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

by Eduardo Galeano

  Along the Pacific shores and through the Andes, from town to town, Don Simón makes his pilgrimage. He never wanted to be a tree, but the wind. For a quarter of a century he has been raising dust on America’s roads. Since Sucre ousted him from Chuquisaca, he has founded many schools and candle factories and published two books with his own hands, letter by letter, since no typographer can cope with so many brackets and synoptic charts. This old vagabond, bald and ugly and potbellied, tanned by the sun, carries on his back a trunk of manuscripts condemned by lack of money and readers. He carries no clothing. He has only what he wears.

  Bolívar used to call him, My teacher, my Socrates. He said, You have molded my heart for the great and the beautiful. People clench their teeth to keep from laughing when mad Rodríguez launches into his perorations about the tragic destiny of these Hispanic-American lands.

  “We are blind! Blind!”

  Almost no one listens to him, no one believes him. They take him for a Jew, because he goes about sowing children wherever he passes, and does not baptize them with Saints’ names, but calls them Corncob, Calabash, Carrot and other heresies. He has changed his surname three times and says he was born in Caracas, but also that he was born in Philadelphia and in Sanlúcar de Barrameda. It is rumored that one of his schools, in Conceptión in Chile, was destroyed by an earthquake which God sent when he learned that Don Simón taught anatomy parading himself stark naked before the students.

  Each day Don Simón grows more lonely. The most audacious, most lovable of America’s thinkers, every day more lonely.

  At eighty, he writes: I wanted to make the earth a paradise for all. I made it a hell for myself.

  (298)

  The Ideas of Simón Rodriguez: “Either We Invent or We Are Lost”

  Look at the way Europe invents, and look how America imitates!

  Some see prosperity in having their ports full of foreign ships, and their homes turned into warehouses for foreign effects. Every day brings a shipment of ready-made clothing, even caps for the Indians. Soon we shall see little gilded packages, with the royal coat of arms, containing earth prepared “by a new process,” for the lads accustomed to eating earth.

  Women making their confessions in French! Missionarees absolveeng seens een Spaneesh!

  America should not servilely imitate, but be original.

  The wisdom of Europe and the prosperity of the United States are, in America, two enemies of freedom of thought. The new republics do not want to admit anything that does not carry a pass … To form their institutions, the statesmen of those nations consulted no one but reason; and this they found on their own soil. Imitate originality, since you try to imitate everything!

  Where shall we go in search of models? We are independent, but not free; masters of our soil, but not of ourselves.

  Let us open up history; and for that which is not yet written, let each read it in his own memory.

  (285)

  1851: La Serena

  The Precursors

  Misery is not being able to think or store in the mind any memory except pain, says Francisco Bilbao, and adds that the exploitation of man by man leaves man no time to be man. Society is divided into those who can do everything and those who do do everything. To revive Chile, giant buried under weeds, an end must be put to a system that denies shelter to those who toil to build palaces, and dresses in rags those who weave the best clothing.

  The precursors of socialism in Chile are not yet thirty years old. Francisco Bilbao and Santiago Arcos, tuxedoed young men cultivated in Paris, have betrayed their class. Searching for a society of solidarity, they have in the course of this year set off various military rebellions and popular uprisings throughout the country, against the wig-wearers and the monks, and private property.

  On the last day of the year the last revolutionary bastion falls, in the city of La Serena. Many reds also fall—before firing squads. Bilbao, who on another occasion escaped disguised as a woman, this time has fled over the rooftops and gone into exile with cassock and missal.

  (39)

  1852: Santiago de Chile

  “What has independence meant to the poor?” the Chilean Santiago Arcos asks himself in jail.

  Since independence the government is and has been of the rich. The poor have been soldiers, national militias, have voted as their employer told them, have worked the land, have dug ditches, have worked the mines, have carried on their backs, have cultivated the country, have kept on earning a penny and a half, have been whipped and pilloried … The poor have enjoyed glorious independence as much as the horses that charged against the king’s troops in Chacabuco and Maipú.

  (306)

  The People of Chile Sing to the Glory of Paradise

  Saint Peter, the patron of me and of you,

  sent an acolyte out for some sausage and wine

  and a nice side of bacon and pigs’ feet fine

  to go in the pot for a succulent stew,

  with a good heady punch, the way earth folks do;

  and, not to be supercilious,

  a basket of tortillas

  so that little angels all

  could out of heavenly boredom fall

  and have themselves a genuine ball.

  Saint Anthony, when the hour was tardy

  swayed to his feet and said “Well, sirs,

  damn all the devils in hell, sirs,

  isn’t this quite a party!

  To no one’s abuse

  it’s time to let loose

  with an innocent ruse:

  I’ll go up to Saint Clara

  and before she’s aware-a’

  her plump little bottom I’m going to goose.”

  (182)

  1852: Mendoza

  The Lines of the Hand

  Even the little altar angels wear red sashes in Argentina. To refuse challenges the fury of the dictator. Like many enemies of Rosas, Doctor Federico Mayer Arnold has suffered exile and prison.

