The Memory of Fire Trilogy: Genesis, Faces and Masks, and Century of the Wind
Page 47
Maciel is the most important of the Montevidean businessmen specializing in the exchange of cow meat for people meat.
(195 and 251)
1799: Guanajuato
Life, Passion, and Business of the Ruling Class
All through the century that is dying, the owners of the Guanajuato and Zacatecas mines have been buying titles of high nobility. Ten mine owners have become counts and six marquises. While they planted family trees and tried on wigs, a new labor code was transforming their workers into debt-slaves. During the eighteenth century Guanajuato has multiplied eightfold its production of silver and gold.
Meanwhile, the magic wand of money has also touched seven Mexico City merchants, farm laborers from the mountains of northern Spain, and made them marquises and counts.
Some mine owners and merchants, anxious for aristocratic prestige, buy lands as well as titles. Throughout Mexico, innumerable haciendas advance, devouring the traditional lands of Indian communities.
Others prefer to go in for usury. The moneylender Jose Antonio del Mazo, for example, risks little and wins much. Friend Mazo, writes Francisco Alonso Terán, is one of those who do the most business in Guanajuato. If God gives him long life, he will contain the whole city in his belly.
(49 and 223)
1799: Royal City of Chiapas
The Tamemes
Don Augustín de las Quentas Zayas, governor of Chiapas, plans a new road from the River Tulijá to Comitán, on the way to Guatemala. Twelve hundred Tamemes will transport the necessary materials.
The Tamemes, two-legged mules, are Indians capable of carrying up to a hundred and seventy-five pounds. With ropes around their foreheads, they tote enormous bundles on their backs—even people seated in chairs—and thus cross high mountains and skirt precipices with one foot in life and the other out.
(146 and 321)
1799: Madrid
Fernando Túpac Amaru
On the street, someone plucks lamentations from a guitar. Inside, Fernando Túpac Amaru shakes with fever and dies dreaming that he is drooling snow.
The son of Peru’s great chieftain does not reach his thirtieth year. Poor as a rat, he ends in Madrid his brief life of exile and prison.
Twenty years ago, violent rain swept the main plaza of Cuzco, and since then it has not stopped raining in the world.
The doctor says Fernando has died of melancholy.
(344)
1800: Apure River
To the Orinoco
America flames and spins, burned and dizzied by its suns. Giant trees embrace over the rivers and in their shade glows the canoe of the sages.
The canoe progresses pursued by birds and by hungry hordes of gnats and mosquitos. Slapping continuously, Humboldt and Bonpland defend themselves against the onslaughts of the lancers, which penetrate clothing and skin and reach to the bone, while the German studies the anatomy of the manatee, the fat fish with hands, or the electricity of the eel or the teeth of the piraña, and the Frenchman collects and classifies plants or measures a crocodile or calculates its age. Together they draw maps, register the temperature of the water and the pressure of the air, analyze the mica in the sand and the conches of snails and the passage of Orion’s belt across the sky. They want America to tell them all it knows and here not a leaf or pebble is dumb.
They camp in a small cove, unloading the troublesome instruments. They light a fire to ward off mosquitos, and to cook. Suddenly, the dog barks as if to warn of an approaching jaguar, and runs to hide beneath Bonpland’s legs. The toucan that Humboldt carries on his shoulder picks nervously at his straw hat. The undergrowth creaks and from among the trees appears a naked man, copper skin, Indian face, African hair:
“Welcome to my lands, gentlemen.”
And he bows to them: “Don Ignacio, at your service.”
Don Ignacio makes a face at the improvised fire. The sages are roasting a capybara rat. “That’s Indian food,” he says disdainfully, and invites them to sup in his house in splendid venison freshly hunted with an arrow.
Don Ignacio’s house consists of three nets slung between trees not far from the river. There he presents them to his wife, Doña Isabela, and his daughter, Doña Manuela, not as naked as he is. He offers the travelers cigars. While the venison is browning, he riddles them with questions. Don Ignacio is hungry to know the news of the court of Madrid and the latest on those endless wars that are so wounding Europe.
(338)
1800: Esmeralda del Orinoco
Master of Poison
They sail on down river.
At the foot of a rocky mountain, at the remote Christian mission of Esmeralda, they meet the master of poison. His laboratory is the cleanest and neatest hut in the village. The old Indian, surrounded by smoking cauldrons and clay jugs, pours a yellowish juice into banana leaf cones and palm leaf funnels: the horrifying curare falls drop by drop, and bubbles. The arrow anointed with this curare will enter and kill better than the fang of a snake.
“Better than anything,” says the old man, as he chews some liana and tree bark into a paste. “Better than anything you people make.”
And Humboldt thinks: He has the same pedantic tone and the same starchy manner as our pharmacists.
“You people have invented black powder,” the old man continues, as very slowly, with meticulous hand, he pours water onto the paste.
“I know it,” he says after a pause, “that powder isn’t worth a damn. It’s noisy. It’s unreliable. Powder can’t kill silently and it kills even when you miss your aim.”
