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

by Eduardo Galeano

“It’s the executioner,” thinks Francisco. “Now it’s all over.”

  The feathered horseman leans down and says something to Maulicán. Francisco hears only the voices of rain and wind. But when the horseman wheels around and disappears, Maulicán unties the prisoner, takes off his cape, and covers him with it.

  Then the horses gallop southward.

  (26)

  1629: Banks of the Bio-Bio River

  Putapichun

  Soon they see a throng approaching from the far-off cordillera. Maulicán spurs his horse and advances to meet Chief Putapichun.

  The group from the cordillera also has a prisoner, who stumbles along between the horses with a rope around his neck.

  On a flat hillock, Putapichun sticks his three-pointed lance into the ground. He has the prisoner unbound and throws a branch at his feet.

  “Name the three bravest captains of your army.”

  “I don’t know,” babbles the soldier.

  “Name one,” orders Putapichun.

  “Don’t remember.”

  “Name one.”

  He names Francisco’s father.

  “Another.”

  He names another. With each name he is told to break the branch. Francisco watches the scene with clenched teeth. The soldier names twelve captains. He has twelve sticks in his hand.

  “Now dig a hole.”

  The prisoner throws the sticks into the hole, one by one, repeating the names.

  “Throw dirt in. Cover them up.”

  Then Putapichun passes sentence. “Now the twelve brave captains are buried.”

  And the executioner brings down on the prisoner the club bristling with nails.

  They tear out his heart. They invite Maulicán to take the first sip of blood. Tobacco smoke floats in the air as the heart passes from hand to hand.

  Then Putapichun, swift in war and slow in word, says to Maulicán: “We came to buy the captain you have there. We know he is the son of Alvaro, the big chief who has caused our land to tremble.”

  He offers him one of his daughters, a hundred Castilian sheep, five llamas, three horses with tooled saddles, and several necklaces of precious stones. “All that would pay for ten Spaniards and leave something over.”

  Francisco swallows saliva. Maulicán stares at the ground. After a while he says:

  “First I must take him for my father and the other chiefs of my Repocura region to see. I want to show them this trophy of my valor.”

  “We’ll wait,” Putapichun says calmly.

  “My life is just one death after another,” thinks Francisco. His ears hum.

  (26)

  1629: Banks of River Imperial

  Maulicán

  “You bathed in the river? Come up to the fire. You’re shivering. Sit down and drink. Come, Captain, are you dumb? And you talking our language like one of us … Eat, drink. We have a long journey ahead. Don’t you like our chicha? You don’t like our unsalted meat? Our drums don’t make your feet dance. You’re in luck, Captain boy. You people burn the faces of captives with the iron that doesn’t rub out. You’re out of luck, Captain boy. Now your freedom is mine. I’m sorry for you. Drink, drink, tear that fear from your heart. I’ll hide you. I’ll never sell you. Your fate is in the hands of the Lord of the world and of man. He is just. So. Drink. More? Before the sun arrives we’ll be off to Repocura. I want to see my father and celebrate. My father is very old. Soon his spirit will go to eat black potatoes over beyond the snow peaks. Hear the footsteps of the night walking? Our bodies are clean and vigorous to start the trip. The horses are waiting for us. My heart beats fast, Captain boy. Hear the drums of my heart? Hear the music of my happiness?”

  (26)

  1629: Repocura Region

  To Say Good-Bye

  Moon by moon, time has passed. Francisco has heard and learned much in these months of captivity. He has learned, and someday will write, the other side of this long Chile war, this just war that the Indians made against those who deceived and wronged them and took them as slaves, and even worse.

  In the forest, kneeling before a cross of arrayán branches, Francisco says prayers of gratitude. Tonight he will be hitting the trail for Nacimiento fort. There he will be exchanged for three captive Araucanian chiefs. He will make the journey protected by a hundred lances.

  Now he walks toward the settlement. Beneath a brush arbor a circle of threadbare ponchos and muddy faces awaits him. The strawberry or apple chicha passes from mouth to mouth.

