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

by Eduardo Galeano

  The mulatto Ambrosio, who belongs to the commander Nieva y Castillo, was denounced to the authorities for having committed the crime of learning to read and write. They flayed his back with lashes as a lesson to those pen-pushing Indians and mulattos who wish to ape Spaniards.

  Prone on the paving stones, Ambrosio groans and raves and dreams of vengeance. “Pardon me,” he pleads in his dream, and plunges in the knife.

  (272)

  1804: Paris

  Napoleon

  The solemn chords of the organ invoke the sixty kings who have ruled France, and perhaps too the angels, while the pope offers the crown to Napoleon Bonaparte.

  Napoleon wreathes his own brow with the laurel of the Caesars. Then he descends, slowly, majestic in ermine and purple, and places on Josephine the diadem that consecrates her as the first empress in France’s history. In a gold and crystal coach they have reached the throne of this nation, the small foreigner, great warrior, sprouted from the harsh mountains of Corsica, and his wife Josephine, born in Martinique, an Antillean whose embrace they say will burn you to a crisp. Napoleon, the artillery lieutenant who hated Frenchmen, becomes Napoleon I.

  The founder of the dynasty that is inaugurated today has rehearsed this coronation ceremony a thousand times. Each personage in the retinue, each actor, has dressed as he prescribed, has placed himself where he wanted, has moved the way he ordered.

  “Oh, José! If our father could see us …”

  The voracious relatives, princes and princesses of France’s new nobility, have done their duty. True, the mother, Laeticia, has refused to come, and is in the palace murmuring grudges, but Napoleon will order David, the official artist, to give Laeticia a prominent place in the painting which will tell posterity of these ceremonials.

  The guests overflow the cathedral of Notre Dame. Among them, a young Venezuelan cranes his neck to miss no detail. At twenty, a hallucinated Simón Bolívar attends the birth of the Napoleonic monarchy: I am no more than a diamond on the handle of Bonaparte’s sword …

  During these days, in a gilded salon in Paris, Bolívar has met Alexander von Humboldt. The adventurer-sage, newly arrived from America, has said to him, “I think your country is ripe for independence, but I don’t see the man who can…”

  (20 and 116)

  1804: Seville

  Fray Servando

  For wanting the independence of Mexico, and for believing that the pagan god Quetzalcoatl was the apostle Saint Thomas in person, Fray Servando has been sentenced to exile in Spain.

  From prison to prison, from escape to escape, the Mexican heretic has been a guest of the most varied Spanish dungeons. But this artist of the file, the tunnel, and the high jump has managed to travel far on the old continent.

  Globetrotter, globe breaker: a bird with agile wings and beak of steel, Fray Servando defends himself against Europe’s fascination by cursing all he sees. 7 am a Mexican, he repeats at every step, and thinks Frenchwomen have faces like snub-nosed, big-mouthed frogs; that in France men are like women and women like children; that the Italian language is made for lying; and that Italy is the homeland of the superlative and the bogus, although it has one worthwhile city, Florence, because it is something like a Mexican city. Against Spain, the impertinent friar recites a whole rosary of insults: he says the Spaniards imitate the French like monkeys; that the Court is a brothel and the Escorial no more than a pile of stones; that the Basques drive nails with their foreheads, and the Aragonese likewise, except with the point upward; that the Catalans don’t move a step without a lantern and won’t admit any relative to their homes who doesn’t bring food; and that the Madrileños are dwarfed stringers of rosaries and inheritors of prisons, condemned to a climate of eight months’ winter and four months’ hell.

  Now, in the Seville jail, Fray Servando is pulling lice from his chest by the fistful while an army of bedbugs makes waves in his blanket and the fleas mock his slaps and the rats his lunges with a stick. They all want to lunch off Fray Servando and he pleads for a truce. He needs a moment of peace to round out the details of his next escape, which he already has nearly complete.

  (318 and 346)

  1806: Island of Trinidad

  Adventures, Misadventures

  After many years of futile waiting, Francisco de Miranda leaves London. The English have paid him a fairly good salary, given him a few promises and some benevolent smiles, but not a bullet for his liberating expedition. Miranda escapes from the chessboard of British diplomacy and tries his luck in the United States.