He revives the fire under the kettles and pots. From within the smoke he asks, “Know how to make soap?”
“He knows,” says Bonpland.
The old man looks at Humboldt with respect. “After curare,” he says, “soap is the big thing.”
(338)
Curare
Guam, the child-god of the Tukan Indians, managed to reach the kingdom of poison. There he caught the daughter of Curare and made love to her. She had spiders, scorpions, and snakes hidden between her legs. Each time he entered that body, Guam died; and on reviving he saw colors that were not of this world.
She took him to her father’s house. Old Curare, who ate people, licked himself. But Guam turned himself into a flea, and in that form entered the old man’s mouth, slithered down to his liver and took a bite. Curare covered his mouth, nose, ears, eyes, his navel, asshole and his penis, so that the flea would have no way to escape; but Guam tickled him inside and got out with the sneeze.
He flew back to his country, and in his bird’s beak carried a little piece of Curare’s liver.
So the Tukan Indians got poison, as the men of much time, the guardians of memory, tell it.
(164)
1800: Uruana
Forever Earth
Opposite the island of Uruana, Humboldt meets the Indians who eat earth.
Every year the Orinoco rises, the Father of rivers, flooding its banks for two or three months. While the flood lasts, the Otomacos eat soft clay, slightly hardened by fire, and on that they live. It is pure earth, Humboldt confirms, not mixed with corn flour or turtle oil or crocodile fat.
So these wandering Indians travel through life toward death, clay wandering toward clay, erect clay eating the earth that will eat them.
(338)
1801: Lake Guatavita
The Goddess at the Bottom of the Waters
On the maps of America, El Dorado still occupies a good part of Guyana. The lake of gold takes flight when its hunters approach, and curses and kills them; but on the maps it is a tranquil blot of blue joined to the upper Orinoco.
Humboldt and Bonpland decipher the mystery of the elusive lake. In the glittering mica on a mountain which the Indians call Golden Mountain, they discover part of the hallucination; and another in a little lake which in the rainy season invades the vast plain neighboring the source waters of the Orinoco and then, when the rains cease, disappears.
In Guyana lies the phantom
lake, that most tempting of America’s deliriums. Far away, on the plateau of Bogotá, is the true El Dorado. After covering many leagues by canoe and mule, Humboldt and Bonpland discover it in the sacred Lake Guatavita. This mirror of waters faithfully reflects even the tiniest leaf in the woods surrounding it: at its bottom lie the treasures of the Muisca Indians.
To this sanctuary came princes, their naked bodies gleaming with gold dust, and at the center of the lake dropped their goldsmiths’ finest works, then plunged in themselves. If they came up without a single speck of gold on the skin, the goddess Furatena had accepted their offerings. In those times the goddess Furatena, snake goddess, governed the world from the depths.
(326 and 338)
1801: Bogotá
Mutis
The old monk talks as he peels oranges and an unending shower of gold spirals down into a pan between his feet.
To see him, to listen to him, Humboldt and Bonpland have detoured from their southward route and have gone upriver for forty days. José Celestino Mutis, patriarch of America’s botanists, is put to sleep by speeches but enjoys intimate chats as much as anyone.
The three men, sages ever astonished by the beauty and mystery of the universe, exchange plants, ideas, doubts, discoveries. Mutis is excited by talk of Lake Guatavita, the salt mines of Zipaquirá, and the Tequendama waterfall. He praises the map of the Magdalena River which Humboldt has just drawn, and discreetly suggests some changes with the sureness of one who has traveled much and knows much, and knows very deep inside himself that something of him will remain in the world.
And he shows everything and tells everything. While he eats and offers oranges, Mutis speaks of the letters that Linnaeus wrote him, and of how much those letters taught him, and of the problems he had with the Inquisition. And he recalls and shares his discoveries about the curative powers of quinine bark, and the influence of the moon on the barometer, and the cycles of flowers, which sleep as we do and stretch and wake up little by little, unfurling their petals.
(148)
1802: The Caribbean Sea
Napoleon Restores Slavery
Squadrons of wild ducks escort the French army. The fish take flight. Through a turquoise sea, bristling with coral, the ships head for the blue mountains of Haiti. Soon the land of victorious slaves will appear on the horizon. General Leclerc stands tall at the head of the fleet. Like a ship’s figurehead, his shadow is first to part the waves. Astern, other islands disappear, castles of rock, splendors of deepest green, sentinels of the new world found three centuries ago by people who were not looking for it.
“Which has been the most prosperous regime for the colonies?”
“The previous one.”
“Well, then, put it back,” Napoleon decided.
No man, born red, black, or white can be his neighbor’s property, Toussaint L’Ouverture had said. Now the French fleet returns slavery to the Caribbean. More than fifty ships, more than twenty thousand soldiers, come from France to bring back the past with guns.
In the cabin of the flagship, a female slave fans Pauline Bonaparte and another gently scratches her head.