  Not long ago this young Buenos Aires professor published a book in Santiago de Chile. The book, adorned with French, English, and Latin quotations, began this way: Three cities have expelled me from their bosoms and four jails have received me to theirs. I have, however, thrown my thoughts freely in the despot’s face. Now again I launch my ideas into the world, and await without fear what Fate has in store for me.

  Two months later, on turning a corner, Doctor Federico Mayer Arnold falls in a spray of blood. But not by order of the tyrant: Federico’s mother-in-law, Doña María, an ill-humored woman from Mendoza, has paid the knife-wielding thugs. She has ordered them to kill her son-in-law because he does not please her.

  (14)

  1853: La Cruz

  The Treasure of the Jesuits

  She knows. That’s why the crow follows her, flies behind her every morning, on the way to Mass, and waits for her at the church door.

  She has just had her hundredth birthday. She will tell the secret when she is ready to die. If not, Divine Providence would punish her.

  “Three days hence,” comes the promise.

  And after three days, “Next month.”

  And after the month, “Tomorrow we’ll see.”

  When people pester her, her eyes go blank and she pretends to be dazed, or explodes with laughter moving her little legs, as if being so old were something naughty.

  The whole town of La Cruz knows that she knows. She was just a little girl when she helped the Jesuits bury the treasure in the Misiones woods, but she hasn’t forgotten.

  Once, taking advantage of her absence, the neighbors opened the old chest which she spent her days sitting on. Inside there was no bag full of gold pieces. In the chest they found only the dried navels of her eleven children.

  Come the death throes, the whole town is at the foot of her bed. She opens and closes her fishlike mouth as if trying to say something.

  She dies in the door of sanctity. The secret was the only one she had in her life and she goes without telling it.
<
br />   (147)

  1853: Paita

  The Three

  She no longer dresses as a captain, nor fires pistols, nor rides horse-back. Her legs don’t work and her whole body is distorted with fat; but she sits on her invalid’s chair as if it were a throne and peels oranges and guavas with the most beautiful hands in the world.

  Surrounded by clay pitchers, Manuela Sáenz reigns in the shaded portico of her house. Beyond, among mountains the color of death, extends the Bay of Paita. Exiled in this Peruvian port, Manuela lives by making sweets and fruit preserves. Ships stop to buy. Her goodies enjoy great fame on these coasts. Whalers sigh for a spoonful.

  At nightfall Manuela amuses herself by throwing scraps to stray dogs, which she has baptized with the names of generals who were disloyal to Bolívar. As Santander, Páez, Córdoba, Lamar, and Santa Cruz fight over the bones, her moonface lights up, and, covering her toothless mouth with a fan, she bursts out laughing. She laughs with her whole body and her many flying laces.

  Sometimes an old friend comes from the town of Amotape. The wandering Simón Rodríguez sits in a rocking chair, beside Manuela, and the two of them smoke and chat and are silent together. The persons Bolívar most loved, the teacher and the lover, change the subject if the hero’s name filters into the conversation.

  When Don Simón leaves, Manuela sends for the silver coffer. She opens it with the key hidden in her bosom and fondles the many letters Bolívar had written to the one and only woman, worn-out paper that still says: I want to see you and see you again and touch you and feel you and taste you … Then she asks for the mirror and very carefully brushes her hair, in case he might come and visit her in dreams.

  (295, 298, and 343)

  1854: Amotape

  A Witness Describes Simón Rodriguez’s Farewell to the World

  As soon as he saw the Amotape priest enter, Don Simón sat up in bed, waved the priest to the only chair in the room and started making something like a speech on materialism. The priest sat there stupefied, and scarcely had the heart to pronounce a few words trying to interrupt him …

  (298)

  1855: New York

  Whitman

  For lack of a publisher, the poet pays out of his own pocket for the publication of Leaves of Grass.

  Waldo Emerson, theologist of Democracy, gives the book his blessing, but the press attacks it as prosaic and obscene.

  In Walt Whitman’s grandiose elegy multitudes and machines roar. The poet embraces God and sinners, he embraces the Indians and the pioneers who wipe them out, he embraces slave and master, victim and executioner. All crime is redeemed in the ecstasy of the New World, America the muscular and the subjugator, with no debt to pay to the past, winds of progess that make man the comrade of man and unchain virility and beauty.

  (358)

  1855: New York

  Melville

  The bearded sailor is a writer without readers. Four years ago he published the story of a captain who pursues a white whale through the seas of the universe, bloodthirsty harpoon in pursuit of Evil, and no one paid it much attention.

  In these times of euphoria, in these North American lands in full expansion, Herman Melville’s voice sings out of tune. His books are mistrustful of Civilization, which attributes to the savage the role of Demon and forces him to play it—as Captain Ahab does with Moby Dick in the immensity of the ocean. His books reject the only and obligatory Truth that certain men, believing themselves chosen, impose on the others. His books have doubts about Vice and Virtue, shadows of the same nothingness, and teach that the sun is the only lamp worthy of confidence.

  (211 and 328)

  1855: Washington Territory

  “You people will suffocate in your own waste,” warns Indian Chief Seattle.

