(311)
1848: Buenos Aires
The Lovers (I)
Dramatis Personae.
Camila O’Gorman. Born in Buenos Aires, in a house with three patios, twenty years ago. Educated in the odor of sanctity, to be successively virgin, wife, and mother in the strait and narrow path that leads to conjugal peace, the offices of the needle, evenings at the piano, and the rosary told with black mantilla on head. She has eloped with the parish priest of the Socorro Church. The idea was hers.
Ladislao Gutiérrez. Minister of God. Age twenty-five. Nephew of the governor of Tucumán. He could not sleep after placing the Host on the tongue of that woman kneeling by the light of candles. Ended by dropping missal and cassock, setting loose a stampede of little angels and campanile pigeons.
Adolfo O’Gorman. Begins each meal reciting the ten commandments, from the head of a long mahogany table. From a chaste woman, he has engendered a priest son, a policeman son, and a fugitive daughter. An exemplary father, he is the first to ask exemplary punishment for the horrendous scandal which shames his family. In a letter to Juan Manuel de Rosas, he pleads for a firm hand against the most atrocious and unheard-of act in the country.
Felipe Elortondo Y Palacio. Secretary of the Curia. Also writes to Rosas asking the capture of the lovers and their inflexible punishment, to prevent similar crimes in the future. Explains in his letter that he had nothing to do with the appointment of the priest Gutiérrez, which was an affair of the bishop.
Juan Manuel De Rosas. Orders the lovers hunted down. His messengers gallop from Buenos Aires. They carry a leaflet describing the fugitives. Camila: white, black eyes, pleasant expression; tall, slim body, well distributed. Ladislao: dark, thin, full beard and curly hair. Justice will be done, Rosas promises, to satisfy religion and the laws and to prevent the consequent demoralization, libertinage, and disorder. The whole country is on guard.
Also participating:
The Opposition Press. From Montevideo, Valparaíso, and La Paz, Rosas’s enemies invoke public morality. The daily newspaper El Mercurio Chileno tells its readers: To such an extreme has come the horrible corruption of the customs under the alarming tyranny of the “River Plata Caligula,” that impious and sacrilegious priests of Buenos Aires elope with the daughters of the best society, without the infamous satrap adopting any measure against these monstrous immoralities.
The Horses. They take the lovers to the north across open country, avoiding cities. Ladislao’s had a golden hide and long legs. Camila’s is grayish, fat, and bobtailed. They sleep, like their riders, outdoors. They do not tire.
Baggage. His: a woolen poncho, some clothes, a couple of penknives and a pair of pistols, a pouch, a silk tie, and a glass inkpot. Hers: a silk shawl, several dresses, four linen petticoats, a fan, a pair of gloves, a comb, and a gold wedding ring, broken.
(166 and 219)
The Lovers (II)
They are two by an error that the night corrects.
1848: Holy Places
The Lovers (III)
In the summer they elope. They spend the autumn at the port of Goya, on the shores of the Paraná. There they go by other names. In the winter they are discovered, betrayed, and caught.
They are taken south in separate carts. The wheels leave scars on the road.
They are shut up in separate dungeons in the Holy Places prison.
If they beg pardon, they will be pardoned. Camila, pregnant, does not repent. Nor does Ladislao. Irons are fixed on their feet. A priest sprinkles the shackles with holy water.
They are shot in the patio, with their eyes blindfolded.
(219)
1848: Bacalar
Cecilio Chi
The ears of corn have spoken, warning of hunger. Huge sugar plantations are devouring the Maya communities’ cornfields in the Yucatán region of Mexico. Men are purchased, as in Africa, and paid for with rum. The Indians hear with their backs, says the lash.
And war breaks out. Sick of contributing dead to other people’s wars, the Mayas answer the call of the hollow trunk drum. They erupt from the brush, from the night, from nothing, machete in one hand, torch in the other: haciendas burn along with their owners and the sons of their owners, and the documents that make debt-slaves of Indians and sons of Indians burn too.
