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

by Eduardo Galeano

  From his cell as night falls, Father Mendieta hears shrieks and moans louder than the choruses of angels.

  Someone has to intercede with the Lord, since the apostle Santiago is not interested, or Xochimilco will soon be Indianless. The Franciscans talk it over and decide to draw lots again. Fate picks the blessed Sebastian for saint-advocate.

  They promise him an altar.

  (79 and 161)

  1579: Quito

  Son of Atahualpa

  Beto, Indian priest of the Archidona region, saw a vision of the Devil in the shape of a cow, who told him God was very annoyed with the Christians and was not going to defend them. Guami, Indian priest of Tambisa, spent five days in the other world. There he saw marvels and listened to God, and now he has the power of rain and the power of resurrection. Beto and Guami announce that Indians who don’t join the rebellion will reap toads and snakes in eternally sterile fields.

  The two prophets put themselves at the head of many lances. Southeast of Quito, the Quijo Indians rebel. They attack various towns and vainly await a rising in the mountains. The Inca’s son, Francisco Atahualpa, captain of Spanish troops, imprisons the mountain plotters and staves off the insurrection. The Quijo Indians are left all alone.

  After some battles comes defeat. The Spaniards oblige all Indians of the Quijo region and the surroundings of Quito to attend the execution of the prophets Beto and Guami. They parade them through the streets of Quito, torture them with hot pincers, hang them, quarter them, and exhibit the pieces. From the royal box, Captain Francisco Atahualpa watches the ceremony.

  (156)

  1580: Buenos Aires

  The Founders

  Nearly half a century ago, a Spanish captain sailed from Seville for these unrenowned shores. He sank the whole fortune he had made in the sack of Rome into the expedition. Here he founded a city, a fortress surrounded by huts, and upriver from here he went hunting for the silver mountain and the mysterious lake where the sun sleeps.

  Ten years earlier, Sebastian Cabot had sought the treasure of King Solomon sailing up this Plate River—so innocent of its silvery name—which has only mud on one bank and sand on the other and leads to other rivers that lead to jungle.

  Pedro de Mendoza’s city didn’t last long. While his soldiers, maddened by hunger, ate each other, the captain read Virgil and Erasmus and made pronouncements for immortality. In short order, the dream of another Peru having vanished, he wanted to go back to Spain. He didn’t get there alive. Afterward came Alonso Cabrera, who set fire to Buenos Aires in the king’s name. He could and did return to Spain. There he killed his wife and ended his days in a lunatic asylum.

  Comes now Juan de Garay from Asunción. Santa María de los Buenos Aires is born again. With Garay come a bunch of Paraguayans, sons of conquistadors, who have received from their Guaraní mothers their first milk and the native language they speak.

  The sword of Garay, stuck into this land, outlines the shadow of the cross. The founders’ teeth chatter from cold and fear. The breeze plays rustling music in the treetops, and beyond, on the endless plains, Indians and phantoms silently spy on them.

  (74, 97, and 99)

  1580: London

  Drake

  “Three cheers for the gold of the galleons! Hurrah for the silver of Potosí!”

  The Dragon is coming! cried the women, and church bells pealed out the alarm. In three years Francis Drake has circumnavigated the world. He has twice crossed the equator and sacked the Spanish Main, stripping ports and ships from Chile to Mexico.

  Now he is returning with only one ship and a moribund crew of eighteen, but he brings treasure that multiplies by 120 the capital invested in the expedition. Queen Elizabeth, chief shareholder and author of the plan, converts the pirate into a knight. On the waters of the Thames the ceremony is performed. On the sword that dubs him is engraved this saying of the queen’s: Who strikes you strikes me, Drake. On his knees, he offers Her Majesty an emerald brooch stolen in the Pacific.

  Towering over the fog and soot, Elizabeth is at the summit of a nascent empire. She is the daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, who for having produced a daughter lost her head in the Tower of London. The virgin queen devours her lovers, uses her fists on her maids of honor, and spits on her courtiers’ clothes.