  The venerable Tereupillán receives the cinnamon-tree branch, which is the word, and raising it, he makes a long speech of praise for each of the chiefs present. Then he eulogizes Maulicán, the brave warrior, who won such a valuable prisoner in battle and knew how to take him alive.

  “It is not for generous hearts,” says Tereupillán, “to take life in cold blood. When we took up arms against the Spanish tyrants who held us under persecution and humiliation, only in battle I felt no compassion for them. But afterward, when I saw them as captives, it gave me great sadness and pain, and it hurt my soul to perceive that truly we did not hate them as persons. Their greed, yes. Their cruelties, their arrogance, yes.”

  Turning to Francisco, he says: “And you, Captain, friend and comrade, who are going away and leaving us hurt, sad, and without consolation, do not forget us.”

  Tereupillán drops the cinnamon branch in the center of the circle and the Araucanians shake the ground awake, stamping their feet.

  (26)

  1630: Motocintle

  They Won’t Betray Their Dead

  For nearly two years Fray Francisco Bravo had been preaching in this village of Motocintle. One day he told the Indians he had been called back to Spain. He wanted to return to Guatemala, he said, and stay here forever with his beloved flock, but his superiors over there in Spain would not let him.

  “Only gold could convince them,” said Fray Francisco.

  “Gold we don’t have,” said the Indians.

  “Yes, you do,” corrected the priest. “I know there’s a seam of it hidden in Motocintle.”

  “That gold doesn’t belong to us,” they explained. “That gold belongs to our ancestors. We’re just looking after it. If any were missing, what would we say to them when they return to the world?”

  “I only know what my superiors in Spain will say. They’ll say: ‘If the Indians of that village where you want to stay love you so much, how come you’re so poor?’”

  The Indians got together to discuss the matter.

  One Sunday after Mass, they blindfolded Fray Francisco and made him turn around until he was dizzy. Everybody went along behind him, from the oldest to children at the breast. When they reached the back of a cave, they took off the blindfold. The priest blinked, his eyes hurting from the glitter of gold, more gold than all the treasures of the Thousand and One Nights, and his trembling hands did not know where to start. He made a bag of his cassock and loaded up what he could. Afterward he swore by God and the holy gospels that he would never reveal the secret, and he received a mule and tortillas for his journey.

  In the course of time the royal audiencia of Guatemala received a letter from Fray Francisco Bravo from the port of Veracruz. With great pain to his soul the priest was fulfilling his duty, as an act of service to the king in an important and outstanding matter of business. He described the possible location of the gold: “I think I went only a short distance from the village. There was a stream running to the left …” He enclosed some sample nuggets and promised to use the rest for devotions to a saint in Malaga.

  Now mounted judge and soldiers descend upon Motocintle. Dressed in red tunic and with a white wand hanging from his breast, Judge Juan Maldonado exhorts the Indians to surrender the gold.

  He promises and guarantees them good treatment.

  He threatens them with severities and punishments.

  He puts a few in prison.

  Others he puts in the stocks and tortures.

  Others he forces up the s
teps of the scaffold.

  And nothing.

  (71)

  1630: Lima

  María, Queen of the Boards

  “Every day more problems and less husband!” says María del Castillo with a sigh. At her feet, the stagehand, the prompter, and the star actress offer consolation and breezes from their fans.

  In the heavy dusk, the guards of the Inquisition took Juan from Maria’s arms and threw him in jail because poisoned tongues said that he said, while listening to the Gospel: “Hey! All there is is living and dying!”

  A few hours earlier, in the central plaza and along the four streets giving onto the merchants’ corner, the Negro Lázaro had announced the viceroy’s new orders concerning comedy playhouses.

  The viceroy, Count Chinchón, orders that an adobe wall must separate women from men in the theater, under pain of imprisonment and fine for anyone invading the territory of the other sex. Also that comedies must ring down the curtain earlier, when the bells toll for prayers, and that men and women must leave by different doors so that the grave offenses being committed against God Our Father should not continue in the darkness of the alleyways. And as if that were not enough, the viceroy has decided that the price of tickets must come down.