The Maya tornado whirls and destroys. Cecilio Chi fights with fifteen thousand Indians against guns that kill en masse, and so falls the proud city of Valladolid de Yucatán which thinks itself so noble, so Castilian; and Bacalar, and many other towns and garrisons, one after the other.
Cecilio Chi exterminates enemies invoking the old-time rebel Jacinto Canek and the even earlier prophet Chilam Balam. He proclaims that blood will flood the Mérida plaza up to the people’s ankles. He offers firewater and fireworks to the patron saints of each town he occupies: If the saints refuse to change sides, and continue at the masters’ service, Cecilio Chi cuts their throats with his machete and throws them on the fire.
(144 and 263)
1849: Shores of the Platte River
A Horseman Called Smallpox
Of every four Pawnee Indians, one has died this year of smallpox or cholera. The Kiowas, their eternal enemies, have saved themselves thanks to Old Uncle Saynday.
The old ruffian wandered these plains from heartache to heartache. My world is finished, he muttered over and over while vainly seeking deer and buffalo, and the Washita River offered him red mud instead of clear water. Soon my Kiowa people will be surrounded like cows.
Old Uncle Saynday was walking along buried in these sad thoughts when he saw over in the east, instead of the sun, a blackness, a great dark stain spreading across the prairie. As it drew closer, he saw that the stain was a horseman dressed in black, with a high black hat and a black horse. The horseman had ferocious scars on his face.
“My name is Smallpox,” he introduced himself.
“I never heard …” said Saynday.
“I come from far away, the other side of the sea,” the stranger explained. “I bring death.”
He asked for the Kiowas. Old Uncle Saynday knew how to turn him around. He explained to him that the Kiowas weren’t worth his trouble, a small and starveling people, and instead recommended the Pawnees, who are many, handsome and powerful, and showed him the rivers where they live.
(198)
1849: San Francisco
The Gold of California
From Valparaiso, Chileans stream in. They bring a pair of boots and a knife, a lamp and a shovel.
The entry to San Francisco Bay is now known as “the golden gate.” Until yesterday, San Francisco was the Mexican town of Yerbas Buenas. In these lands, usurped from Mexico in the war of conquest, there are three-kilo nuggets of pure gold.
The bay has no room for so many ships. An anchor touches bottom, and adventurers scatter across the mountains. No one wastes time on hellos. The cardsharp buries his patent leather boots in the mud:
“Long live my loaded dice! Long live my jack!”
Simply landing on this soil turns the bum into a king and the beauty who had scorned him dies of remorse. Vicente Pérez Rosales, newly arrived, listens to the thoughts of his compatriots: “Now I have talent! Because in Chile, who’s an ass once he has cash?” Here losing time is losing money. Endless thunder of hammers, a world on the boil, birth-pang screams. Out of nothing rise the awnings under which are offered tools and liquor and dried meat in exchange for leather bags filled with gold dust. Crows and men squawk, flocks of men from all lands, and night and day eddies the whirlwind of frock coats and seamen’s caps, Oregon furs and Maule bonnets, French daggers, Chinese hats, Russian boots, and shiny bullets at the waists of cowboys.
Under her lace sunshade, a good-looking Chilean woman smiles as best she can, squeezed by her corset and by the multitude that sweeps her over the sea of mud paved with broken bottles. In this port she is Rosarito Améstica. She was born Rosarito Izquierdo more years ago than she’ll tell, became Rosarito Villaseca in Talcahuano,
Rosarito Toro in Talca, and Rosarito Montalva in Valparaíso.
From the stern of a ship, the auctioneer offers ladies to the crowd. He exhibits them and sings their praises, one by one, look gentlemen what a waist what youth what beauty what …
“Who’ll give more?” says the auctioneer. “Who’ll give more for this incomparable flower?”
(256)
1849: El Molino
They Were Here
Man calls and gold falls from the sands and rocks. Sparks of gold jump on the winds; gold comes docilely to the hand of man, from the bottom of California’s rivers and ravines.