  Francis Bacon will be the philosopher and chancellor of the new empire and William Shakespeare its poet. Francis Drake, captain of its ships. Scorner of storms, master of sails and winds, the pirate Drake moves at court as if climbing masts and rigging. Squat but hefty with fiery beard, he was born by the sea and has been brought up in the fear of God. The sea is his home; and he never launches an attack without a Bible pressing against the chest beneath his clothing.

  (149, 187, and 198)

  1582: Mexico City

  What Color Is a Leper’s Skin?

  The lamp advances violating the darkness and pulls faces out of the murk, faces of specters, hands of specters, and nails them to the wall.

  The official touches nothing, his gloved hands hidden beneath his cape, half closing his eyes as if fearing to infect them. He has come to check the implementation of the new order concerning San Lázaro Hospital. The viceroy has ordered that male patients should not mix. Whites and mestizos have to occupy one room, blacks and mulattoes another, Indians another. The females, however, are to be all together in one room whatever their color or condition.

  (148)

  1583: Copacabana

  God’s Aymara Mother

  They cross Lake Titicaca in the cattail boat. She travels by his side, dressed for a fiesta. In the city of La Paz her tunic has been gilded. When they land, he puts his cloak over her to shield her from the rain; and with her in his arms, covered up, he enters the village of Copacabana. The rain stings the crowd that has come to receive them.

  Francisco Tito Yupanqui enters the sanctuary with her and uncovers her. She is taken up to the altar. From on high, the Virgin of Copacabana embraces them all. She will protect against pestilence and sorrow and the bad weather of February.

  The Indian sculptor has modeled her in Potosí. He has worked for nearly two years to give her appropriate beauty. Indians may only paint or carve images that imitate European models, and Francisco Tito Yupanqui did not want to violate the ban. He had intended to make a Virgin identical to Our Lady of Candelaria, but his hands have modeled this Andean body with big lungs hungry for air, large torso, and short legs, and this broad Indian face with fleshy lips and almond eyes that stare sadly at the bruised land.

  (47 and 163)

  1583: Santiago de Chile

  He Was Free for a While

  He raises himself on his hands and falls on his face. He tries to lean on an elbow and slips. He manages to bring up one knee and sinks into the mud.

  Face down in the mud, beneath the rain, he weeps.

  Hernando Maravilla had not wept under the two hundred lashes he received in the streets of Lima on the way to the harbor; and not a tear was seen on his face while he received another two hundred here in Santiago.

  Now the rain lashes him, drawing off the dry blood and the mud.

  “Wretch! That’s how you bite the hand that feeds you!” said his owner, the long-widowed Doña Antonia Nabía, when they brought the fugitive slave back to her.

  Hernando Maravilla had escaped because one day he saw a woman who was pretty as a picture and couldn’t resist following her. They caught him in Lima, and the Inquisition questioned him. He was sentenced to four hundred lashes for having said that marriages were made by the Devil and that the bishop was a nothing and that he shat on the bishop.

  He who was born in Africa, grandson of a medicine man, son of a hunter, twists himself around and weeps, his back raw, as the rain falls on Santiago de Chile.

  (31 and 138)

  1583: Tlatelolco

  Sahagún

  Lonelyme, lonelyme, sings the ringdove.

  A woman offers flowers to a stone that has been smashed to pieces. “Lord,�
�� says the woman to the stone, “Lord, how you have suffered.”

  The old native wise men offer their testimony to Fray Bernardino de Sahagún: “Let us die,” they plead, “since our gods have died.”

  Fray Bernardino de Ribiera, native of Sahagún: son of St. Francis, bare feet, patched cassock, seeker of the plenitude of Paradise, seeker of the memory of these vanquished peoples. For more than forty years Sahagún has been traveling through Mexico, the seigniory of Huexotzingo, Tula of the Toltecs, the Texcoco region, to rescue the images and words of times past. In the twelve books of the General History of New Spain, Sahagún and his young assistants have saved and assembled ancient voices, the fiestas of the Indians, their rites, their gods, their way of counting the passage of years and stars, their myths, their poems, their medicines, their tales of remote ages and of the recent European invasion … History sings in this first great work of American anthropology.