(71)
1802: Pointe á Pitre
They Were Indignant
On the island of Guadeloupe, as in all French colonies, free blacks become slaves again. Black citizens reappear in their owners’ inventories and wills as saleable goods; once more they form part of the tool inventories of plantations, the equipment of ships, and the arsenal of the army. The colonial government summons whites who have left the island and guarantees them the return of their property. Blacks unclaimed by their owners are sold off for the public treasury.
The hunt becomes a butchery. The authorities of Guadeloupe pay forty-four francs for each rebel head. The hanged rot in perpetuity on top of Constantine Hill. In Pointe-à-Pitre’s Place Victoria, the bonfire of blacks never goes out and the flames rise higher than the houses.
Three whites protest. For their dignity, for their indignation, they are condemned. Millet de La Girardière, a several-times-decorated French army officer, is sentenced to death in an iron cage, exposed to the public, sitting naked on a spiny leaf. The other two, Barse and Barbet, will have their bones broken before being burned alive.
(180)
1802: Chimborazo Volcano
On the Roofs of the World
They climb over clouds, amid abysses of snow, clinging to the rough body of Chimborazo, tearing their hands against the naked rock.
They have left the mules half-way up. Humboldt carries on his shoulder a bag full of stones that speak of the origin of the Andean cordillera, born of an unusual vomiting from the earth’s incandescent belly. At seventeen thousand feet Bonpland has caught a butterfly, and higher up an incredible fly, and they have continued climbing, despite the bitter cold and vertigo and slippings and the blood that spurts from their eyes and gums and parted lips. Mist envelops them as they climb blindly up the volcano, until a shaft of light breaks through and strips bare the summit, that high white tower, before the astounded travelers. Is it real, could it be? Never has any man climbed so close to the sky, and it is said that on the roofs of the world appear horses flying to the clouds and colored stars at noon. Is it a hallucination, this cathedral of snow rearing up between north and south skies? Are not their bruised eyes deceiving them?
Humboldt feels an abundance of light more intense than any delirium: we are made of light, Humboldt feels, of light ourselves, and of light the earth and time, and he feels a tremendous urge to tell it right away to brother Goethe, over there at his home in Weimar.
(338)
1803: Fort Dauphin
The Island Burned Again
Toussaint L’Ouverture, chief of the free blacks, died a prisoner in a castle in France. When the jailer opened the padlock at dawn and slid back the bolt, he found Toussaint frozen in his chair.
But life in Haiti moved on, and without Toussaint the black army has beaten Napoleon Bonaparte. Twenty thousand French soldiers have been slaughtered or died of fevers. Vomiting black blood, dead blood, General Leclerc has collapsed. The land he sought to enslave proves his shroud.
Haiti has lost half its population. Shots are still heard, and hammers nailing down coffins, and funeral drums, in the vast ash-heap carpeted with corpses that the vultures spurn. This island, burned two centuries ago by an exterminating angel, has been newly eaten by the fire of men at war.
Over the smoking earth those who were slaves proclaim independence. France will not forgive the humiliation.
On the coast, palms, bent over against the wind, form ranks of spears.
(71)
1804: Mexico City
Spain’s Richest Colony
Theology professors still earn five times more than their colleagues in surgery or astronomy, but Humboldt finds in Mexico City an astonishing nursery of young scientists. This is the heritage of some Jesuit priests, friends of experimental physics, the new chemistry, and certain theories of Descartes, who despite the Inquisition taught and contaminated here; and it is also the work of the viceroy Revillagigedo, a man open to the winds of time, defier of dogmas, who a few years ago governed these lands with anguished concern about the lack of machines and laboratories and modern books to read.
Humboldt discovers and praises the School of Mining and its learned professors, while Mexico produces more silver than all the rest of the world, a river of silver flowing to Europe through the port of Veracruz. At the same time, Humboldt warns that cultivated land is little and badly worked, and that the colonial monopoly of commerce and the poverty of the people block the development of manufacturing. Mexico is the land of inequality, he notes. The monstrous inequality of rights and fortunes hits one in the face. Counts and marquesses paint newly purchased coats-of-arms on their carriages, and the people live in a misery that is the enemy of all industry. The Indians suffer atrocious penury. As in all of America, here too, more or less white skin decides what class a man occupies in society.
1804: Madrid
The Attorney General of the Council of the Indies advises against overdoing the sale of whiteness certificates,
to the end that persons of color should not seek to generalize these favors believing that these make them equal to whites with no difference but the accident of color, and believing themselves able to obtain all destinies and employments and to form links with any legitimate and mixture-free family … consequences which it is fitting to avoid in a monarchy, where the classification of classes contributes to better order, security, and good government …
Colored or brown persons stemming from infected mixtures constitute a very inferior species which, due to its vitiated nature, its arrogance, and inclination for freedom, has been and is little attached to our government and nation …
(174)
1804: Catamarca
Ambrosio’s Sin
Bound to a post in the main plaza of Catamarca, Ambrosio Millicay receives twenty-five strokes of the lash.