Some strange men have arrived on horseback, carrying long ropes and many stakes. Their skin looks as if it had been drained of blood, and they speak a language never before heard. They stick bright-colored signals into the ground and ask questions of a white medal which replies by moving a needle.
Geronimo does not know that these men have come to measure the Apaches’ lands, to sell them.
(24 and 91)
1858: Kaskiyeh
Geronimo
The Apaches had gone unarmed to the market of Kaskiyeh in the southern lands betweeen Sonora and Casas Grandes to exchange buffalo and deerskins for food. Mexican soldiers demolished their camps and took their horses. Among the dead lie the mother and the wife of Geronimo, and his three children.
Geronimo says nothing while his comrades meet and sadly vote. They are surrounded, unarmed, and have no choice but to leave.
Sitting by the river, motionless, he watches his people march off behind Chief Mangas Colorado. Here the dead remain. Finally, Geronimo leaves as well, looking over his shoulder. He follows his people at the right distance to hear the soft padding of the Apaches’ feet in retreat.
During the long trek to the north, he does not open his mouth. Upon arriving home, he burns his house of skins and his mother’s house and all of his things and his wife’s and his mother’s things, and burns his children’s toys. Then, his back to the fire, he raises his head and sings a war chant.
(24)
1858: San Borja
Let Death Die
His sore body is aching to mix itself with the American earth. Aimé Bonpland knew this was where he would end up and linger on, ever since that distant day when he landed with Humboldt on the Caribbean coast.
Bonpland dies of his death, in a mud and straw hut, serenely, knowing that the stars do not die; that ants and people will not stop being born; that there will be new cloverleaves, and new oranges or suns on the branches; and that foals, newly upright on their mosquito legs, will be stretching out their necks in search of a teat. The old man bids farewell to the world as a child does to the day at bedtime.
Afterwards, a drunk stabs the body; but this sinister imbecility of mankind is a detail of no importance.
1860: Chan Santa Cruz
The Ceremonial Center of the Yucatán Rebels
“My father didn’t put me among the rich. He didn’t put me with the generals or with those who have money, or with those who claim to have it.” The Mother of Crosses, she who sprouted from the mahogany tree beside the spring, had announced this in Yucatan. And when soldiers ax down the mahogany and burn the little cross dressed by the Indians, she has already had daughters. From cross to cross the word has survived: “My father put me with the poor, because I am poor.”
Around the cross, around the crosses, has grown Chan Santa Cruz, the great sanctuary of Maya rebels in the Yucatàn jungle.
The soldiers of Colonel Acereto’s expedition go in without resistance. They find no Indians and are left open-mouthed. The Mayas have built an immense church of sturdy walls with a lofty dome, the House of God, the House of the Jaguar God, and in the tower hang the bells taken from Bacalar.
In the sacred city, empty of people, everything is scary. There is little water in the canteens, but Colonel Acereto forbids drinking from the wells. Six years ago other soldiers drank and vomited and died while from the thickets Indians asked them if the water was fresh.
From patience to impatience the soldiers pass the days. Mean while, Indians flock from a hundred villages and a thousand corn patches. They bring a rifle or a machete and a little sack of corn flour. They mass in the brush; and when Colonel Acereto decides to withdraw, they mop up his troop in one sweep.
The band, which has been captured intact, will teach music to the children and play polkas in the church, where the cross lives and talks, surrounded by Maya gods. There, in the church, the people celebrate communion with corn tortillas and honey, and once a year elect interpreters for the cross and warrior-chiefs, who wear a gold earring but work in the cornfields like anyone else.
(273 and 274)
1860: Havana
Poet in Crisis
At a cost of thirteen deaths per kilometer, Cuba has constructed the railway that takes sugar from the Güines cane fields to the port of Havana: dead Africans, Irishmen, Canary Islanders and Chinese from Macao, slaves or wretched day laborers brought by traffickers from afar—and the sugar boom demands more and more.
