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

by Eduardo Galeano

  The Chiriguans discover paper, the written word, the printed word, when after a long journey the Franciscan monks of Chuquisaca appear carrying sacred books in their saddlebags.

  As they didn’t know paper or that they needed it, the Indians had no word for it. Today they give it the name skin of God, because paper is for sending messages to friends far away.

  (233 and 252)

  1701: Sāo Salvador de Bahia

  Voice of America

  Father Antonio Vieira died at the turn of the century, but not so his voice, which continues to shelter the defenseless. The words of this missionary to the poor and persecuted still echo with the same lively ring throughout the lands of Brazil.

  One night Father Vieira spoke about the ancient prophets. They were not wrong, he said, in reading destinies in the entrails of the animals they sacrificed. In the entrails, he said. In the entrails, not the heads, because a prophet who can love is better than one who can reason.

  (351)

  1701: Paris

  Temptation of America

  In his study in Paris, a learned geographer scratches his head. Guillaume Deslile draws exact maps of the earth and the heavens. Should he include El Dorado on the map of America? Should he paint in the mysterious lake, as has become the custom, somewhere in the upper Orinoco? Deslile asks himself whether the golden waters, described by Walter Raleigh as the size of the Caspian Sea, really exist. And those princes who plunge in and swim by the light of torches, undulating golden fish: are they or were they ever flesh and bone?

  The lake, sometimes named El Dorado, sometimes Parima, figures on all maps drawn up to now. But what Deslile has heard and read makes him doubt. Seeking El Dorado, many soldiers of fortune have penetrated the remote new world, over there where the four winds meet and all colors and pains mingle, and have found nothing. Spaniards, Portuguese, Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Germans have spanned abysses that the American gods dug with nails and teeth; have violated forests warmed by tobacco smoke puffed by the gods; have navigated rivers born of giant trees the gods tore out by the roots; have tortured and killed Indians the gods created out of saliva, breath, or dream. But that fugitive gold has vanished and always vanishes into the air, the lake disappearing before anyone can reach it. El Dorado seems to be the name of a grave without coffin or shroud.

  In the two centuries that have passed since the world grew and became round, pursuers of hallucinations have continued heading for the lands of America from every wharf. Protected by a god of navigation and conquest, squeezed into their ships, they cross the immense ocean. Along with shepherds and farmhands whom Europe has not killed by war, plague, or hunger, go captains and merchants and rogues and mystics and adventurers. All seek the miracle. Beyond the ocean, magical ocean that cleanses blood and transfigures destinies, the great promise of all the ages lies open. There, beggars will be avenged. There, nobodies will turn into marquises, scoundrels into saints, gibbet-fodder into founders, and vendors of love will become dowried débutantes.

  (326)

  Sentinel of America

  Long, long ago in the Andean cordillera, the Indians lived in perpetual night. The condor, oldest of all flying creatures, was the one who brought them the sun. He dropped it, a little ball of gold, among the mountains. The Indians picked it up and, blowing as hard as they could, blew it up toward the sky where it remains suspended forever. With the golden rays the sun sweated, the Indians modeled the animals and plants that inhabit the earth.

  One night the moon rose, ringed by three halos, to shine upon the peaks: the halo of blood announced war; the halo of flame, fire; and the black halo was the halo of disaster. Then the Indians fled into the cold, high wilderness and, carrying the sacred gold, plunged into the depths of lakes and into volcanos.

  The condor, bringer of the sun to the Andeans, is the caretaker of that treasure. With great gliding wings he soars over the snowy peaks and the waters and the smoking craters. The gold warns him when greed approaches. The gold cries out, and whistles, and shouts. The condor swoops down. His beak picks out the eyes of the thieves, and his claws tear their flesh.

  Only the sun can see the back of the condor, his bald head, his wrinkled neck. Only the sun knows his loneliness. Seen from the earth, the condor is invulnerable.

  (246)

  1701: Ouro Prêto

  Conjuring Tricks

  The silver mountain of Potosí is not an illusion, nor do the deep tunnels of Mexico contain only delirium and darkness; nor do the rivers of central Brazil sleep on beds of fool’s gold.