  In New York he gets a ship. Two hundred volunteers accompany him. He lands on the Venezuelan coasts of the Gulf of Coro, after thirty-six years of exile. He has promised his recruits a glorious welcome, flowers and music, honors and treasure, but he meets silence. No one responds to the proclamations that announce freedom. Miranda occupies a couple of towns, covers them with flags and words, and quits Venezuela before the five thousand soldiers from Caracas can wipe him out.

  On the island of Trinidad he receives outrageous news. The English have seized the port of Buenos Aires and plan the conquest of Montevideo, Valparaíso, and Veracruz. From London, the War Minister has given clear instructions: The novelty will consist, simply and solely, of substituting the dominion of His Britannic Majesty for the dominion of the Spanish king.

  Miranda will return to London, to his house in Grafton Street, and loudly voice his protest. There they raise his annual pension from three hundred to seven hundred pounds sterling.

  (150)

  1808: Rio de Janeiro

  Judas-Burning Is Banned

  By will of the Portuguese prince, recently arrived in Brazil, the traditional burning of Judases during the Holy Week is to be banned in the colony. To avenge Christ and avenge themselves the people would throw on the fire, one night in the year, the marshal and the archbishop, the rich merchant, the big landlord and the chief of police; the naked ones have enjoyed seeing how the rag dolls, sumptuously adorned and filled with firecrackers, twist in pain and explode amid the flames.

  From now on, those in power will not suffer even in Holy Week. The royal family, who have just come from Lisbon, demand silence and respect. An English ship has rescued the Portuguese prince with all his court and jewelry, and brought them to these remote lands.

  This efficacious maneuver removes the Portuguese dynasty from the dangerous onslaught of Napoleon Bonaparte, who has invaded Spain and Portugal, and it affords England a useful center of operations in America. The English have taken a tremendous beating on the River Plata. Expelled from Buenos Aires and Montevideo, they now launch their next penetration through Rio de Janeiro, through the most helplessly unconditional of their allies.

  (65 and 171)

  1809: Chuquisaca

  The Cry

  of “America” explodes in Chuquisaca. While Spain seethes, up in arms against the French invaders, America rebels. The Creoles repudiate the throne that Joseph Bonaparte, brother of Napoleon, occupies in Madrid.

  Chuquisaca is first. The rebellion of America’s Salamanca announces that Spain will lose her dominion over the Indies.

  Chuquisaca, formerly La Plata and Charcas, and the Sucre to be, lies at the foot of two mountains in love. From its patios and gardens rises the aroma of citrus blossoms, and through its streets pass more knightly gentlemen than commoners. Nothing is so abundant here as cloaks and clerical tonsures. Very Chuquisacan are doctors, stiff as their gilt-handled canes, and friars who go about sprinkling houses with hyssop.

  Here, the world seemed immutable and secure. Astoundingly, the shrill cry of liberty has come from this mouth accustomed to falsetto Latin. La Paz and Quito and Buenos Aires will immediately echo it. To the north, in Mexico …

  (5)

  1810: Atotonilco

  The Virgin of Guadalupe Versus the Virgin of Remedios

  Making its way through curtains of dust, the multitude crosses the town of Atotonilco.

  “Long live America and death to the bad gov
ernment!”

  Father Miguel Hidalgo hauls from the church the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe and ties it to a spear. The raised standard glows over the crowd.

  “Long live Our Lady of Guadalupe! Death to the Spanish dogs!”

  Fervor of revolution, passion of religion. The bells have rung out from the church of Dolores, the priest Hidalgo calls for struggle, and the Mexican Virgin of Guadalupe declares war on the Spanish Virgin of Remedios. Indian Virgin defies white Virgin; the one who chose a poor Indian on the hill of Tepeyac marches against the one who saved Hernán Cortés in the flight from Tenochtitlán. Our Lady of Remedios will dress up as a general; and by order of the viceroy the firing squad will riddle with bullets the standard of the Virgin of Guadalupe.