  The earth is not the white man’s brother, but his enemy, and when he has conquered it, he moves on. But all things are connected. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth …

  The clatter of cities only seems to insult the ears …

  The air is precious to the red man. For all things share the same breath—beasts, trees, man. Like a man dying for many days, he is numb to the stench …

  It matters little where we pass the rest of our days; they are not many. A few more hours, a few more winters … The whites, too, shall pass— perhaps sooner than other tribes. Continue to contaminate your bed, and you will one night suffocate in your own waste …

  (229)

  The Far West

  Is anyone really listening to old Chief Seattle? The Indians are condemned, like the buffalo and the moose. The one that does not die by the bullet dies of hunger or sorrow. From the reservation where he languishes, old Chief Seattle talks in solitude about usurpations and exterminations and says who knows what things about the memory of his people flowing in the sap of the trees.

  The Colt barks. Like the sun, the white pioneers march westward. A diamond light from the mountains guides them. The promised land rejuvenates anyone sticking a plow in it to make it fertile. In a flash cities and streets spring up in the solitude so recently inhabited by cacti, Indians, and snakes. The climate, they say, is so very healthy that the only way to inaugurate cemeteries is to shoot someone down.

  Adolescent capitalism, stampeding and gluttonous, transfigures what it touches. The forest exists for the ax to chop down and the desert for the train to cross; the river is worth bothering about if it contains gold, and the mountain if it shelters coal or iron. No one walks. All run, in a hurry, it’s urgent, after the nomad shadow of wealth and power. Space exists for time to defeat, and time for progress to sacrifice on its altars.

  (218)

  1856: Granada

  Walker

  The son of Tennessee shoots from the hip and buries without epitaph. He has eyes of cinders. He neither laughs nor drinks. He eats as a duty. No woman has been seen with him since his deaf and dumb fiancée died; and God is his only friend worthy of trust. He calls himself the Predestined. He dresses in black. He hates anyone touching him.

  William Walker, Southern gentleman, proclaims himself President of Nicaragua. Red carpets cover the main square of Granada. Trumpets flash in the sun. The band plays North American military marches as Walker kneels and takes the oath with one hand on the Bible. Twenty one salutes are fired. He makes his speech in English and then raises a glass of water and toasts the president of the United States, his compatriot and esteemed colleague. The North American ambassador, John Wheeler, compares Walker with Christopher Columbus.

  Walker arrived in Nicaragua a year ago, at the head of the Phalanx of Immortals. I will order the death of anyone who opposes the imperial march of my forces. Like a knife into meat came the adventurers recruited on the wharves of San Francisco and New Orleans.

  The new president of Nicaragua restores slavery, abolished in Central America over thirty years ago, and re-implants the slave trade, serfdom, and forced labor. He decrees that English is Nicaragua’s official language and offers lands and hands to any white North Americans who care to come.

  (154, 253, and 314)

  1856: Granada

  Stood

  Five or none. Nicaragua wasn’t much. William Walker wanted to conquer all of Central America.

  The five pieces of Morazan’s fatherland, united against the pirate, chop his force to bits. The people’s war kills many North Americans; morbus cholera, which turns you wrinkled and gray and suddenly finishes you off, kills more.

  The Messiah of slavery, roundly defeated, crosses Lake Nicaragua. Flocks of ducks and swarms of plague-infected flies pursue him. Before returning to the United States, Walker decides to punish the city of Granada. Nothing should remain alive there. Neither its people, nor its tile-roofed houses, nor its sandy streets lined with orange trees.

  Flames rise to the sky.

  At the foot of the ruined wharves a lance is stuck into the ground. A strip of leather hangs from the lance like a dejected flag. In red letters it says, in English: Here stood Gr
anada.

  (154 and 314)

  Walker: “In Defense of Slavery”

  The enemies of American civilization—for such are the enemies of slavery—seem to be more on the alert than its friends.

  Something is due from the South to the memory of the brave dead who repose in the soil of Nicaragua. In defense of slavery these men left their homes, met with calmness and constancy the perils of a tropical climate, and finally yielded up their lives …

  If there, then, be yet vigor in the South—and who can doubt that there is—for the further contest with the soldiers of anti-slavery, let her cast off the lethargy which enthrals her, and prepare anew for the conflict … The true field for the exertion of slavery is in tropical America; there it finds the natural seat of its empire and thither it can spread if it will but make the effort …

  (356)

  1858: Source of the Gila River

  The Sacred Lands of the Apaches

  Here, in the valley where the river is born, among the rocky heights of Arizona, is the tree that sheltered Geronimo thirty years ago. He had just sprouted from his mother’s belly and was wrapped in a cloth. They hung the cloth from a branch. The wind rocked the baby while an old voice entreated the tree: “Let him live and grow to see you give fruit many times.”

  This tree is at the center of the world. Standing in its shade, Geronimo will never confuse north with south, nor evil with good.

  All around spreads the vast country of the Apaches. In these rugged lands they have lived ever since the first of them, Son of the Storm, donned the feathers of the eagle who defeated the enemies of light. Here, animals to hunt have never been lacking, nor herbs to cure the sick, nor rocky caves to lie in after death.