  The gold of Brazil is apportioned by lottery or by fists, by luck or by death. Those who don’t lose their lives make immense fortunes, one-fifth of which is owed to the Portuguese king. Yet, when all’s said and done, that royal fifth is but a fable. Heaps and heaps of gold escape as contraband, and even as many guards as the region’s dense forests have trees could not stanch its flow.

  The friars of the Brazilian mines devote more time to trafficking in gold than to saving souls. Hollow wooden saints serve as containers. For the monk Roberto way off by the coast, forging dies is as simple as telling his rosary, and so illicit gold bars come to sport the royal seal. Roberto, a Benedictine monk of the Sorocaba monastery, has also manufactured an all-powerful key that vanquishes any lock.

  (11)

  1703: Lisbon

  Gold, Passenger in Transit

  A few years ago a governor-general of Brazil made some prophesies that were as accurate as they were useless. From Bahia, João de Lencastre warned the king of Portugal that hordes of adventurers would turn the mining region into a sanctuary for criminals and vagabonds; and even graver, with gold the same might happen to Portugal as to Spain, which as soon as it receives its silver from America kisses it a tearful goodbye. Brazilian gold might enter by the Bay of Lisbon and, without ever stopping on Portuguese soil, continue its voyage up the River Tagus en route to England, France, Holland, Germany …

  As if to echo the governor’s voice, the Treaty of Methuen is signed. Portugal will pay with Brazilian gold for English cloth. With gold from Brazil, another country’s colony, England will give its industrial development a tremendous push forward.

  (11, 48, and 226)

  1709: The Juan Fernández Islands

  Robinson Crusoe

  The lookout reports distant gunfire. To investigate it, the freebooters of the Duke change course and head for the coast of Chile.

  The ship approaches the Juan Fernández Islands. From a string of bonfires, a canoe, a splash of foam comes toward it. Onto the deck climbs a tangle of hair and filth, trembling with fever, emitting noises from its mouth.

  Days later, Captain Rogers has the story. The shipwrecked man is one Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish colleague well versed in sails, winds, and plunder. He arrived off the Valparaíso coast with the expedition of the pirate William Dampier. Thanks to Bible, knife, and gun, Selkirk has survived more than four years on one of those uninhabited islands. He has learned the art of fishing with goats’ intestines, cooked with salt crystallized on the rocks, and lighted his world with seal oil. He built a hut on high ground and beside it a corral for goats. He marked the passage of time on a tree trunk. A storm brought him the remains of some wreck and also an almost-drowned Indian. He called the Indian Friday because that was the day of his arrival. From him he learned the secrets of the plants. When the big ship came, Friday chose to stay. Selkirk swore to him that he would return, and Friday believed him.

  Within ten years, Daniel Defoe will publish in London his novel about the adventures of a shipwrecked sailor. Selkirk will be Robinson Crusoe, native of York. The expedition of the British pirate Dampier, who had ravaged the coasts of Peru and Chile, will become a respectable commercial enterprise. The desert island without a history will jump from the Pacific Ocean to the mouth of the Orinoco, and the shipwrecked sailor will live there twenty-eight years. Robinson will save the life of a savage cannibal. “Master” will be the first word he teaches him in Engli
sh.

  Selkirk marked with a knife-point the ears of each goat he caught. Robinson will undertake the subdivision of the island, his kingdom, into lots for sale; he will put a price on every object he gets from the wrecked ship, keep accounts of all he produces on the island and a balance of every situation, the “debit” of bad fortune and the “credit” of good. Robinson will endure, like Selkirk, the tough tests of solitude, fear, and madness; but at the hour of rescue Alexander Selkirk is a shivering wretch who cannot talk and is scared of everything. Robinson Crusoe, on the other hand, invincible tamer of nature, will return to England with his faithful Friday, totting up accounts and planning adventures.

  (92, 149, and 259)

  1711: Paramaribo

  The Silent Women

  The Dutch cut the Achilles tendon of a slave escaping for the first time, and one who makes a second try gets the right leg amputated; yet there is no way to stop the spreading plague of freedom in Surinam.

