened her waist, making it permanently slim, and the ant exuded the water she kept in her belly.

  “Now tell me where you got it.”

  The ant led God to a tree that had nothing unusual about it.

  Frogs and men with axes worked on it for four days and four nights, but the tree wouldn’t fall. A liana kept it from touching the ground.

  God ordered the toucan, “Cut it.”

  The toucan couldn’t, and for that was sentenced to eat fruit whole.

  The macaw cut the liana with his hard, sharp beak.

  When the water tree fell, the sea was born from its trunk and the rivers from its branches.

  All of the water was sweet. It was the Devil that kept chucking fistfuls of salt into it.

  (174)

  The Tides

  In olden times, winds blew unremittingly on Vancouver Island. Good weather didn’t exist, and there was no low tide.

  Men decided to kill the winds. They sent in spies. The winter blackbird failed; so did the sardine. Despite his bad vision and broken arms, it was the sea gull that managed to dodge the hurricanes mounting guard on the house of the winds.

  Then men sent in an army of fish led by the sea gull. The fish hurled themselves in a body against the door. The winds, rushing out, trod on them, slipping and falling one after another on the stingray, which pierced them with his tail and devoured them.

  The west wind was captured alive. Imprisoned by the men, it promised that it would not blow continuously, that there would be soft air and light breezes, and that the waters would recede a couple of times a day so that shellfish could be gathered at low tide. They spared its life.

  The west wind has kept its word.

  (114)

  Snow

  “I want you to fly!” said the master of the house, and the house took off and flew. It moved through the air in the darkness, whistling as it went, until the master ordered, “I want you to stop here!” And the house stopped, suspended in the night and the falling snow.

  There was no whale blubber to light the lamps, so the master gathered a fistful of fresh snow, and the snow gave him light.

  The house landed in an Iglulik village. Someone came over to greet it, and when he saw the lamp lit with snow, exclaimed, “The snow is burning!” and the lamps went out.

  (174)

  The Flood

  At the foot of the Andes, the heads of communities had a meeting. They smoked and discussed.

  The tree of abundance reared its rich crown far above the roof of the world. From below could be seen the high branches bent by the weight of fruit, luxuriant with pineapples, coconuts, papayas, guanábanas, corn, cassava, beans …

  Mice and birds enjoyed the feast. People, no. The fox went up and down giving himself banquets, sharing with no one. Men who tried to make the climb crashed to the ground.

  “What shall we do?”

  One of the chiefs conjured up an ax in his sleep. He awoke with a toad in his hand and struck it against the enormous trunk of the tree of abundance, but the little creature merely vomited up its liver.

  “That dream was lying.”

  Another chief, in a dream, begged the Father of all for an ax. The Father warned that the tree would get its own back but sent a red parrot. Grasping the parrot, the chief struck the tree of abundance. A rain of food fell to the ground, and the earth was deafened by the noise. Then the most unusual storm burst from the depths of the rivers. The waters rose, covering the world.

  Only one man survived. He swam and swam for days and nights, until he could cling to the top of a palm tree that stuck out of the water.

  (174)

  The Tortoise

  When the Flood receded, the Oaxaca Valley was a quagmire.

  A handful of mud took on life and started walking. The tortoise walked very, very slowly. He moved with his head stretched out and his eyes very open, discovering the world that the sun was bringing back to life.

  In a place that stank, the tortoise saw the vulture devouring corpses.

  “Take me to heaven,” he said. “I want to meet God.”

  The vulture made him keep asking. The corpses were tasty. The tortoise stuck out his head in entreaty, then pulled it back under his shell, unable to stand the stench.

  “You who have wings, take me,” he begged.

  Bored by his persistence, the vulture opened his huge black wings and flew off with the tortoise on his back. They flew through clouds, and the tortoise, his head tucked in, complained, “How disgusting you smell!”

  The vulture pretended not to hear.

  “What a stink of putrefaction!” the tortoise repeated.

  He kept it up until the hideous bird lost patience, leaned over brusquely, and threw him down to earth.

  God came down from heaven and put the bits together.

  The shell shows where the mends were.

  (92)

  The Parrot

  After the Flood, the forest was green but empty. The survivor shot his arrows through the trees, and the arrows hit nothing but shadows and foliage.

  One evening, after much walking and searching, the survivor returned to his refuge and found roast meat and cassava cakes. The same happened the next day, and the next. From desperate hunger and loneliness, he turned to wondering whom he had to thank for his good fortune. In the morning, he hid and waited.

  Two parrots appeared out of the sky. No sooner had they alit on the ground than they turned into women. They lit a fire and started cooking.

  The only man chose the one with the longest hair and th
e finest and brightest feathers. The other woman, scorned, flew off.

  The Mayna Indians, descendants of this couple, curse their ancestor when their women turn lazy or grouchy. They say it’s all his fault because he chose the useless one. The other was mother and father of all the parrots living in the forest.

  (191)

  The Hummingbird

  At dawn he greets the sun. Night falls and he’s still at work. He goes buzzing from branch to branch, from flower to flower, quick and necessary like light itself. At times he’s doubtful and pauses suspended in the air; at times he flies backward as no one else can. At times he’s a little drunk from all the honey he has sucked. As he flies, he emits flashes of color.

  He brings messages from the gods, becomes a bolt of lightning to carry out their vengeance, blows prophecies in the ears of the soothsayers. When a Guaraní child dies, he rescues its soul, which lies in the calyx of a flower, and takes it in his long needle beak to the Land Without Evil. He has known the way there since the beginning of time. Before the world was born, he already existed; he freshened the mouth of the First Father with drops of dew and assuaged his hunger with the nectar of flowers.

  He led the long pilgrimage of the Toltecs to the sacred city of Tula before bringing the warmth of the sun to the Aztecs.

  As captain of the Chontals, he glides over the camps of the enemy, assesses their strength, dive-bombs them, and kills their chief in his sleep. As the sun of the Kekchis, he flies to the moon, takes her by surprise in her chamber, and makes love to her.

  His body is the size of an almond. He is born from an egg no bigger than a bean, in a nest that fits inside a nut. He sleeps with a little leaf as covering.

  (40, 206, and 210)