DIRECT IMPORTATION
The taste would not be too-too, but it was nearly-nearly, and no one got stomach ulcers. The business went like a house on fire. The factory could not keep up with the demand, but Don Vicente came down with an attack of patriotism and decided he could not go on living in a state of treason.
“This good reputation belongs only to Chile.”
He threw the European labels in the fire and had another sign put on his door, this time even larger:
NATIONAL INDUSTRY
The bottles now wear a new dress: labels printed here, which say in Spanish: Chilean Cognac.
Not even one can be sold.
(256)
Street Cries in the Santiago de Chile Market
“Carnations and basil for stocky little girls!”
“WA-A-FER COOKIES!”
“Pretty buttons, one penny the string!”
“Sulphur matche-e-es!”
“Belts, cinches, soft like a glove!”
“Charity, for the love of God!”
“Good beef!”
“A penny for a poor blind man?”
“BROO-OO-OMS! LAST CHANCE FOR BROOMS!”
“Baccy, chewing baccy?”
“Miraclemedals, single or by the box!”
“Look at these brandy cakes!”
“Knives f’yer personal security!”
“SHA-A-ARP BLADES!”
“Who’ll buy this rope?”
“Get this lovely bread!”
“Little bells, only one left!”
“WATERMELONS, DEARIE!”
“Get this lovely bread, fresh from a woman’s hands!”
“WA-A-ATERMELONS!”
“Get this lovely bread! It’s piping hot!”
(288)
1833: Arequipa
Llamas
“Happy creatures,” says Flora Tristán.
Flora is travelling through Peru, her father’s country, and in the mountains discovers the only animal man has not been able to debase.
The gentle llamas are more agile than mules and climb higher. They resist cold, exhaustion, and heavy loads. With no reward they give the mountain Indians transport, milk, meat, and the clean and brilliant wool that covers their bodies. But they never let themselves be tied up or mistreated, nor do they take orders. When they let up their queenly stride, the Indian implores them to get going again. If anyone hits them, insults them, or threatens them, llamas throw themselves on the ground, and, raising their long necks, they turn their eyes heavenward, the most beautiful eyes in Creation, and softly die.
“Happy creatures,” says Flora Tristán.
(337)
1833: San Vicente
Aquino
The head of Aquino lies in the executioner’s basket.
May he rest in war. The chief of the Indians of El Salvador had raised three thousand spears against the robbers of lands. He got the better of the muskets, which the enemy fired with glowing cigars, and stripped Saint Joseph naked on the high altar of a church. Clad in the cloak of the father of Christ, he proclaimed that Indians would never again be slaves, nor soldiers, nor famished, nor drunk. But more troops arrived, and he had to seek refuge in the mountains.
His lieutenant, named Cascabel, turned him in.
“Now I am a jaguar without claws or fangs,” said Aquino, when they loaded him with shackles and chains; and he confessed to Fray Navarro that in all his life he had only been frightened by the anger or tears of his wife.
“I am ready to play blindman’s buff,” he said, when they put on the blindfold.
(87)
1834: Paris
Tacuabé
On the headlands of the Quequay, General Rivera’s cavalry have completed the civilizing operation with good marksmanship. Now, not an Indian remains alive in Uruguay.
The government donates the four last Charrúa Indians to the Natural Sciences Academy in Paris. They are sent over in the hold of a ship, as baggage, among other packages and valises.
The French public pay admission to see the savages, rare specimens of a vanished race. The scientists note their gestures, clothing, and anthropometric measurements. From the shape of their skulls, they deduce their small intelligence and violent character.
Before two months have passed, the Indians let themselves die. Academicians fight over the cadavers. Only the warrior Tacuabé survives, and escapes with his newly born daughter, reaching the city of Lyons—who knows how—disappearing there.
Tacuabé was the one who made music. He made it in the museum after the public left. He would rub a bow with a little saliva-moistened stick and draw sweet vibrations from its horsehair strings. Frenchmen who spied on him from behind the curtains said he produced very soft, muffled, almost inaudible sounds, as if he were talking in secret.