  Captain Molinay sails downriver to Paramaribo. His expedition is returning with two heads. He had to behead the captured women, one named Flora, the other Sery, because after the torture they were in no condition to walk through the jungle. Their eyes are still fixed heavenward. They never opened their mouths in spite of the lashes, the fire, and the red-hot pincers, stubbornly mute as if they had not spoken a word since that remote day when they were fattened up and smeared with oil, and stars or half-moons were engraved on their shaven heads to fit them for sale in the Paramaribo market. Always mute, this Flora and Sery, as the soldiers kept asking where the fugitive slaves hid out: they stared upwards without blinking, following clouds stout as mountains that drifted high in the sky.

  (173)

  They Carry Life in Their Hair

  For all the blacks that get crucified or hung from iron hooks stuck through their ribs, escapes from Surinam’s four hundred coastal plantations never stop. Deep in the jungle a black lion adorns the yellow flag of the runaways. For lack of bullets, their guns fire little stones or bone buttons; but the impenetrable thickets are their best ally against the Dutch colonists.

  Before escaping, the female slaves steal grains of rice, corn, and wheat, seeds of bean and squash. Their enormous hairdos serve as granaries. When they reach the refuges in the jungle, the women shake their heads and thus fertilize the free land.

  (173)

  The Maroon

  The crocodile, disguised as a log, basks in the sun. The snail revolves its eyes on the point of little horns. The male bird courts the female with circus acrobatics. The male spider climbs up the female’s perilous web—bedsheet and shroud—where he will embrace and be devoured. A band of monkeys leaps to seize wild fruits in the branches. The monkeys’ screams daze the thickets, drowning out the litanies of cicadas, the questionings of birds. But strange footsteps sound on the carpet of leaves and the jungle falls quickly silent. Paralyzed, it draws into itself and waits. When the first gunshot rings out, the whole jungle stampedes in flight.

  The shot announces a hunt for runaway slaves: cimarrones, in the Antillean phrase meaning “arrow that seeks freedom.” Used by Spaniards for the bull that takes off for the woods, it passes into other languages as chimarrão, maroon, marron to designate the slave who in every part of America seeks the protection of forests and swamps and deep canyons; who, far from the master, builds a free domain and defends it by marking false trails and setting deadly traps.

  The maroon is the gangrene of colonial society.

  (264)

  1711: Murrí

  They Are Never Alone

  There are Indian maroons too. To shut them in under the control of friars and captains, prisons are built. The newly born village of Murrí, in the region of the Chocó, is one.

  Some time back, huge canoes with white wings arrived here, seeking the rivers of gold that flow down from the cordillera; and since then, Indians have been fleeing. Countless spirits accompany them as they journey through forests and across rivers.

  The witch doctor knows the words that call the spirits. To cure the sick he blows his conch shell toward the foliage where the peccary, the bird of paradise, and the singing fish live. To make the well sick, he puts into one of their lungs the butterfly of death. The witch doctor knows that there is no land, water, or air empty of spirits in the Chocó region.

  (121)

  1711: Saint Basil’s Refuge

  The Black King, the White Saint and His Sainted Wife

  More than a century ago, the Negro Domingo Bioho fled from the galleys in Cartagena of the Indies and became warrior-king of the swamplands. Hosts of dogs and musketeers went hunting for him, and Domingo was hanged several times. On various days of great public enthusiasm Domingo was dragged through the streets of Cartagena tied to the tail of a mule, and several times had his penis chopped off and nailed to a long pike. His captors were rewarded with successive grants of land and repeatedly given the title of marquis; but within the maroon palisades of the Dique Canal or of the lower Cauca, Domingo Bioho reigns and laughs with his unmistakable painted face.