Ten years ago the first shipment of Maya slaves reached Cuba from Yucatán. A hundred and forty Indians, prisoners of war, were sold at twenty-five pesos a head; children, gratis. Later Mexican President Santa Anna granted a monopoly on the traffic to Colonel Manuel María Jiménez and the price rose to a hundred and sixty pesos per man, a hundred and twenty per woman and eighty per child. The Maya war has gone on and on, and with it more and more Cuban loans of money and rifles. The Yucatán government collects a tax on each slave sold, and thus pays with Indians for the war against the Indians.
The Spanish poet José Zorrilla has purchased in the port of Campeche a shipment of Indians to sell in Cuba. He was all set to embark when yellow fever killed his capitalist partner Cipriano de las Cagigas in Havana, and now the author of “Don Juan Tenorio” consoles himself writing verses on a coffee plantation.
(222 and 273)
1861: Havana
Sugar Hands
Soon the city of Havana will be staging its floral games. The intellectuals of the Literary Society propose a great central motif. They want the literary competition to be on the theme of asking Spain for sixty thousand new slaves. The poets will thus support the black importation project, which already enjoys the patronage of the newspaper Diario de La Marina and the legal blessing of the attorney general.
Hands are needed for sugar. Blacks smuggled in via the Mariel, Cojímar, and Batabanó beaches are scarce and expensive. Three sugar mill owners have drawn up the project, because Cuba lies exhausted and desolate, imploring the Spanish authorities to hear her cries of woe and provide her with blacks, meek and loyal slaves to whom Cuba owes her economic prosperity. It will be easy, they insist, to bring them from Africa. They will run joyfully to the Spanish ships, when they see them arriving.
(222 and 240)
Sugar Language
The window grills of Havana homes are adorned with iron spirals and the columns with plaster curlicues; the doorways with lacy woodwork; the stained-glass windows with peacock feathers. The talk of doctors and monks gleams with arabesques. Poets reach for unheard-of rhymes and prose writers for the most reverberant adjectives. Orators strive to make their points, their restless and fugitive points; a point peeks out from behind an adverb or a parenthesis and the orator throws more and more words at it; the speech stretches out trying to catch it, but the point keeps fleeing; and the chase continues ad infinitum.
Account books, on the other hand, speak the rough language of reality. In sugar mills throughout Cuba, they register the birth or purchase of every black slave as the acquisition of merchandise, calculating depreciation at three percent annually. A man’s illness is equivalent to the faultiness of a valve and the end of a life is like the loss of a head of cattle: The killed cattle are bulls. We lost the ceiba sow. The Negro Domingo Mondongo has died.
(222)
1861: Bull Run
Grays Against Blues
Near the city of Washington the first battle of the Civil War is fought. A big audience has turned out, in carriages or on horseback, to see the show. The blood hardly begins to flow when horses bolt and the crowd stampedes, howling with panic. Soon the capital’s streets are filled with the mutilated and dying.
Two opposing countries had previously shared the map, the flag, and the name of the United States. A Southern newspaper reported the election of Abraham Lincoln in its “News from Abroad” section. Within months the Southern states formed a separate nation and war broke out.
Lincoln, the new president, embodies the ideals of the
North. He has proclaimed in his campaign that it is impossible to continue half slave and half free, and has promised farms instead of plantations and higher tariffs against the competition of European industry.
North and South: two spaces, two periods. In the North, factories that already produce more than fields; tireless inventors creating the electric telegraph, the sewing machine, and the reaper; new cities sprouting on all sides, a million inhabitants in New York and wharves too small for the ships filled with desperate Europeans seeking a new country. In the South, pride of ancestry and nostalgia, fields of tobacco, enormous cotton plantations: four million black slaves producing raw materials for Lancashire textile mills; gentlemen fighting duels over the tainted honor of a sister or the fair name of a family; ladies airing themselves in carriages through the flowering country-side and fainting on the verandahs of their palaces at dusk.