  Six years ago King Philip II had those manuscripts and all the native codices copied and translated by Sahagún seized so that no original or translation of them should remain. Where have they ended up, those books suspected of perpetuating and publicizing idolatries? No one knows. The Council of the Indies has not replied to any of the despairing author-copier’s pleas. What has the king done with these forty years of Sahagún’s life and so many centuries of the life of Mexico? They say in Madrid that the pages have been used as spice wrappings.

  Old Sahagún does not give up. At eighty he clutches to his breast a few papers saved from the disaster and dictates to his pupils in Tlatelolco the first lines of a new work, to be called Divinatory Art. Later he will go to work on a complete Mexican calendar. When he finishes the calendar, he will begin a Náhuatl Spanish-Latin dictionary. And after the dictionary …

  Outside, dogs howl, fearing rain.

  (24 and 200)

  1583: Ácoma

  The Stony Kingdom of Cíbola

  Captain Antonio de Espejo, who made a fast fortune on the frontier of Mexico, has responded to the siren call of the seven cities of gold. At the head of a few warrior horsemen he has undertaken the Odyssey to the north; and instead of the fabulous kingdom of Cíbola, he has found an immense desert, very occasionally peppered with villages in the shape of fortresses. No precious stones hang from the trees, because there are no trees except in the rare valleys; and there is no more glitter of gold than what the sun draws from the rocks when it beats down hard on them.

  In those villages the Spaniards hoist their flag. The Indians still do not know that they will soon be obliged to change their names and raise temples to worship another god, although the Great Spirit of the Hopis told them some time ago that a new race would arrive, a race of fork-tongued men, bringing greed and boast-fulness. The Hopis receive Captain Espejo with offerings of corn tortillas and turkeys and hides; and the Navajos of the high mountains welcome him bringing water and corn.

  Beyond, a fortress of rock and mud soars into the purple sky. From the edge of the mesa, the village of the Ácomas dominates the valley, green with cornfields irrigated by canals and dams. The Ácomas, enemies of the Navajos, are famous for their ferocity. Not even Francisco Vazquez de Coronado, who came this way forty years ago, dared go near them.

  The Ácomas dance in Captain Espejo’s honor and lay at his feet colored cloths, turkeys, ears of corn, and deerskins.

  A few years from now they will refuse to pay tribute. The assault will last three days and three nights. Survivors will have one foot chopped off with a single ax blow, and the chiefs will be thrown over the precipice.

  (89)

  Night Chant, a Navajo Poem

  House made of dawn,

  House made of evening light,

  House made of dark cloud …

  Dark cloud is at the house’s door,

  The trail out of it is dark cloud,

  The zigzag lightning stands high upon it …

  Happily may I walk,

  Happily, with abundant showers, may I walk.

  Happily, with abundant plants, may I walk.

  Happily, on the trail of pollen, may I walk.

  Happily may I walk.

  May it be beautiful before me.

  May it be beautiful behind me.

  May it be beautiful below me.

  May it be beautiful above me.

  May it be beautiful all around me.

  In beauty it is finished.

  (42)

  1586: Cauri

  The Pestilence

  Influenza does not shine like the steel sword, but no Indian can dodge it. Tetanus and typhus kill more people than a thousand greyhounds with fiery eyes and foaming jaws. The smallpox attacks in secret and the gun with a loud bang, amid clouds of sparks and sulfurous smoke, but smallpox annihilates more Indians than all the guns.

  The winds of pestilence are devastating these regions. Anyone they strike, they blow down: they devour the body, eat the eyes, close the throat. All smells of decay.

  Meanwhile, a mysterious voice ranges over Peru. It treads on the heels of the pestilence and penetrates the litanies of the dying, this voice that whispers, from one ear to another: “Whoever throws the crucifix out of his house will return from the dead.”

  (221)

  1588: Quito

  Grandson of Atahualpa

  The golden columns, arabesques, and ornamentations sweat gold; the saints and adored virgins in their gilded robes, and the chorus of angels with little golden wings, pray gold: This is one of the houses that Quito offers to him who centuries ago was born in Bethlehem in manger straw and died naked.