  Mother, queen, and goddess of the Mexicans, the Virgin of Guadalupe was called Tonantzin by the Aztecs before the archangel Gabriel painted her image in the Tepeyac sanctuary. Year after year the people stream to Tepeyac in procession, Ave Virgin and Pregnant, Ave Damsel with Child, go on their knees up to the rock where she appeared, to the crack from which roses bloomed, Ave Possessed of God, Ave Most Beloved of God, drink water from its springs, Ave that Maketh God a Nest, and beseech love and miracles, protection, counsel, Ave Maria, Ave Ave.

  Now the Virgin of Guadalupe advances, killing for the independence of Mexico.

  (178)

  1810: Guanajuato

  El Pípila

  Hidalgo’s troops storm out of the mountain scrub, and fall upon Guanajuato with volleys of stones. The mining town joins the insurgent avalanche.

  Despite the havoc wrought by the king’s fusillades, the multitude flood the streets, a surge that sweeps the soldiers aside and beats up against that bastion of Spanish power, the Corn Exchange. There, beneath the vaulted ceilings of its thirty halls, lie eight thousand bushels of corn and an incalculable fortune in silver, gold bars, and jewels. The lords of the colony, scared out of their wits, have locked themselves in with all of their treasure.

  In vain, the dandies beg for mercy. Throat-cuttings, looting, a vast drunken spree follows, and the Indians strip the dead to see if they have tails.

  El Pípila, a miner, is the hero of the day. They say he hoisted an enormous stone slab onto his back, scuttled like a turtle through the rain of bullets, and with a lighted torch and plenty of pitch set fire to the Corn Exchange door. They say that El Pípila’s name is Juan José Martínez and they say he has other names too, all the names of the Indians who are or have ever been in the mines of Guanajuato.

  (197)

  1810: Guadalajara

  Hidalgo

  Everybody knew, in the town of Dolores, that the priest Hidalgo had the bad habit of reading as he walked through the streets, the great wings of his hat between the sun and the pages, and that it was a sheer miracle that neither horses nor the Inquisition ever hit him, because more dangerous than reading was what he read. At a slow pace the priest moved through the cloud of dust in the streets of Dolores, always with some French book covering his face, one of those books that talk of the social contract and the rights of man and the freedoms of citizens; and if he didn’t greet people it was because of his thirst for erudition, not rudeness.

  The priest Hidalgo rebelled along with the twenty Indians who made bowls and pots with him, and at the end of a week there were fifty thousand of them. Then the Inquisition went to work on him. The Holy Office of Mexico has pronounced him a heretic, apostate of religion, denier of the virginity of Mary, materialist, libertine, advocate of fornication, seditious, schismatic, and sectarian of French liberty.

  The Virgin of Guadalupe invades Guadalajara at the head of an insurgent army. Miguel Hidalgo has the portrait of King Ferdinand removed from the walls and replies to the Inquisition with a decree abolishing slavery, confiscating the goods of Europeans, ending the tributes paid by Indians, and recovering farmlands from those who have usurped them.

  (127, 203, and 321)

  1810: Pie de la Cuesta

  Morelos

  He is a country priest, like Hidalgo. Like Hidalgo, he was born in the Tarascan country, in the mountains of Michoacán where Bishop Vasco de Quiroga had created, two and a half centuries earlier, his communist utopia—lands of redemption later laid waste by plagues and by the forced labor of thousands of Indians dragged to the mines of Guanajuato.

  “With violence I go to the hot lands of the south.”

  José María Morelos, shepherd and muleteer, parish priest of Carácuaro, joins the revolution. He takes the road with twenty-five spearmen and a few shotguns. Behind the white silk kerchief that binds his head, the troop keeps growing.

  In search of Atoyac Indians hidden in the palm groves, Morelos crosses the little town of Pie de la Cuesta.

  “Who goes there?”

  “Holy God,” say the Indians.

  Morelos talks to them. From now on, to the cry of “Who goes there?” people will answer, “America.”