  “He’ll never have me!” cries María. “No matter how much he lays siege to me, he’ll never have me!”

  María del Castillo, great chief of Lima’s comedy stage, has kept intact the poise and beauty that made her famous, and after sixty long years she still laughs at the covered ones who wear their shawls over one eye; since both of hers are handsome, she looks, seduces, and frightens with open face. She was almost a child when she chose this magical profession, and she has been bewitching people from the Lima stage for half a century. Even if she wanted to, she explains, she could not now change theater for convent, for God would not want her for wife after three such thoroughly enjoyed marriages.

  Although the inquisitors have left her husbandless and the government’s decrees seek to scare the public, María swears she won’t get into bed with the viceroy.

  “Never, never!”

  Against hell and high water, alone and by herself, she will continue presenting cape-and-sword works in her comedy playhouse behind the San Augustín monastery. Shortly she will be reviving The Nun Lieutenant by the well-known Spanish wit Juan Pérez de Montalbán and will produce two new and very salty plays so that everyone may dance and sing and thrill with emotion in this city where nothing ever happens, so boring that two aunts can die on you in the time it takes to yawn.

  (122)

  1631: Old Guatemala

  A Musical Evening at the Concepción Convent

  In the convent garden Juana sings and plays the lute. Green light, green trees, green breeze: The air was dead until she touched it with her words and music.

  Juana is the daughter of Judge Maldonado, who apportions Indians in Guatemala among farms, mines, and workshops. The dowry for her marriage to Jesus was a thousand ducats, and six black slaves serve her in the convent. While Juana sings her own or others’ words, the slaves, standing at a distance, listen and wait.

  The bishop, seated before the nun, cannot keep his face under control. He looks at Juana’s head bent over the neck of the lute, throat bare, mouth glowingly open, and orders himself to calm down. He is famous for never changing his expression when bestowing a kiss or a condolence, but now this immutable face wears a frown: His mouth twists and his eyelids flutter. His normally firm pulse seems foreign to this hand that tremblingly holds a wineglass.

  The melodies, praises of God or profane plaints, rise into the foliage. Beyond stands the green-water volcano. The bishop would like to concentrate on the cornfields and wheatfields and springs that shine on its slope.

  That volcano holds the water captive. Anyone approaching it hears seethings as in a stewpot. The last time it vomited, less than a century ago, it drowned the city that Pedro de Alvarado founded at its foot. Here the earth trembles every summer, promising furies; and the city lives on tenterhooks, between two volcanos that cut off its breath. One threatens flood, the other inferno.

  Behind the bishop, facing the water volcano, is the fire volcano. By the flames coming from its mouth a letter can be read at midnight a league away. From time to time is heard a thunder as of many guns, and the volcano bombards the world with stones: It shoots out rocks so large that twenty mules could not move them, and it fills the sky with ash and the air with the stink of sulphur.

  The girl’s voice soars.

  The bishop looks at the ground, wanting to count ants, but his eyes slip over to the feet of Juana, which her shoes hide and yet reveal, and his glance roves over that well-made body that palpitates beneath the white habit, while his memory suddenly awakes and takes him back to childhood. The bishop recalls those uncontrollable urges he used to feel to bite the Host in the middle of Mass, and his panic that it would bleed; then he takes off on a sea of unspoken words and unwritten letters and dreams never told.

  After a while, silence has a sound. The bishop notices with a start that for some time Juana has not been singing and playing. The lute rests on her knees and she looks at the bishop, smiling broadly, with those eyes that not even she deserves. A green aura floats around her.

  The bishop suffers an attack of coughing. The anise falls to the ground and he blisters his hands with applause.

  “I’ll make you a mother superior!” he cries, “I’ll make you an abbess!”