El Molino is one of many camps that have sprung up on these golden shores. One day the miners of El Molino notice columns of smoke rising from the distant cypress forests. At night they see a line of fires mocking the wind. Someone recognizes the signals: the telegraph of the Indians is calling for war against the intruders.
In a flash, the miners form a detail of a hundred and seventy rifles and attack by surprise. They bring in a hundred prisoners and shoot fifteen to teach them a lesson.
(256)
Ashes
Since he had the dream of the White Rabbit, the old man talked of nothing else, though he had trouble talking at all, and for a long time had been unable to stand. The years made his eyes watery and bent him irremediably. He lived in a basket, his face hidden behind his pointy knees, poised for the return to the belly of the earth. Stuck in the basket, he traveled on the back of some son or grandson and told his dream to everybody: White Rabbit gonna devour us, he babbled. Gonna devour our seed, our grass, our living. He said the White Rabbit would come mounted on an animal bigger than a deer, an animal with round feet and hair on its neck.
The old man did not live to see the gold fever in these Californian lands. Before the miners arrived on horseback, he announced: “Can’t feed my children no more. Like old root, just ready for growing now. Speak no more.”
They burned him in his basket, on firewood that he had selected.
(229)
1849: Baltimore
Poe
At the door of a tavern in Baltimore the dying man lies face up, strangling in his vomit. Some pious hand drags him to the hospital, at dawn; and nothing more, nevermore.
Edgar Allan Poe, son of ragged itinerant comedians, vagabond poet, convicted and confessed guilty of disobedience and delirium, had been condemned by invisible tribunals and crushed by invisible pincers.
He got lost looking for himself. Not looking for gold in California; no, looking for himself.
(99 and 260)
1849: San Francisco
Levi’s Pants
The flashes of violence and miracles do not blind Levi Strauss, who arrives from far-off Bavaria and realizes at one blink that here the beggar becomes a millionaire and the millionaire a beggar or corpse in a click of cards or triggers. In another blink he discovers that pants become tatters in these mines of California, and decides to provide a better fate for the strong cloths he has brought along. He won’t sell awnings or tents. He will sell pants, tough pants for tough men in the tough work of digging up rivers and mines. So the seams won’t burst, he reinforces them with copper riveting. Behind, under the waist, Levi stamps his name on a leather label.
Soon the cowboys of the whole West will claim as their own these pants of blue Nîmes twill which neither sun nor years wear out.
(113)
1850: San Francisco
The Road to Development
The Chilean Pérez Rosales is looking for luck in the mines of California. Learning that, a few miles from San Francisco, fabulous prices are paid for anything edible, he gets a few sacks of worm-eaten jerky and some jars of jam and buys a launch. Hardly has he pushed off from the pier when a customs agent points a rifle at his head: “Hold it there.”
This launch cannot move on any United States river because it was built abroad and its keel is not made of North American wood.
The United States had defended its national market since the times of its first president. It supplies cotton to England, but customs barriers block English cloth and any product that could injure its own industry. The planters of the southern states want English clothing, which is much better and cheaper, and complain that the northern textile mills impose on them their ugly and costly cloth from baby’s diaper to corpse’s shroud.
(162 and 256)
1850: Buenos Aires
The Road to Underdevelopment: The Thought of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento
We are not industrialists or navigators and Europe will provide us for long centuries with its artifacts in exchange for our raw materials.
(310)
1850: River Plata
Buenos Aires and Montevideo at Mid-Century
From his seat in the French Academy to the River Plata docks, sails the poet Xavier Marmier.
The great European powers have reached an agreement with Rosas. The Buenos Aires blockade has been lifted. Marmier thinks he is on the Rue Vivienne as he strolls down Peru Street. In the shop windows he finds Lyons silks and the Journal de Modes, the novels of Dumas and Sandeau and the poems of de Musset; but in the shade of the City Hall’s porticos saunter barefoot blacks in soldiers’ uniforms, and the pavements ring with the trot of a gaucho’s horse.