(19)
1834: Mexico City
Loving Is Giving
A calabash filled with vinegar mounts guard behind each door. On every altar a thousand candles pray. Doctors prescribe bloodlettings and chloride fumigations. Colored flags mark houses invaded by the plague. Lugubrious chants and cries indicate the passage of carts full of the dead through streets with nobody on them.
The governor issues a proclamation banning certain foods. According to him, stuffed chilis and fruits have brought cholera to Mexico.
On Holy Ghost Street, a coachman is cutting an enormous chirimoya. He stretches out from his perch to enjoy eating it bit by bit. Someone passing by leaves him with his mouth open.
“Barbarian! Don’t you see you’re committing suicide? Don’t you know that that fruit takes you to the grave?”
The coachman hesitates. He contemplates the milky flesh, undecided whether to bite. Finally he gets up, walks a few steps and offers the chirimoya to his wife, who is sitting at the corner.
“You eat it, my love.”
(266)
1835: Galapagos Islands
Darwin
Black hills rise from the sea and mist. On the rocks, as if taking siestas, move turtles as big as cows; and between the crannies slide iguanas, dragons without wings.
“The capital of hell,” comments the captain of the Beagle.
“Even the trees feel bad,” Charles Darwin confirms, as the anchor falls.
In these islands, the Galapagos, Darwin approaches the revelation of the mystery of mysteries. Here, he senses the keys to the never-ending transformation of life on earth. He discovers here how chaffinches have perfected their beaks; how the beak that breaks big hard seeds has taken on the form of a nutcracker, and the one that seeks nectar from cactuses that of a pincers. The same has occurred, Darwin discovers, with the shells and necks of turtles, according to whether they eat on ground level or prefer lofty fruits.
In the Galapagos is the origin of all my opinions, Darwin will write. I go from surprise to surprise, he writes now, in his travel journal.
When the Beagle sailed four years ago from an English port, Darwin still believed every word of the Sacred Writings. He thought God had made the world the way it is now, in six days, and had ended his work, as Archbishop Usher insists, at 9 A.M. on Saturday October 12 of the year 4004 before Christ.
(4 and 88)
1835: Columbia
Texas
Fifteen years ago, a wagon train creaked across the desert prairie of Texas, and the mournful voices of owls and coyotes bid them illcome. Mexico ceded lands to these three hundred families that came from Louisiana with their slaves and plows. Five years ago, there were already twenty thousand North American colonists in Texas, and they had many slaves purchased in Cuba or in the corrals where the gentry of Virginia and Kentucky fatten up little blacks. Now, the colonists hoist their own flag, the image of a bear, and decline to pay taxes to the government of Mexico or to obey Mexican law which has abolished slavery in all the national territory.
The vice president of the United States, John Calhoun, believes that God created blacks to cut wood, pick cotton, and carry water for the chosen people
. Textile factories demand more cotton and cotton demands more land and more blacks. There are powerful reasons, said Calhoun last year, for Texas to form part of the United States. At that time President Jackson, who breathes frontiers with an athlete’s lungs, had already sent his friend Sam Houston to Texas.
The rugged Houston forces his way in with his fists, makes himself an army general, and proclaims the independence of Texas. The new state, soon to be another star on the United States flag, has more land than France.
And war breaks out against Mexico.
(128 and 207)
1836: San Jacinto
The Free World Grows
Sam Houston offers land at four cents an acre. Battalions of North American volunteers pour in by every road and weapons arrive by the shipload from New York and New Orleans.
The comet that announced calamity in the skies over Mexico was no news to anybody. Mexico has lived in a perpetual state of calamity since the murderers of Hidalgo and Morelos declared independence in order to grab the country for themselves.