  (72)

  Popular Couplets of the Bashful Lover

  I want to say and I don’t,

  I’m speaking without any word.

  I want to love and I don’t

  And I’m loving without being heard.

  I’ve a pain from I don’t know where,

  That comes from I don’t know what.

  I’ll be cured I don’t know when

  By someone whose name I forgot.

  Each time you look at me

  And I at you

  With my eyes I say

  What I don’t say.

  As I don’t find you

  I look, to remind you.

  (196)

  1633: Pinola

  Gloria in Excelsis Deo

  The chigger is smaller than a flea and fiercer than a tiger. It enters by the feet and knocks you out if you scratch. It does not attack Indians but has no mercy on foreigners.

  Father Thomas Gage has been at war for two months, and as he celebrates his victory against the chigger he balances up his stay in Guatemala. If it were not for the chigger, he would have no complaint. The villages welcome him with trumpets beneath canopies of branches and flowers. He has the servants he wants, and a groom leads his horse by the bridle.

  He collects his salary on the dot, in silver, wheat, corn, cacao, and chickens. The Masses he says here in Pinola and in Mixco are paid for separately, as well as baptisms, weddings, and burials, and the prayers he offers upon request against locusts, pests, or earthquakes. Counting in the offerings to the many saints in his charge and those at Christmas and Easter, Father Gage takes in more than two thousand escudos a year, free of dust and straw, in addition to wine and cassock free of cost.

  The priest’s salary comes from the tribute that the Indians pay to Don Juan de Guzmán, owner of these men and these lands. As only the married ones pay tribute and the Indians are quick to nose out and spread scandal, the officials force children of twelve and thirteen into matrimony, and the priest marries them while their bodies are still growing.

  (72 and 135)

  1634: Madrid

  Who Was Hiding Under Your Wife’s Cradle?

  The Supreme Council of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, watching over purity of blood, decides that in the future there will be an exhaustive investigation before its officials get married.

  All who work for the Inquisition, porter and prosecutor, torturer and executioner, doctor and scullion, must state the two-century genealogy of the chosen woman to obviate marriage with in
fected persons.

  Infected persons, that is: with liters or drops of Indian or black blood, or with great-great-grandfathers of the Jewish faith or Islamic culture or adherence to any heresy.

  (115)

  1636: Quito

  The Third Half

  For twenty long years he has been the big shot of the realm of Quito, president of the government and king of love, card table, and Mass. Everyone else walks or runs at the pace of his mount.

  In Madrid, the Council of the Indies has found him guilty of fifty-six misdemeanors, but the bad news has not yet crossed the sea. He will have to pay a fine for the shop he has operated for twenty years in the royal audiencia, selling the silks and Chinese taffetas he has smuggled in, and for countless scandals involving married women, widows, and virgins; and also for the casino he installed in the embroidery room of his house beside the private chapel where he received communion every day. The turn of the cards has netted Don Antonio de Morga two hundred thousand pesos just in admissions collected, not counting the feats of his own deft, fleecing fingers. (For debts of ten pesos, Don Antonio has sentenced many Indians to spend the rest of their lives chained to looms in the mills.)

  But the Council of the Indies’ resolution has not yet reached Quito. That is not what worries Don Antonio.

  He stands in his room naked before the tooled gold mirror and sees someone else. He looks for his bull’s body and does not find it. Beneath the flaccid belly and between the skinny legs hangs mute the key that has known the combination to so many female locks.

  He looks for his soul, but the mirror does not have it. Who has stolen the pious half of the man who preached sermons to friars and was more devout than the bishop? And the shine of his mystics eyes? Only darkness and wrinkles above the white beard.

  Don Antonio de Morga moves forward till he touches the mirror, and he asks for his third half. There must be a region where the dreams he once dreamed and has forgotten have taken refuge. There has to be: a place where the eyes, spent from so much looking, will have retained the colors of the world; and the ears, now almost deaf, its melodies. He searches for some taste that has not been broken, some smell that has not vanished, some warmth that the hand can yet feel.