Someone explains to Marmier that no gaucho dispatches anybody without first kissing the blade of his knife and swearing by the Immaculate Virgin; and if the dead man was a friend, the killer mounts him on his steed and ties him to the saddle so that he may enter the cemetery on horseback.
Further on, in the suburban plazas, Marmier finds the carts, ships of the pampa, which bring hides and wheat from the interior and on the return trip take cloth and liquor which have arrived from Le Havre and Liverpool.
The poet crosses the river. For seven years Montevideo has been under siege from the rear, harassed by General Oribe’s gaucho army, but the city survives, facing the river-ocean, thanks to French ships which pour merchandise and money onto the docks. One Montevideo newspaper is Le Patriote Français and the majority of the population is French. In this refuge of Rosas’s enemies, Marmier notes, the rich have gone poor and all have gone mad. A suitor pays an ounce of gold to stick a camellia in his girl’s hair and the mistress of the house offers the visitor a bouquet of honeysuckle held by a ring of silver, rubies, and emeralds. For the ladies of Montevideo, the war between vanguardists and conservatives seems more important than the war against the Uruguayan peasants, a real war that kills people. Vanguardists wear their hair very short; conservatives, luxuriantly rolled.
(196)
1850: Paris
Dumas
Alexandre Dumas rolls up his cuffs of fine batiste and with a stroke of the pen writes the epic pages of Montevideo; or, The New Troy.
The novelist, a man of fantasy and gluttony, has priced at five thousand francs this professional feat of the imagination. He calls Montevideo’s humble hill a “mountain” and turns the war of foreign merchants against the gaucho cavalry into a Greek epic. The hosts of Giuseppe Garibaldi, which fight for Montevideo, fly not the flag of Uruguay but the classic pirate skull and crossbones on a black field; but in the novel Dumas writes to order, only martyrs and titans take part in the defense of the almost French city.
(101)
1850: Montevideo
Lautréamont at Four
Isidoro Ducasse has been born in the port of Montevideo. A double wall of fortifications separates the countryside from the besieged city. Isidoro grows up dazed by cannon fire, with the daily spectacle of dying men hanging from their horses.
His shoes take him to the sea. Standing on the sand, face to the wind, he asks the sea where music goes after it leaves the violin, where the sun goes when night arrives, and where the dead go. Isidoro asks the sea where his mother went, that woman he cannot remember, nor should name, nor knows how to imagine. Someone has told him that the other dead people threw her out of the cemetery. The sea, which talks so much, does not answer; an
d the boy flees up the cliff and, weeping, embraces an enormous tree with all his strength, so it won’t fall.
(181)
1850: Chan Santa Cruz
The Talking Cross
Three long years of Indian war in Yucatán. More than a hundred and fifty thousand dead, a hundred thousand fled. The population has been reduced by half.
One of the captains of the rebellion, the mestizo José María Barrera, leads the Indians to a cave deep in the jungle. There, a spring offers fresh water in the shade of a very tall mahogany tree. The tree has given birth to the little cross that talks.
Says the cross, in the Maya language: “The time has come for Yucatán to rise. I am falling hour by hour, they are cutting me with machetes, stabbing me with knives, poking sticks into me. I go about Yucatan to redeem my beloved Indians …”
The cross is the size of a finger. The Indians dress it. They put a huipil and skirt on it; they adorn it with colored threads. She will unite the dispersed.
(273)
1851: Latacunga
“I Wander at Random and Naked …”
Instead of thinking about Medes and Persians and Egyptians, let us think about Indians. It is more important for us to understand an Indian than Ovid. Start your school with Indians, Señor Rector.
Simón Rodríguez offers his advice to the college of the town of Latacunga, in Ecuador: that a chair be established in the Quechua language instead of in Latin, that physics be taught instead of theology; that the college build a pottery factory and a glass factory; that it offer degrees in masonry, carpentry, and smithery.
The Memory of Fire Trilogy: Genesis, Faces and Masks, and Century of the Wind Page 55