The war does not last long. Mexican General Santa Anna arrives calling for a bloodbath, and makes one at the Alamo, but at San Jacinto loses four hundred men in a quarter of an hour. Santa Anna gives up Texas in exchange for his own life and returns to Mexico City with his beaten army, his personal chef, his seven-thousand-dollar sword, his countless decorations and his wagonload of fighting cocks.
General Houston celebrates his victory by naming himself president of Texas.
Texas’s constitution assures the master perpetual rights over his slaves, as legitimately acquired property. Extend the area of liberty had been the slogan of the victorious troops.
(128)
1836: The Alamo
Portraits of the Frontier Hero
At the outbreak of the Texas war, when fortune still smiles on the Mexican troops, Colonel Davy Crockett falls pierced by bayonets. He falls in the Alamo fort, together with his band of heroic outlaws, and the buzzards finish his story.
The United States, which fattens on the lands of Indians and Mexicans, has lost one of its frontier heroes. Davy Crockett had a rifle named Betsy which could kill five bears with a single bullet.
Crockett could well have been the son of Daniel Boone, the legendary pioneer of the previous century, a very macho and lonely killer, who hated civilization but earned a living by placing colonists on lands robbed from his Indian friends. And he could well have been the father of Natty Bumppo, a fictional character so famous that he now seems flesh and blood.
Since Fenimore Cooper published The Last of the Mohicans, Natty Bumppo, the crude and noble hunter, has incorporated himself into the daily life of the United States. Nature has taught him all he knows of morality and his energy comes from the mountains and the woods. He is ugly, only one tooth in his enormous mouth; but without expecting anything in return he protects beautiful white virgins, who, thanks to him, pass invincible through thicket and desire. Natty Bumppo praises silence with many words and tells no lie when he says that he doesn’t fear death, or when he admires the Indians while ruefully killing them.
(149 and 218)
1836: Hartford
The Colt
Samuel Colt, engineer, registers in Hartford, Connecticut, the patent of the “revolving pistol” he has invented. It is a pistol with a revolving cylinder of five shots, which kills five times in twenty seconds.
From Texas comes the first order.
(305)
1837: Guatemala City
Morazán
A storm of cassocks explodes. Rafael Carrera is the lightning flash that instills fear, and all over Guatemala roll the thunderclaps: “Long live religion! Death to the foreigners! Death to Morazán!”
No candle stays unlit. Nuns pray so fast that in nine seconds they roll off nine novenas. Choirs intone salutations to Mary and curse Morazán with the same fervor.
Francisco Morazán, president of Central America, is the heretical foreigner who has unleashed these mystical furies. Morazán, born in Honduras, has not only unified the Central American provinces into one nation, he has also reduced counts and marquesses to the category of mere citizens, and has created public schools that teach things of this world and say nothing of Heaven. According to his laws, a cross is no longer necessary for a grave nor a priest for a wedding, and he makes no distinction between a child born in the conjugal bed and a child made, without previous contract, on the straw of a stable, the one having the same inheritance rights as the other. Gravest of all, Morazán has separated Church and State, decreed freedom to believe or not to believe, suppressed the tithes and first fruits of the Lord’s officers and put their lands up for sale.
The monks blame Morazán for the plague that is devastating Guatemala. Cholera is killing people off, and from the pulpits rain fulminating accusations: Morazán has poisoned the water; the Antichrist has pacted with the Devil to sell him the souls of the dead.
The people of the mountains rise against the poisoner. Rafael Carrera, the hog farmer who leads the insurrection, is just over twenty and already has three bullets in his body. He goes about covered with scapularies and medals and with a green bough stuck in his hat.
(220 and 253)
1838: Buenos Aires
Rosas
Great tamer of ponies and people, Juan Manuel de Rosas is the boss of the River Plata ranges. Guitarist and dancer, he tells the stories that provoke the most fear or laughter around the campfire, but he is made of marble and even his children call him “master.” He has the cook who ruins his chicken arrested; and he has himself whipped when he carelessly violates one of his own rules.