  The free blacks live on constant alert, trained from birth to fight, protected by ravines and precipices and deep ditches lined with poisonous thorns. The most important of the refuges in the region, which has existed and resisted for a century, is going to be named after a saint, Saint Basil, whose effigy is soon expected to arrive on the Magdalena River. Saint Basil will be the first white man authorized to enter here. He will arrive with mitre and staff of office and will bring with him a little wooden church well stocked with miracles. He will not be scandalized by the nudity, or ever talk in a master’s voice. The maroons will provide him with a house and wife. They will get him a saintly female, Catalina, so that in the other world God will not wed him to an ass and so that they may enjoy this world together while they are in it.

  (108 and 120)

  The Maríapalito

  There is much animal life in the region where Domingo Bioho reigns forever and a day within his palisades. Most feared are the tiger, the boa constrictor, and the snake that wraps himself around the vines and glides down into the huts. Most fascinating are the mayupa fish that shits through his head, and the maríapalito.

  Like the spider, the female maríapalito eats her lovers. When the male embraces her from behind, she turns her chinless face to him, measures him with her big, protuberant eyes, fastens her teeth in him and lunches off him with absolute calm, until nothing remains.

  The maríapalito is extremely devout. She always keeps her arms folded in prayer and prays as she eats.

  (108)

  1712: Santa Marta

  From Piracy to Contraband

  From the green foothills of the Sierra Nevada, which wets its feet in the sea, rises a belltower surrounded by houses of wood and straw. In them live the thirty white families of the port of Santa Marta. All around, in huts of reed and mud, sheltered by palm leaves, live the Indians, blacks, and mixtures whom no one has bothered to count.

  Pirates have always been the nightmare of these coasts. Fifteen years ago the bishop of Santa Marta had to take apart the organ of the church to improvise ammunition. A week ago English ships penetrated the cannon fire of forts guarding the bay and calmly met the dawn on the beach.

  Everybody fled into the hills.

  The pirates waited. They didn’t steal so much as a handkerchief or burn a single house.

  Mistrustful, the inhabitants approached one by one; and Santa Marta has now become a pleasant market. The pirates, armed to the teeth, have come to buy and sell. They bargain, but are scrupulous in paying.

  Far away over there, British workshops are growing and need markets. Many pirates are becoming contrabandists although not one of them knows what the devil “capital accumulation” means.

  (36)

  1714: Ouro Prêto

  The Mine Doctor

  This doctor does not believe in drugs, nor in the costly little powders from Portugal. He mistrusts bleedings and purges and has small use for
the patriarch Galen and his tablets of laws. Luis Gomes Ferreira advises his patients to take a daily bath, which in Europe would be a clear sign of heresy or insanity, and prescribes herbs and roots of the region. Dr. Ferreira has saved many lives, thanks to the common sense and ancient experience of the Indians, and to the aid of the “white handmaiden,” sugarcane brandy that revives the dying.

  There is little he can do, however, about the miners’ custom of disemboweling each other with bullet or knife. Here, every fortune is fleeting, and shrewdness is worth more than courage. In the implacable war of conquest against this black clay in which suns lie concealed, no science has any role to play. Captain Tomás de Souza, treasurer to the king, went looking for gold and found lead. The doctor could do nothing for him but make the sign of the cross. Everyone believed the captain had a ton of gold stashed away, but the creditors found only a few slaves to divide up.

  Rarely does the doctor attend a black patient. In the Brazilian mines slaves are used and scrapped. In vain Ferreira recommends more careful treatment, telling the bosses they sin against God and their own interests. In the places where they pan for gold, and in the galleries below ground, no black lasts ten years, but a handful of gold buys a new child, who is worth the same as a handful of salt or a whole hog.

  (48)

  1714: Vila Nova do Príncipe

  Jacinta

  She hallows the ground she walks on. Jacinta de Siquiera, African woman of Brazil, is the founder of this town of Príncipe and of the gold mines in the Quatro Vintens ravines. Black woman, verdant woman, Jacinta opens and closes like a carnivorous plant swallowing men and birthing children of all colors, in this world still without a map. Jacinta advances, slashing open the jungle, at the head of the scoundrels who come on muleback, barefoot, armed with old rifles, and who, when they enter the mines, leave their consciences hanging from a branch or buried in a swamp: Jacinta, born in Angola, slave in Bahia, mother of the gold of Minas Gerais.