  The family of the Inca Atahualpa has an altar in this church of St. Francis, in the place of honor in the great transept beside the evangel. At the foot of the altar rest the dead. The son of Atahualpa, who was named Francisco like his father and his father’s assassin, occupies the main tomb. God must have reserved glory for Captain Francisco Atahualpa if God listens, as they say, to the views of those in command with more attention than He pays to the screams of the commanded. The Inca’s son knew how to suppress the native risings in the South. He brought as prisoners to Quito the rebel chiefs of Cañaribamba and Cuyes and was rewarded with the office of this city’s director of public works.

  Francisco’s daughters and nieces have come to install the image of St. Catherine that a sculptor of Toledo, Juan Bautista Vázquez, has carved for a spot high on the Atahualpas’ altar. Alonso, Francisco’s son, sent the image from Spain; and the family is still unaware that Alonso died in Madrid while St. Catherine was crossing the ocean to this church.

  Alonso Atahualpa, grandson of the Inca, died in prison. He could play the harp, the violin, and the clavichord. He wore only Spanish dress, cut by the best tailors, and for a long time had not paid the rent for his house. Gentlemen are not imprisoned for debt, but Alonso went to jail denounced by Madrid’s most important tailors, jewelers, hatters, and glovemakers. Nor had he paid for the carving that his family now places, amid golden garlands, on the gilded altar.

  (155 and 215)

  1588: Havana

  St. Martial versus the Ants

  Rapacious ants continue to mortify people and undermine walls. They fell trees, devastate farmlands, and gobble fruit and corn and the flesh of the absentminded.

  In view of patron St. Simon’s inefficacy, the town council unanimously elects another protector.

  The city promises to celebrate his day every year. St. Martial is the new shield of Havana against the assaults of bibijagua ants. St. Martial, who three centuries ago was bishop of Limoges, is known as a specialist and is said to have great influence with the Lord.

  (161)

  1589: Cuzco

  He Says He Had the Sun

  Rigid beneath the sheets, Mancio Serra de Leguízamo unburdens his conscience. Before a notary he dictates and swears: “That we discovered these realms in such condition that there was not in all of them one thief, one vicious man, nor idler, nor was there an adulterous or bad woman …”

&n
bsp; Pizarro’s old captain does not want to depart this world without saying for the first time: “That the lands and mountains and mines and pastures and hunting grounds and woods and all manner of resources were governed or divided in such a way that everyone knew and had his property, without anyone else occupying or taking it …”

  Don Mancio is the last survivor of the army that conquered Peru. Over half a century ago he was one of those who invaded this sacred city of Cuzco, pillaged the treasures of its tombs and houses, and axed down the walls of the Temple of the Sun so clotted with gold that their resplendence made anyone who entered look like a corpse. He says he received the best part of the booty: the immense golden face of the sun, with its fiery rays and flames, which had dominated the city and blinded the people of Cuzco at the hour of dawn.

  Don Mancio wagered the sun at cards and lost it in a night.

  (118)

  1592: Lima

  An Auto-da-Fé in Lima

  The wind carries off the ashes of three Lutheran Englishmen, captured on the island of Puná. One of them, Henry Oxley, was burned alive because he would not renounce his faith.

  Smoke curls upward from the center of a circle of tall lances as the crowd grows delirious and the Tribunal of the Holy Office pronounces sentences of lashes and other pains and humiliations.

  Several suffer punishment for marrying twice or for simple fornication and other crimes of the sin of the flesh. For soliciting nuns a Dominican friar, a Franciscan, an Augustinian, and a Jesuit are condemned. Juan de la Portilla, soldier, for swearing by the ears of God. Isabel de Angulo, soldier’s wife, because so that men would desire her she recited the words of the Consecration in a low voice. Bartolomé de Lagares, sailor, for affirming that, being a bachelor and paying for it, no sin was committed. Lorenzo de la Peña, barber, that because his wife’s pew in church was taken, he said if that was the way of it, there was no God.