  (332 and 348)

  1811: Buenos Aires

  Moreno

  Great fortunes in a few hands, thought Mariano Moreno, are stagnant waters that do not bathe the earth. So as not to escape from tyrants without destroying tyranny, parasitical capital amassed in colonial business would have to be expropriated. Why seek in Europe, at the price of extortionate interest, money that is more than abundant at home? From abroad should be brought machines and seeds, instead of Stoddard pianos and Chinese vases. The State, thought Moreno, should become a great entrepreneur of a newly independent nation. The revolution, he thought, should be terrible and astute, implacable with enemies and vigilant towards onlookers.

  Fleetingly he held power, or thought he did.

  “Thanks be to God,” breathed the merchants of Buenos Aires. Mariano Moreno, the demon of hell, has died on the high seas. His friends French and Beruti go into exile. Castelli is sentenced to prison.

  Cornelio Saavedra orders copies of Rousseau’s Social Contract, which Moreno had published and circulated, rounded up; and he warns that no Robespierre has any place on the River Plata.

  (2 and 267)

  1811: Buenos Aires

  Castelli

  There were two of them: a pen and a voice. A Robespierre who wrote, Mariano Moreno, and another who spoke. They are all perverse, said a Spanish commandant, but Castelli and Moreno are very perverse indeed. Juan José Castelli, the great orator, is in jail in Buenos Aires.

  Usurped by conservatives, the revolution sacrifices the revolutionaries. The charges pile up: Castelli is a womanizer, a drunk, a cardsharp, and a profaner of churches. The prisoner, agitator of Indians, seeker of justice for the poor, spokesman for the American cause, cannot defend himself. Cancer has attacked his mouth. His tongue has to be amputated.

  The revolution falls dumb in Buenos Aires.

  (84)

  1811: Bogotá

  Nariño

  We have changed masters, writes Antonio Nariño in Colombia.

  La Bagatela, the newspaper founded, directed, and edited by him from cover to cover, deprives puppets of heads and big shots of pedestals. Nariño proclaims that the patriotic uprising of the Colombians is turning into a masked ball and demands that independence be declared once and for all. He also demands, voice crying in the desert, that the right of the poor to vote be recognized and that the will of the naked plebeian is worth as much as that of the gentleman sheathed in velvet.

  We have changed masters, he writes. Some months ago the people invaded the main square of Bogotá, the men took the viceroy prisoner and the women threw the vicereine into the whores’ prison. The ghost of José Antonio Galán, the commoners’ captain, charged at the head of the infuriated multitude. Then the doctors and bishops and merchants and masters of lands and slaves were badly scared. Swearing to avoid at any price the errors of the libertines of France, they helped the viceregal couple to escape secretly.

  We have changed masters. Colombia is governed by gentlemen in very starched shirts and cassocks with many buttons. Even in Heaven t
here are hierarchies, preaches the Canon of the Cathedral, and not even the fingers of the hand are equal. The ladies cross themselves, lowering a thicket of curls, flowers, and ribbons beneath the black mantilla. The Junta of Notables issues its first decrees. Among other patriotic measures, it resolves to despoil the despoiled Indians of all that remains to them. Under the pretext of freeing them from tribute, the Junta seizes the Indians’ communal lands to force them to serve in the big haciendas which feature a pillory in the middle of the patio.

  (185 and 235)

  The World Upside Down, Verses for Guitar Accompanied by Singer

  When you paint the world upside down

  You see it in all its error:

  The dog flees the fox in terror,

  Thief chases judge in his gown.

  The feet look down on the head,

  The mouth drags along in the mire,

  Water is put out by fire,

  Letters are taught by the blind,

  The carter is pulling the wagon,

  The oxen are riding behind.

  On the banks of a man sits a river,

  Sharpening his horse in the shade

  And watering his blunted blade.

  (179)

  1811: Chilapa

  Potbelly

  In Mexico, military order is vanquishing popular tumult. Hidalgo has been executed in Chihuahua. It is said that he renounced his ideas, after four months of chains and torture. Independence now has only the forces that follow Morelos to rely on.

  Ignacio López Rayón sends Morelos an urgent message of warning: I have it from good sources that the viceroy has paid an assassin to kill you. I cannot tell you any more about this man, except that he is very potbellied …

  At dawn, in a burst of hooves, the messenger reaches the camp at Chilapa.