(70)
1862: Fredericksburg
The Pencil of War
His back against a wall, legs crossed on the ground, a young soldier looks without seeing. Several months’ growth of beard flattens the open collar of his tunic. A soldier’s hand strokes the head of a dog sleeping on his knees.
John Geyser, recruit from Pennsylvania, sketches himself and his comrades while the war kills. His pencil freezes them for an instant on the way to the ditch excavated by cannon fire. Soldiers load rifles, or clean them, or eat the ration of army biscuit and bacon, or stare with sad eyes. Sadly, they look without seeing, or perhaps see beyond what they look at.
(69)
1863: Mexico City
“The American Algeria”
is the new name for Mexico according to the Paris press. The army of Napoleon III attacks and conquers the capital and the chief cities.
In Rome, the pope jumps for joy. The government of Benito Juárez, dislodged by the invaders, was guilty of blasphemy against God and his properties in Mexico. Juárez had stripped the Church naked, despoiling it of its sacred tithes, of its estates vast as the sky, and of the State’s loving protection.
The Conservatives join the new conquistadors. Twenty thousand Mexican soldiers help the thirty thousand from France, who have just finished storming the Crimea, Algeria, and Senegal. Napoleon III takes over Mexico invoking the Latin spirit, Latin culture, and the Latin race, and in passing demands repayment of an immense and phantasmal loan.
Taking charge of the new colony is Maximilian of Austria, one of Europe’s many unemployed princes, accompanied by his stunning wife.
(15)
1863: London
Marx
“Napoleon III will break his head on Mexico, if they don’t hang him first,” announces a wise and penurious prophet, who lives on what he can borrow in London.
While he corrects and polishes the drafts of a work that is going to change the world, Karl Marx does not miss a detail of what is happening in the world. In letters and articles he calls the third Napoleon an imperial Lazarillo de Tormes* and the invasion of Mexico an infamous enterprise. He also denounces England and Spain, who would like to share with France the territory of Mexico as war booty, and all the nation-thieving nations, accustomed to sending thousands and thousands of people to the slaughterhouse so that usurers and traders may extend the scope of their business.
Marx no longer believes that the imperial expansion of the most developed countries is a victory for progress over backwardness. Fifteen years ago, however, he did not disagree when Engels applauded the invasion of Mexico by the United States, believing that this would turn Mexican campesinos into proletarians and bring the bishops and feudal lords down from their pedestal.
(129 and 201)
* Anonymous Spanish picaresque novel of the sixteenth century.
1865: La Paz
Belzu
A flood of rebellious Indians has restored Belzu to power. Manuel Isidoro Belzu, “Grandpa Belzu,” avenger of the poor, scourge of doctors, returns to La Paz riding a human wave.
When he was in power a few years back, the capital of Bolivia was wherever he happened to be on the haunch of his horse; and the masters of the country, who attempted more than forty military coups, never succeeded in overthrowing him. Foreign merchants hated him, because Belzu barred the door to them and protected the Cocha-bamba artisans against the invasion of British-made ponchos. The pettifoggers of Chuquisaca, in whose veins run ink or water, were terrified of him. Also conspiring against him were the masters of the mines, who could never dictate a decree to him.
Belzu, lean and handsome, has come back. He enters the palace on horseback, at a gentle pace, as if steering a ship.
(172)
From a Speech by Belzu to the Bolivian People
The time has come to ask the aristocracy to give back their titles, and private property its privileges … Private property is the chief source of most of the offenses and crimes in Bolivia; it is the cause of the continuing struggle between Bolivians; it is the dominant principle of that selfishness eternally condemned by universal morality. No more property, no more proprietors, no more inheritances! Down with aristocrats! Let the lands be for all! Enough of exploitation of man by man!