His estancias are the most prosperous; his meat-salting plants are the best organized. Rosas owns the best of the sea of grasslands that extend from the port of Buenos Aires to the Indian villages.
Rosas governs. He has decreed a customs law that protects Argentinian production of ponchos and mattresses, shoes, carriages, ships, wine and furniture, and he has closed the interior rivers to foreign merchants.
The Revue des Deux Mondes demands that France give a lesson in civilization and discipline to the degenerate sons of the Spanish conquest. The French squadron, under command of Admiral Leblanc, blockades Buenos Aires, the only Argentine port equipped for overseas commerce.
(166, 271, and 336)
1838: Buenos Aires
The Slaughterhouse
Esteban Echeverría writes the first story of River Plata literature. In The Slaughterhouse, the Rosas dictatorship is the harassment of a defenseless Buenos Aires doctor by a knife-wielding mob.
Born in the slums and hardened by street-fights, but polished in Paris, Echeverría despises “the rabble.” A slaughterhouse in the south of the city offers a fantastic setting for the writer to describe dogs fighting over entrails with the black women eviscerators, and to tell of the “fuck-you’s” bubbling up from vulgar throats as blood flows from the beasts’ necks. The throat-cutter of the story wears a gaucho’s poncho, has his face daubed with blood, buries his knife up to the handle in a steer’s throat, and later corners the elegant black-tied gentleman who has refused him common courtesy.
(104)
More on Cannibalism in America
In his last cavalry charge, Colonel Juan Ramón Estomba hurls his horsemen against nobody. The war against Spain has ended, but much more atrocious is the war of Argentines against Argentines. Colonel Estomba raises his sword and howls: Charge! and in a whirlwind of war-cries and sword-thrusts the horses attack the empty horizon.
This torn country is mad with fury. The heroes of independence devour one another. Estanislao López receives the head of Pancho Ramírez, wrapped in a sheep’s hide, puts it in an iron cage, and spends a whole night joyfully contemplating it. Gregorio Lamadrid loads the mother of Facundo Quiroga with chains and drags her through the streets, before Facundo falls in an ambush, a bullet in his eye. In a corral, on a carpet of cowshit, Juan Lavalle executes Manuel Dorrego; and ever since, the ghost
of Dorrego has been following Lavalle, biting at his heels until one day he catches up to him and sews him with bullets to the nude body of his lover, so that Lavalle may have the pleasure of dying inside a woman.
(55, 103, 110)
1838: Tegucigalpa
Central America Breaks to Pieces
while Morazán fights in Guatemala against the multitude inflamed by the monks.
One after another, the feeble threads that had sewn this country together break. Costa Rica and Nicaragua nullify the federal pact and Honduras, too, declares itself independent. The city of Tegucigalpa celebrates with drums and cymbals and speeches the failure of its son who, ten years ago, launched from here his great unifying campaign. Provincial rancor, envy and greed, old poisons, prove more powerful than the passion of Morazán. The Federal Republic of Central America lies torn into four pieces, soon to be five, and then six. Poor pieces. For each other, they feel more hatred than pity.
(220)
1839: Copán
A Sacred City Is Sold for Fifty Dollars
and the buyer is John Lloyd Stephens, United States ambassador to Central America. It is the Maya city of Copán, in Honduras, invaded by jungle on the bank of a river.
In Copán the gods have turned to stone, and into stone also the men whom the gods chose or chastised. In Copán, more than a thousand years ago, lived the wise astronomers who discovered the secrets of the morning star and measured the solar year with a precision never equaled.
Time has mutilated, but not conquered, the temples of lovely friezes and carved stairs. The divinities still look out from the altars, playing hide-and-seek among the plumage of masks. Jaguar and snake still open their fangs on steles rising from the underbrush, and men and gods breathe from these stones, silent but never dumb.
The Memory of Fire Trilogy: Genesis, Faces and Masks, and Century of the Wind Page 53