(213)
1865: La Paz
Melgarejo
Mariano Melgarejo, Belzu’s fiercest enemy, is a Hercules who can carry a horse on his shoulder. He was born in Tarata, highland of tall grass, of a father who loved and left. He was born on an Easter Sunday.
“God has chosen me to be born while He was reviving.”
Before learning to walk, he knew how to gallop horses whose heads barely peeked out above the verdure; and before the maternal teat, he got to know the chicha that makes you roll or fly, the best chicha in Bolivia, milk of Tarata, corn chewed and expectorated by old women with the most villainous saliva. Before he could even sign his name, he was unstoppable in daredevil battle charges, body to body, his tunic in rags, lifting and splitting people with dagger, spear, or sword.
He has finished off many. Eternal rebel and troublemaker, he has killed in broad daylight and on moonless nights and twice has been condemned to death. Between sprees and free-for-alls, he has known exile and power. The night before last he slept on the throne and last night in mountain furrows. Yesterday he entered this city of La Paz at the head of his army, riding on an enormous cannon, his red poncho flaming like a flag; and today he crosses the plaza somber and alone.
(85)
1865: La Paz
The Shortest Coup d’État in History
It is Belzu’s hour. Melgarejo, the vanquished, comes to surrender. Melgarejo crosses the plaza through the shouts.
“Long live Belzu!”
In the huge second-floor chamber, Belzu waits. Melgarejo enters the palace. Without looking up, his black beard flattened against his bull chest, he mounts the stairs. The crowd yells in the plaza.
“Long live Belzu! Grandpa Belzu!”
Melgarejo walks toward Belzu. The president rises, opens his arms.
“I forgive you.”
Through the open windows thunder the voices.
“Grandpa Belzu!”
Melgarejo lets himself be embraced, and shoots. The shot rings out, and the body crashes to the floor.
The victor goes out on the balcony. He shows the body, offers it.
“Belzu is dead! Who’s next?”
(85)
1865: Appomattox
General Lee Surrenders His Ruby Sword
The Northern soldiers, in the middle of a crushing advance, await the order for the final assault. At that moment, a cloud of dust rises from the enemy lines. It grows and grows. From the hungry, shattered army of the grays, a horseman breaks away. He carries a white rag tied to a stick.
In the final battles, the Southern soldiers had their names inscribed on their backs, so that they would be recognized among the dead. The South, devastated, has lost the war long ago, and continues only out of a stubborn sense of honor.
Now the beaten general, Robert E. Lee, proffers with gloved h
and his sword embellished with rubies. The victorious general, Ulysses Grant, without sword or insignias, his tunic unbuttoned, smokes, or at least chews, a cigar.
The war has ended, slavery has ended. With slavery have fallen the walls that prevented the full development of United States industry and the expansion of its national market. Six hundred thousand young men have died in battle; among them, half of all the blacks who wore the blue of the Northern battalions.
(70)
1865: Washington
Lincoln
Abe comes from Kentucky. There, his father wielded the ax and pounded the hammer, and the cabin had walls and a roof and beds of dry leaves. Every day his ax cut wood for the fire, and one day it wrested from the forest the wood needed to bury Abe’s mother under the snow. Abe was a small boy when that hammer knocked in those wooden nails for the mother who would never again make white bread on Saturdays, or flutter those ever-perplexed eyes; and the ax brought in wood to make a raft so that the father could take his children down river to Indiana.
He comes from Indiana. There Abe draws his first letters with a charcoal, and becomes the best railsplitter in the district.
He comes from Illinois. In Illinois, he loves a woman named Ann and marries another named Mary, who speaks French and has started the crinoline fashion in the city of Springfield. Mary decides that Abe will be president of the United States. While she is bearing boy children, he writes speeches and a few poems in the sad island of his mind, that magic island bathed in liquid light.
He comes from the Capitol in Washington. Leaning from the window, he sees the slave market, a kind of stable where blacks are penned up like horses.
The Memory of Fire Trilogy: Genesis, Faces and Masks, and Century of the Wind Page 57